The call was made on a holiday. Someone on staff at Harvest Christian Fellowship phoned police at 4:16 p.m. on Labor Day 2024 and told the officer on duty that a former minister was accused of sexually abusing children.

“An incident report was made,” Riverside police spokesman Ryan Railsback confirmed in an email to The Roys Report (TRR), “after Harvest Christian Fellowship had learned of the allegations.”

But former staff and high-level volunteers at the Southern California megachurch led by evangelist Greg Laurie say the call wasn’t made days or months after hearing the allegations. They claim church leaders waited years before reporting former associate pastor and missionary Paul Havsgaard, 76, was suspected of molesting scores of children.

TRR has also found public records indicating Harvest knew about Havsgaard’s alleged child abuse as early as 2004 — 20 years before the call to police.

Harvest and Harvest’s lawyer have not responded to emails with questions about when church leaders knew about the pedophilia allegations and why police were only contacted in 2024.

California law requires ministers contact law enforcement if they have knowledge or “reasonable suspicion” that a child has been abused. But the ordained men leading Harvest waited until they knew a series of civil lawsuits was going to make the allegations public, according to former staff and volunteers.

“Everything’s ‘be quiet,’ ‘keep quiet,’ ‘nothing to see here,’” one long-time volunteer who no longer attends the church told TRR. “There’s no accountability. … Things are quiet; things slide by.”

Two former volunteers and two former staff members spoke to TRR about the allegations on the condition that their names and identities not be published. They fear Harvest and Calvary Chapel Association leaders will blacklist them and their family members from ministry positions. The church also could put pressure on their current employers to silence them, the sources say.

TRR has confirmed the former staff and volunteers’ identities and work histories, as well as key details of their independent, overlapping accounts.

Records show sudden separation

Public documents show that Harvest and Calvary Chapel ministers cut ties with Havsgaard suddenly in 2005. This was right after a trio of ministers in Romania reported allegations of Havsgaard’s pedophilia to Harvest and Calvary leaders, McAllister Olivarius, the London and New York-based law firm suing Harvest, told TRR.

Harvest employed Havsgaard as a minister when he first moved to Romania to run orphanages in the late 1990s, according to archived images of the church website. In 2002, Havsgaard started his own nonprofit, called Actively Restoring Kids International (ARK). According to the legal papework that Havsgaard filed, the new nonprofit shared a Riverside address with Harvest: 6115 Arlington Ave.

There were other connections as well. Havsgaard listed Wes Denham, a Calvary Chapel Association regional leader, as his vice president. He put Harvest Missions Pastor Rick Schutte as his treasurer and secretary. The nonprofit’s tax returns were prepared by the same firm that Greg Laurie used for his independent ministry Harvest Crusades, which is also associated with — but officially separate from — the Riverside church.

Those connections between Havsgaard and Harvest were all severed suddenly in 2005. The tax preparer stopped working for Havsgaard’s ministry. The church address was removed from state and federal records. The two ministers left his board.

Havsgaard’s nonprofit board was completely reconstituted in 2006, state records show. One new board member was the local attorney who filed the legal paperwork.

The other was listed on a California Secretary of State form only as “Tony,” with no last name. Tax records filed in 2006 listed the name as “Anthony Annunciato.”

California businessman Anthony Annunziato — spelled with a z, not a c — told TRR he occasionally donated money to Havsgaard, covering electricity bills and other expenses to help make ends meet at the orphanages. He said he didn’t know why Havsgaard listed him as vice president of his nonprofit, misspelling his name in the process.

“It’s been 20 years, but I don’t remember being on his board,” Annunziato said. “I don’t know why I would have been on the board unless he put me down because he just needed someone.”

According to McAllister Olivarius, the hurried legal disentanglement can be explained by an audit of the orphanages.

In 2004, according to the 12 lawsuits filed to date, a trio of Calvary Chapel Association ministers investigated and found reports that Havsgaard had raped numerous Romanian boys he was supposedly taking care of. There was also evidence of financial irregularities, which were reportedly passed onto Calvary Chapel and Harvest leaders at the end of the year.

Greg Laurie, Rick Schutte, and Wes Denham did not respond to emails asking about the seemingly sudden decision to separate from Havsgaard’s nonprofit. Defense attorneys listed on federal court documents did not respond to requests for comment either.

Ann Olivarius, the London-based attorney who represents more than 20 men who claim Havsgaard brutally and repeatedly abused them, is convinced church leaders were busily looking the other way.

“They were fully aware what was going on,” Olivarius told TRR. “Our argument is that Greg Laurie was responsible for what was happening. He ran the show. That’s their model.”

No reports of ‘reasonable suspicion’

 No one called law enforcement during all this, according to Riverside police records.

Havsgaard retained a legal residence in Riverside. He travelled back to California regularly, sometimes bringing Romanian boys with him to raise funds for the ministry, according to multiple sources. A 2003 law also made it a crime for an American citizen “to engage in illicit sexual conduct” outside the United States.

It’s possible that those who knew about allegations against Havsgaard did not contact police because the victims lived outside the U.S. But when Havsgaard moved back to Southern California in 2008, no one contacted police then either.

It’s unclear if the church leaders with alleged knowledge of Havsgaard’s abuse said anything privately to area ministers.

Mike Gann, founding pastor of another Riverside church, Calvary the Cross, hired Havsgaard as an assistant pastor when Havsgaard returned to the U.S. Gann declined to say whether anyone told him about allegations of sexual abuse.

“I don’t have any information regarding this situation,” he said in an email to TRR.

When TRR asked whether that meant he was left in the dark, Gann repeated, “As I said, I don’t have any information about this situation.”

Gann’s church was located less than 10 miles from Harvest and was part of the same Calvary Chapel Association of churches. Havsgaard worked there for at least three years, according to archived versions of the church’s website.

Havsgaard also led a Bible study at another Calvary Chapel church in Southern California. An online ad, obtained by McAllister Olivarius, announced Havsgaard’s adult class on the book of Nehemiah at The Packinghouse Church in the Redlands, about 20 miles from Harvest.

Packinghouse minister Ed Rae did not respond to an email or a phone message from TRR. Havsgaard, who is retired and lives in nearby Forest Falls, has not returned repeated phone calls either.

A secret settlement

If the allegations Havsgaard was a pedophile somehow slipped the attention of Harvest ministers in 2004, they were reminded in 2016. A law firm representing alleged victims contacted the church around that time, threatening to sue, according to people who worked at Harvest.

“We heard that something terrible had happened overseas,” one volunteer who later left the church told TRR. “It was something that you weren’t allowed to talk about. Everyone talked about it.”

The church decided to settle, according to multiple former staff members.

McAllister Olivarius declined to comment on whether it was involved in a settlement with Harvest.

Harvest did not respond to emailed questions either. But a September 2025 statement from Harvest accused McAllister Olivarius of “financial extortion” and noted the recent lawsuits were “only the latest demand.”

Legal settlements of sexual abuse allegations typically involve non-disclosure agreements. Many prohibit the parties involved from publicly discussing details, or even acknowledging there was a settlement.

Former staff at Harvest, who were not involved in top-level decisions regarding potential lawsuits, told TRR they learned of the secret settlement when the church suddenly faced a financial crisis.

“They spent so much money to make that lawyer go away, they laid off probably half of the staff,” one former employee said.

One of the people laid off was children’s minister Ray Narez, who was let go unexpectedly in January 2017. He first thought he had been fired because he had been too critical of Harvest leaders, including Laurie, he told TRR. Then he was informed the real reason was financial.

That explanation didn’t make any sense, Narez said. No one had mentioned any concerns about the budget before. He had seen how much the church spent on events and had even questioned what seemed, to him, like excessive spending.

“I was told, verbatim, ‘You don’t understand how things work,’” Narez, who no longer works in ministry, told TRR. “If there were meetings about the budget being a problem, I wasn’t a part of them.”

Later, he heard his layoff might have been connected to a legal settlement involving orphanages in Eastern Europe.

A number of the former employees have found themselves recently piecing together details about decisions the church made at that time. They wonder if church leaders thought about the fact that Havsgaard was still ministering in a Calvary church in 2016 and still had access to children.

“They had to know,” one told TRR. “One hundred percent, they had to know.”

Why did no one go to police?

Another former employee recounted how the details of what he heard about the abuse kept him up at night, years later.

He wasn’t opposed to a legal and financial settlement, he told TRR. He didn’t think the church’s dirty laundry necessarily needed to be publicized. But he wondered if Havsgaard was continuing to abuse children in California.

And he wondered if anyone had gone to police.

The answer was no.

And Havsgaard was still welcome at Harvest, at least on special occasions. A 2023 photo seen by TRR shows him at the Riverside church in a suit with a boutonnière. According to the caption, Havsgaard was officiating a wedding for one of his grandsons.

The following summer — 20 years after three ministers raised the alarm about sexual abuse allegations — Harvest called Riverside police.

Two weeks later, the first of 12  lawsuits were filed making the allegations public and accusing the Southern California church leadership of a coverup.

Daniel Silliman is senior reporter/editor at The Roys Report. He began his two decades in journalism covering crime in Atlanta and has since led major investigations into abuse and misconduct in Christian contexts. Daniel and his wife live in Johnson City, Tennessee.