Twenty years after she revealed her abuse to a friend at summer camp, Meagan Bishop is speaking out once again. This time, it’s to oppose her abuser’s plans to found a Christian halfway house in a small South Carolina town.
“David Truluck was my stepfather, and he was also my abuser,” Bishop told The Roys Report (TRR) this week.
Truluck runs Shield Ministries, which recently announced plans to open a new facility to house up to 55 men, including up to 10 sex offenders. Truluck’s wife, Melodie Truluck, co-founded the organization and is its operations manager.
As TRR previously reported, David Truluck is also a registered sex offender, who in 2003 was convicted of committing or attempting a lewd act on a child under age 16. Bishop told TRR she was the victim involved in that case.
Bishop first revealed her link to David Truluck on Wednesday at a community meeting of residents opposed to Shield Ministries’ proposed halfway house.
Your tax-deductible gift helps our journalists report the truth and hold Christian leaders and organizations accountable. Give a gift of $30 or more to The Roys Report this month, and you will receive a copy of “Hurt and Healed by the Church” by Ryan George. To donate, click here.
She said David Truluck started molesting her when she was about 11. He had married her mother and was the youth pastor at the family’s church in Charleston at the time, she told TRR.
The abuse continued for a little more than a year until Bishop disclosed it to a friend at a summer church camp, she said.
Camp staff learned of the conversation, Bishop said, and alerted police and Bishop’s biological father. They also told her mother, Melodie Truluck.
After Melodie Truluck found out, “she was basically blaming me for everything, that I was asking for it,” Bishop recalled in an interview with TRR. Bishop added that Melodie Truluck gave up custody of her daughter after the arrest.
Charleston County court records show a judge sentenced Truluck to 10 years in prison and three years’ probation. However, all but two days of Truluck’s prison sentence was suspended, his case record indicates.
Bishop told TRR she had hoped never to deal with her mother and stepfather again, after disclosing her abuse.
About a decade ago, after Shield Ministries had already opened its first halfway house in Charleston, Bishop found out about Shield.
“I didn’t really have a voice, or think I had a voice back then, and I didn’t say or do anything about it at the time,” Bishop said.
Then she heard about Shield’s plans for a facility in Walterboro, a city of about 5,400 west of Charleston. Bishop lives on the opposite side of the state, but said she has family in the Walterboro area.
“I felt like people in the area needed to know, for their safety and for their children,” said Bishop, who’s a mother herself. So she shared some publicly available information about the organization with Walterboro residents.
“I would have felt somewhat responsible, I guess, if I knew that I could have said something, and I didn’t,” Bishop explained. “I could have possibly prevented a child from having to go through what I did, or worse.”
The information she shared spawned a Facebook group opposed to the proposed halfway house, which has grown to more than 1,200 members in a week. Bishop and a Walterboro resident administer the group together.
But Bishop told TRR she hadn’t planned in advance on revealing her link to Truluck.
“I just felt like maybe my story would give a little bit more insight as to who these people really are,” she said. “On the outside, it looks like they are trying to do God’s work, that they are trying to help these men transition.”
Bishop added she “has no issues” in principle with reentry programs for formerly incarcerated people.
“I don’t trust that David really cares about the rehabilitation process for any of these men,” Bishop explained. “And if Melodie didn’t care about what happened to her own children, how is she going to care about what happens to the children in this community?”
Bishop also questions whether those convicted of child molestation can effectively be rehabilitated, she said.
A federal fact sheet about sex offender recidivism states it’s difficult to measure how often child molesters reoffend, in part because so many are never arrested in the first place. But in general, up to a quarter of convicted sex offenders are arrested on another sexual offense charge within 15 years, the fact sheet indicates.
TRR asked David Truluck for a response for this story, but did not immediately hear back.
In a statement to South Carolina TV station WCSC, Truluck said he does “not make excuses for what I have done in my past and know that my actions caused many people who cared about me emotional hurt.”
“I have been through court ordered counseling and with the assistance of Dr. William Burke, others,” Truluck continued. “And, experiencing the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ, my wife, and Christian brothers, I have walked down a road of restoration, healing, self-recognition, and redemption.”
Burke, who teaches at Medical University of South Carolina and runs a clinic treating child molesters, provides professional guidance for Shield Ministries, the organization’s annual report states.
Truluck added in the statement to WCSC that he draws on his own experience to help Shield Ministries’ clients “travel this same road” and reduce recidivism.
Sarah Einselen is an award-winning writer and editor based in Texas.
English 
Spanish
9 Responses
Thank you for this very important story.
Meagan Bishop. Thanks for being so strong and vulnerable and willing to try and protect the innocent children. You were so harmed by this sick man and your own mom. I can’t think of anything worse for an adolescent. Gods best to you and yours.
Here’s an idea. Perhaps Mr. Truluck should consider resigning from the Walterboro facility and replacing himself with an experienced non-offender.
Megan Bishop, if you are reading this thank you for your bravery and speaking out. I do have a question for you. In the article, it talks about your stepfather being restored. Did he or your mother come to you to ask for forgiveness and admit they were wrong?
As a therapist, I have a real problem with any program being ran by people who are not licensed therapists. I also live in South Carolina, in the Upstate. It seems it doesn’t take much vetting to open a group home, etc.
It is Mr Truluck claiming restoration, but it’s clearly an undefined term. The victim’s mother sounds equally bad as the step-father – in blaming her daughter for “asking for it.” Is this couple really living in the 21st center?
That Mr Truluck reportedly was a Youth Pastor when this happened is terribly troubling.
And he served only two days of a sentence? Incredible
It might be interesting to hear how the father, Mr. Bishop would weigh in on this.
How can he say he’s “walked down a road of restoration, healing, self-recognition, and redemption” when he obviously has not reached out to his victim and apologized and tried to make amends of any sort? How can he say there’s been restoration? Restoration cannot be done without acknowledgment of the pain done to the victims. This is ridiculous, and it needs to stop.
Meagan, I also want to thank you and recognize you for your bravery in coming forward. Thank you. I recognize that this is done at a personal cost – and I hope you are being honoured, affirmed and supported in that. ♥️
This article raises the question:
How can a man who never fully took responsibility for his own actions and behaviour, be seen as the responsible shepherd and navigator for a large group of men who have the same problem as he did/has?
Does the treatment program just get participants to the point of feeling good and saying squishy things about who they are “in Jesus”, or does it actually create a burden to stop hurting the innocent, make restitution, and trigger a dramatic, empathetic change?
The way things are being presented it sounds like all their leader can offer them is the first scenario. This is NOT good. For ANYBODY involved – let alone for the larger, concerned, community.
Dear Megan, thanks for your courage, for getting involved again. It would have been much easier not too. What is it with mothers who side with the monsters?
I’m a leader in a Celebrate Recovery ministry and work with registered sex offenders. If a man truly were restored, I don’t know how he could ever redeem himself in our society. Being convicted of a sexual offense against a child is truly an unforgivable sin in today’s society.
I have 18 children. All were adopted and some were molested before we adopted them from the foster care system. So I am not a novice at this. I’ve seen the damage it does to a child. I’ve LIVED that damage. My kids will be fighting their demons for the rest of their lives.
But I had a perplexing experience several years back that has left me wondering. A man I was ministering to had been sunbathing nude in his back yard. Two neighborhood boys peered through the wooden privacy fence and saw him. They told their mothers, one of whom called police. He was convicted of exposing himself to minors. His sentence was harsh, with several restrictions. Of course, his registered offender status also made employment nearly impossible.
About this same time, we were camping at a state park with public bathroom facilities. One of my sons returned from the bathroom and commented, “Dad, there was a man in there standing naked at the sink shaving.” I couldn’t help but wonder. One could argue that both men exposed themselves to minors. But only one of them became a registered sex offender.
The RSO’s out there definitely need help. Instead of opposing a facility on the grounds of who is proposing it, perhaps we could instead look for ways to make it legitimately safe and useful to the community?