DARVO and Matthew 18 - Silence the Victims - Detangling IHOPKC

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-Brandom.org and with me I have my co-host and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer. Jed, it's good to be back and talk about this touchy subject.

I'll admit this is probably not going to be one of my favorites to cover because it's painful to think about. All of the victims and this is a widespread issue. It's not centralized and localized only to IHOPKC. It is something that I've noticed in the Brandham cults. In fact, that just hit the news and went all over the United States about not quite to this level, but something similar that was happening in various places. It's happened, I don't know if you've kept up with the news, but the victims are starting to step forward in many, many different

organizations. They all have this pattern, which we're going to be talking about a bit today. It's painful to watch because I feel a lot of pain for the victims. I have a lot of mixed emotions about the, I guess I'll call them victim leaders because some of the people I know have fallen into this kind of thing and they were good people. I knew them for a long time, but they had something inside of them that wasn't good and given the wrong environment and the wrong empowerment, this just turns into a big mess that, honestly, for me, it's painful.

No, absolutely. I think when we talk about the response to whether it be scandals or assaults or the way that the church handles these issues, we go from bad apples to systemic issues, and that's what's really difficult. I know that in talking about how people have responded to the accusations against Mike Pickle is symptomatic of something that is

affecting the entire, I have KC community, so the entire community that I was raised in was affected by this. It wasn't just, it's that step where it's like, oh, Mike Bickle was doing all of these really horrible things.

But you can kind of cut that off, categorize it in your head if you're able to just put the responsibility on this one lone individual. But when we talk about a lot of the things that we talk about today, we're going to recognize that it's not just one individual and it's these things happen because there's a whole group of people who, some more sinister than others, are helping enable and defend abusers in their midst.

And so, yeah, it's definitely a difficult conversation. And for me, this is where it feels like I personally felt way more betrayed is with the larger response to how not just the Mike Bickle situation, but just how abuse is handled in the church is one of my largest points of pain, I guess, if I look back through my history.

And so, yeah, it's absolutely a painful, painful topic. Absolutely. I've had the conversation with Bob a few times now talking about, you know, his proximity, his closeness to the leadership. And, you know, I understand from Bob's side, I totally get that because of me being around some people of importance and knowing them very well, I get all of that.

And on, in the cult side, I understand why the response is so delayed because, you know, these people have shut off critical thinking, when you shut off critical thinking, and you think God is in this movement and God will protect you, God will not let something like this happen.

That's how you're manipulated to think. When it does happen, you're just blindsided and, you know, some of the leadership was also manipulated. They're also shutting off critical thinking. So, when victims come forward, the first response is always, well, no, that can't be because God is with us. We're in, we're in the God movement, right?

And I don't care what church it is, you, from the Catholic church down to the most humble, honest, little, you know, non-denominational minister who has good intent, all it takes is one person of ill intent to rise into power.

And be able to manipulate people to where they shut off critical thinking. And then he can do whatever he wants until enough voices cry out. And for me, that's the biggest problem. Why does it take so many voices before something is done?

Yeah. Especially, you know, something to this level. This is, this is horrific. Yeah, yeah. And I think that question. Why does it take so many voices? voices is, I mean, you could, that could be the theme of this entire conversation today.

Why did it take so many voices before people were believed before not even just believed it was taken seriously? Let's get into it and let's try to unpack a bit of our thoughts on why it takes so many voices and why people, why people not allow, this is not the right word, but it feels like to the victims, it feels like they allowed this to happen and I want to unpack that a little bit too because every story has two sides, we have to be very cautious and very delicate about talking about both sides, but there is a reason why this mess exists and maybe we

can, maybe if you and I put our heads together, we can frame it in such a way that everybody else can understand. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, no, and I think that, I think one benefit, if you can say benefit to it, I mean, one potentially good outcome that is coming from the entire debacle at IHOPKC is that there was such an explicit example of some of the tactics that we were going to be talking about today that I think that, like you were saying just at the beginning, this isn't isolated to IHOPKC, there's right now there are people who are coming forward

talking about abuse that happened within their own church or their own family and are being actively, their voices are actively being suppressed or fought against and I think that the one good thing about all of this scandal with IHOPKC is that it was a very explicit battle.

There was a very explicit sort of tussle between those who were trying to come forward and speak out and all of like everything, Mike Bickle and the IHOPKC leadership really through everything against the wall to try to suppress this information, to try to get Mike Bickle and IHOPKC out of the limelight to get them out of the spotlight, to distract, to avoid any sort of accountability and attack the victims, attack the people who are the advocates who are standing up for the victims, did legitimately try to do everything within their power to make sure that this scandal was dismissed and ignored at all costs and

they didn't succeed, it didn't work and I think people can look at this example and and see how it can be more insidious. Can see it for the, because like you said, John, when people, there's a lot of good people or people who are seeming or wanting to do good who will be defending abusers just because they're manipulated or because they just can't comprehend.

My pastor, my friend has done all of these different things and I know it's bad and in this way, or oh, maybe he was having enough air and he should have been doing this.

There's so many sort of excuses that you want to make for your friend and you will see different individuals really intentionally or unintentionally help this process of suppressing the voices of victims, suppressing truth coming out, thinking that they're doing good, thinking that they're just protecting their church and their pastor or their loved ones and whatnot.

And so I hope that individuals kind of see the playbook a little bit through the example at IHOP KC and part of the reason why I am wanting to talk so explicitly about everything that IHOP did is to show people kind of the playbook moving forward.

Because it is a playbook, like it's 100% whether people are sitting down and making these strategies behind closed doors or not. I mean, that's 100% what was happening at IHOP is there was a group of individuals who were like, how can we discredit?

How can we blame? How can we shift responsibility? It was a behind closed doors strategy to blame victims and to get Mike off,

Scott free. I don't know if that always is the case but people will still, whether they consciously do it or not will play into these same playbooks. And once you recognize the playbook, you see it.

Like every, you see it in all of these different responses. You see it in what's happening in Texas and day star. You see it with a lot of these different. I'm sure that you're seeing it a lot with the way that the message is responding to controversy and has for its entire history has used these sort of techniques.

So it's something that it's so important to talk about despite it being an uncomfortable conversation to have. It really is. I've had conversations with people who were victims of various types of abuse. And also with people who were the, I guess the tar, good of character assassination to distract everybody else from looking at said victims.

And that's where it gets really weird for me because in the cult indoctrination strategy, somewhere deeply embedded into the cult mindset is the fact that if somebody does something horrific, like what we're talking about here, that is causing abuse, and the victims could cry out and could put a stop to it.

There's always this either a person or a group of people who suddenly do something so far worse or get labeled as one of the victims and then is trying to discredit the whole group of victims by pretending something happened and it didn't.

And whenever that person gets exposed for having fraudulently made claims or whatever, then all of the victims get ignored. I don't know. I'm assuming that this happened to some extent there at IHOP, but I've seen it happen time in a time and again in the message type scenarios and it's so odd because I've known many of the people, some of the people who have been the false victims, if you will.

And yes, they had problems, but I can't picture them just up and doing this. So was it a core strategy? What was the reason behind it? You know what I mean? I've had conversations with them and they, one person in particular, truly felt like they were a victim until all eyes were upon them and then suddenly they caved.

Was the caving real? Was they being honest beforehand? Were they being honest? I don't know. But it's just odd to me that there's always that distraction that comes up and it comes up pretty quickly whenever there's a group of victims who are raising their voices and saying, Hey, we've been victimized.

So here's a sudden, suddenly here's this distraction. What do you think about, what do you think about that? Do you think it's planned or do you think it's coerced? Yeah. Well, again, I think that in, I think that there are tactics that people do consciously or unconsciously that this is the same with like gas sliding or narcissistic tendencies.

A narcissist doesn't always know that they're a narcissist. In fact, most of the times that they don't and I think about my own father and the way that he demonstrated a lot of textbook abusive tendencies and I don't think he was conscious of the fact that he was like, I don't think he was sitting down and planning, okay, I am going to undermine my own son in this particular way.

I'm going to undermine my wife in this particular way in order to gain leverage over the family. I think it was just sort of when he felt insecure or he felt like he wasn't gaining the respect that he wanted or deserved that he would kind of go to...

do these certain patterns. It's, I think a good example for this is like, people who develop munchowsons, where you notice at a young age, when you're sick, or maybe you have a family member who's sick, all the attention sort of goes to them.

I don't think those people then go and strategize. Here's the disease that I'm gonna pretend to have. Here's the thing that I think it's just sort of this, when you start limping people, people care about you.

So it becomes this sort of manipulative tactics that people employ without really understanding what they're doing, but they're effective. And it's sort of the river flows, the path of least resistance, and the more you find success in that, the more you continue down that pattern.

So I definitely think that for in a lot of cases, you see these individuals who are doing really abusive, manipulative behaviors, and I don't know if they know exactly what they're doing. All that being said, Mike Bickle, 100% knew, and Mike Bickle definitely strategized, and we know that he did, so it's a little bit, we have, again, one of the more extreme cases, that's way more explicit.

And so when any, the one term that I think is really important

for people to know, if they don't know it already, I'm sure a lot of listeners will be familiar with this term, but it's called, the term is Darvo, and it's an acronym for the peritpensity, but basically it's the sort of playbook that often arises in sexual assault cases

when you're wanting to discredit the victim. So the Darvo sounds stands for deny, attacked, reverse, victim, and offender. So it's those three strategies is denying, whatever happened, no, this is not true, then in order to deny, you need to attack.

This is not true, and it's being made up by this woman who is after money, is after,

is mentally ill, is after clout, is doing, this is a campaign for some specific reason. This is a demon, God's, this woman is part of Satan's agenda to dismantle the God's authority.

And then in that, that attack leads to a sudden reverse of victim and offender. Suddenly it's not the person who committed those. abuse. It's the person who was abused. They're actually the ones. And this, this even can be true in situations where it wasn't totally denied. Like, oh, we did have, I did do these inappropriate things, but this person is coming against me. And actually now they're ruining my life. Do you understand how this accusation is going to entirely ruin my entire life? And they're the aggressors.

They're the people who are now hurting me. And all of this happened with a very textbook happened with Michael. So just to get into the specifics of it. And this is, this is what I saw from a first person perspective quite explicitly because as we talked about last, in the last video, my mother was one of the victims. And so I saw one of the, one of the Jane Does who was coming for it. So I saw these deny attack attempts against, against my actual mother. And then furthermore, my father ended up becoming one of the biggest defenders of Mike

Bickle during this time. And so I saw him employ a lot of these tactics. Again, I, I don't know how much he was conscious of what he was doing. But he certainly, there was like this sort of immediate denying attack and make the, the people who are coming forward, the actual aggressors and stuff.

So, so I saw all of this happen very explicitly. Oh, wow. So you had inside knowledge of how the process worked for, for reporting the abuse. What did that look like? How, what were the steps that were taken whenever the first victim came forward? When Jane Doe first decides that she's going to come forward and address what had happened to her with Mike, she is still fairly isolated and alone in this. She has her husband who's supporting her and she has a few ex-i-hop members who are coming in her support. But and there is, she believes that there is another woman who is

also been abused by Mike. But right now, she's the only individual who's sort of coming forward. My mom was not involved at that point. So Jane Doe wants to address what happened to her.

The way that you address issues in the church, at least in the charismatic church that I have seen, there's this, the, the Matthew 18 principle, which I'm sure that we've talked about this before and I'm sure that you've probably even talked about it in different.

podcast, but just to summarize, if you've never heard of the Matthew 18 process, it's this process, it's a verse where Jesus talks about how to confront someone who is wronged you. And it says, first confront them in private, see if they're repented, if they're not repented, bring it to the rest of the church.

I think that it totally makes sense, it's sort of this piece of wisdom, like the songs or the proverbs of, hey, this is a good way to handle personal conflict. When someone has wronged you, go to them, speak to them, see if they're repented.

I think that there's great wisdom in it. I think that it is a horrible principle to enforce on people and a horrible principle for sexual assault victims. It is absolutely, people can talk about whether Jesus would meant it to be taken in the way that it is, or it is an, I will just talk about the consequences.

I don't want to get into the, like, there are a lot of people who have different theological, like, I don't want to be arguing with God in this setting, I will just be saying, when you have this Matthew 18 outline, you are making it so, victims, specifically victims of clergy abuse, specifically victims of clergy sex abuse have to individually go to the very person that abused them and let them know that they're going to be speaking out.

If that person is sinister, if that person doesn't want that information to get out, they then have a jumpstart of how to start the starvo process. They know how to deny, how to attack, how to reverse victim because they can see it coming, they're not going to be shocked and surprised.

Furthermore, a victim of sexual abuse should never, ever have to confront their abuser face-to-face. It's a horrible, retraumatizing experience, especially if they're alone. If it's in a court of law, and there's support, it's a little bit different, but even in those situations, it's always going to be a traumatizing event.

It's just, this is simply, there's zero wisdom and it's so painful to enforce that policy on to the victims. That being said, Jane Doe still kind of does it. So first, she actually, her husband confronts Mike, who's been, I mean, this is longtime friends of Mike and longtime friends.

And and and people who have been involved in I have for a long period of time, right? So first Jando's husband sort of confronts Mike and Jando herself. I believe there was an email exchange.

I can't remember exactly how it happens, but Mike becomes aware that this individual is going is now speaking out. That Jando is now speaking against abuse that she experienced. Mike then sends a letter that has been made public to Jando's husband that is explicitly threatening. It basically lays out like if she does this, this will be the biggest betrayal of my my life that you have no idea what will come back on her.

She giving sort of the like she is giving a sort of forewarning that like she is going to be attacked. It never is he's never saying that I will attack back like this. The legion of people who love me will attack Jando. They will dismantle her that you will lose funding.

Their their Jando and her husband are still involved in the church. They get their primary source of income through donations. Mike in fact was one of the major donors to their ministry and so he's like that's obviously going to be cut off. So using all sorts of financial threats, these vague sort of sinister spiritual threats and guilt. Like if you do this to me, you will be betrayed me. Never really addresses any of the actual substance of what was being said. So he does that and then he goes and preaches a message. He he has not been removed from

IHOP leadership. IHOP leadership is is some of the at least Stuart Greaves is aware to some extent of what is going on with Mike. And yet Mike is still given a platform to speak. He goes and speaks at at a former under Christian fellowship. The the the IHOP church and he gives a message about the black horse prophecy, which I'm not going to spend too much time telling you what the black horse prophecy was. I think that maybe you've even covered the black horse prophecy, but it basically was an attempt to undercut the accusations that Mike knew were going to come

against him using prophecy and making it sort of this spiritual attack. He spiritualizes and says, this is something that we've been talking for a long time. I knew that there was going to be attack coming. I have had a dream that I am going to be attacked in the future. It wasn't necessarily as specific as that or it or it.

explicit as that, but that is the essence of the message that Mike is giving because first thing, first thing that he does is not a message of repentance. It's not a message of guilt or a message of farewell or anything like that. It's not even like a common everyday message where he's trying to ignore and isn't processing it. He starts enacting his plan as soon as possible. He starts prophetically trying to get a head of the attack that's being going, that's going to come against them, which is not prophetic at all because he just has had

these people confront him. It's not prophetic. It's not something like from the external perspective, it might seem prophetic because nobody in the congregation knows about these attacks yet, but because of the Matthew 18 process, because you're first supposed to come to the individual and see if they're repentant, Mike has a head start on all of this, so he explicitly uses it to fabricate prophecy in order to undercut the accusation that is about to come to him against them.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the New Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others, with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book. You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute

to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top, and as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William-Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support.

There's a lot to unpack there, and I think I spoke a lot there. It's all right. I think I want to start with what you said about the verse from Matthew. One of the problems that I have noticed over time, and it took a long time for me to notice it, was the fact that as American Christians, because of the way Christianity developed in the United States, the way that the Bible is read is quite incorrect. There are people who, I'm sure you were thinking it as you said it, there are people that whenever you try to say that there's a better way than that verse from

to you for handling church affairs, they're going to adamantly call you, denounce you as a sataness man. Right. And it's like, you know, there's all these examples of God as a father-child relationship between the father and the child, right?

If I'm teaching my child how to throw a baseball, there's one way to throw a baseball where you throw a fastball and it goes across the plate. And it works for kids who, you know, if you're throwing a fastball, maybe they can't swing fast enough.

But suddenly you get a good batter up there. We have to have other tricks in your arsenal, right? You might throw a curveball, you might throw a dropball. Well, my example to the child was just simply throwing a fastball.

It doesn't mean it's the only way to throw a baseball, but I gave the example, right? So Jesus gives an example of church order or church discipline. Well, it is one example. It applies to whatever was the situation he was addressing in the ancient world.

We're no longer living in the ancient world. Could it apply? Yes, definitely, most definitely. Is it the only way, most definitely not? But there are people because of Christian fundamentalism, they were strongly opposed to reading change into the Bible.

In other words, if the Bible says something, we're going to always stick with exactly what it said. We're not gonna deviate one, they would say one Iota. We're not gonna deviate one Iota. Not realizing that when somebody is giving you an example of how to be and how to do, how to live your life, it's not the end-all solution, right?

So like you said, whenever there is especially sexual abuse, it is a very, very bad idea to put the abuser in front of the person who's the predator. Very bad idea. I'm not going to question that at all.

And then, unfortunately for you, because of your relationship with your father, you have a father who is supporting the predator. This also is complicated because in the way in which Lateran created the authoritarian structure, you had, it was a pyramid, hierarchy pyramid of authoritarian dictatorship.

The very top was the central figure, which in this case is Mike Bickel. Underneath him is the tier of generals that are under him. And then all the way down to the rank and file members, right?

What? Unfortunately for your father, for your family, your father was in that tier where he is supposed to do what he did. He has been manipulated, coerced, trained, undermined control, however you want to say it, he has manipulated to be this person that was his role in the cult hierarchy.

And in every other area of the world, I mean, if you're a post office worker and your boss is having you drive a mail truck and then when you drive the truck back to the station, and he sexually assaults you. Your first thing is going to be called the police because this person sexually assaulted me. But in a cult where you have this authoritarian structure, unfortunately your first thought is, wait a minute, that's a man of God. Should I call the police? Should I not call the police? You've been manipulated to be that way. And I can tell you after experiencing churches

that weren't cult churches that you do not have that kind of relationship with the pastor. If the pastor does something as horrific as this, immediately you're going to pick up the phone and call the police and say, this guy who's the pastor of this church did this thing to me.

And the police aren't going to question and say, oh wait, he might be a man of God. Let's question it. They're going to immediately come drag his butt to jail, right? But they've created this cult hierarchy where it's difficult because the victims are also victimizers, especially in that tier that's right under the central figure. They have been manipulated and programmed to try to defend the central figure at all costs. And then complicate that further if there are people with ill intent in that tier, will now they support each other in the role and they enable each other

to become predators. So this turns into a big mess just because of the cult hierarchy. Yeah, and they defend each other. So not only is it my father coming to Michael's defense because of the sort of hierarchy and the way that he has the sort of allegiance and honor to Mike, which still is baffling to me. I've never really understood why. My dad has very little respect for anything that isn't his own mission in an agenda, but then yet somehow is is respecting this individual. But I think that too, you have a lot of many cult leaders following in the footsteps

of Mike Bickle. And what you have with my father and others is a lot of other people who have committed sexual abuse. And so they see Mike Bickle as a representation of themselves. And they see the attack against Mike Bickle as an attack against themselves. This was explicitly true with my father, which is really, really heartbreaking because like, you know, it's just such a horrible thing when you now are siding with the abuser because you identify with the abuser and you're going to defend the abuser because you yourself are a abuser. It's just really really horrible.

And I think that something that I've been trying to explain and put my finger on for a while is that there is absolutely no way for the,

this is true for a lot of Pentecostal churches. There's just no system for leaders

to be addressed as abusers. It's kind of, it assumes this sort of,

minimum moral threshold of all agents within the community. It's like they all have to be not liars for it to work. You know, something about just on the deception side, like if you have prophecy, if you have a community and the reason why people are like, why are you picking on the Pentecostal community?

Because there's prophets in the Pentecostal community more than any other Christian community. And this is true for other religious communities too. I grew up in the Pentecostal community. So I'm, you know, if I had grown up in Hollywood, I think I've said this with you before then I'd be on a podcast talking about, you know, sexual abuse in Hollywood.

Like this isn't unique to the Pentecostal charismatic non-nominational communities, but that's the community that I was raised in. And I will say that this emphasis on spiritual heroes and magicians and emphasis on the miracle workers and the prophets opens up the door for charlatans.

And they're basically is, I remember talking with Bill Johnson about this, where it was just basically like, what is your even way of filtering if someone's a charlatan? Like how do you don't even have any system in place?

Someone could be, well, I think a good example of this, but I don't wanna jump too far, but there's, you know, Russell Brand. Yeah. Hollywood guy clearly has had some sexual abuse stuff is quite explicitly jumping into the non-nominational kind of woo-woo charismatic space, selling amulets and all this different stuff.

It is such an obvious charlatan play. Like it is so explicitly someone who has seen an easy group to manipulate and is jumping in there to gain money, to gain power, to gain authority, to distract from his own sexual assault stuff.

And it's one of those things where it's like, what is the system to, if you disagree about Russell Brand, let's say some theoretical person, some fictional individual decides, hey, I don't care about Christianity at all, I don't believe any of this.

I see a bunch of vulnerable people. I'm going to go into this. I'm going to say what they will want to hear. I'm going to do these miracles to try to pretend like I'm this miracle worker.

What is even the process to keep that individual from praying upon individuals of the community? There's nothing. There's legitimately nothing. Not every maybe assemblies of God and some of these more structured panel-costal communities will have more of these

procedures in place to avoid that sort of thing. But the community that I was raised in, Bethel Community, which is still going, you know, Morningstar. All of these big mega churches have zero accountability in place. You know, I've got in a little bit of trouble over saying similar things because people say, John, you can't paint with that white of a brush.

So let's unpack that a bit and try to further explain my thoughts, which are apparently similar to yours. In the groups that you have mentioned, there is this strange doctrinal notion that the men are the spiritual authorities of the people in the congregation. On the extreme and the NAR, Bethel Church, you know, you've mentioned a few of those, they believe that they are next thing to God because they're the apostle, they're a prophet. And so on that end of the extreme, these people are submitting to the authority and it's destructive. I'll just say it like that and

move on. But you have the other end of the spectrum. You have the casual Pentecostal minister who has no agenda whatsoever. Many of them, I'm friends with some of them. In fact, have some good conversations with them. They're good people, a lot of them. But they are in a religion that has a framework in which the people in the congregation are led to believe that the minister is receiving a message from God for the service on Sunday. I know how these messages come from God.

Like you or me, they go study the Bible and they prepare their sermon. Like you would, if you're a teacher in a school, for example, teaching the students, I know how the message comes. Am I to say God's nut in that process? I'm not. But the problem is whenever you present it like that, where people believe that there's this chain of command from God down to the people through this individual who is the minister, will now he becomes to some extent, whether it's great on the Bethel side or on the Pentecostal side, to some extent this is a person who becomes a spiritual

authority. And when there's a problem, people are afraid. to call out the spiritual authority, because in effect, they're calling out God, and so that turns into a mess. How did that work out, and I hop?

What happened at I hop? I hop. Here's about this response, and they just, they don't have any grit for it. There's no capacity to recognize, ooh, this person might be abusive, which then opens up the door for, after the Black Horse Prophecy, getting back into the specifics of what was actually happening.

You then had, they, I hop instead of hiring a lawyer to investigate, instead of distancing themselves from Mike, which they did publicly, so just to clarify what was happening behind the scenes, is some of this information starts coming public, the Jane Doe then gets connected with a bunch of the advocates, including Allen Hood and Dwayne Roberts, and there is former international house prayer leaders who are coming in support of Jane Doe, Michael Sullivan as well, and then there's connected to my mother.

My mother gets connected to the group and there becomes much more traction of like, okay, we now have two separate testimonies talking about the exact same thing, giving extremely bizarre stories about Mike Bickel's behaviors way back in the 80s and 90s.

The red flags then start being raised of, okay, it wasn't just these two women, there were several other, over the last like 30 years, I think that basically started clicking for a lot of these individuals who had been around Mike for a lot of times where a lot of red flags had been raised in the past with several different women and his behaviors with, he was having a lot of different individuals that he was giving apartments to and he was giving, that he had a key to their apartments and he was doing a lot of these different

behaviors that now are looking like big red flags. So they basically put together a document, the advocacy group puts together a document that says, okay, we know that it was happening with at least these two individuals.

We think that it was happening with a bunch of these different individuals. We need to start investigating, someone needs to start contacting and communicating with these different women, seeing if they're okay, one of which was Misty Edwards, who was a prominent figure in the IHOP community was a huge, huge figure in my life and just from the stage, and I wasn't personally close to her with her, but she was a worsh...

leader at IHOP and an extremely influential individual. And so there's a bunch of these different red flags with a bunch of these different people. And so they put together this document that kind of is a rough sort of accumulation of all the red flags that have been raised about Mike Bickle.

They then bring it to IHOP leadership. And what IHOP leadership does is they take that document. And then they go and they find the people who were mentioned in that document. And they find the ones who are still loyal to Mike.

And they get them to flip on the AG group. So this is what happened. This is where it got super muddy for everyone who was outside. And part of the reason that it was muddy is because Jane Doe was coming forward and wasn't using her name.

My mother was coming forward and wasn't using her name. She was using her initials, but it was also being referenced as like Jane Doe 1, Jane Doe 2. There was the original woman who had a very similar experience to the first Jane Doe who I still don't even know who that person is, who is also referred to as Jane Doe.

So you have all these different women who in the public are really only being referred to by this sort of very anonymous name. So what Mike Bickel does and what Stuart Greaves does is they find different women who are loyal to Mike who very well could have been abused by him.

Maybe it wasn't exactly the same. Maybe Mike wasn't sort of doing some of his grooming behaviors, but not as explicitly with these other women. Maybe he was doing it just as much as he was, but these women are just still loyal to him because they don't want to come forward.

They don't want to address it. For whatever reason, these women want to still support and defend them. We know that this is the strategy that Mike implemented. We know that he started going to these women because later Tammy Woods comes forward and she says that when all of this was going about, so right when the scandal is starting to break, Mike calls Tammy and starts feeding her lines saying like, hey, you are going to need to defend me because he has been grooming Tammy for 50 something years or something.

And she's still, at that time, she'll talk about this where she was still in this place where she was like, Mike is a good guy. And she's defending him and excusing some of the things that happened in her past because it's just, it's hard to...

dress. It's easier to tell a different story in your head that condones and contextualizes it and dealing with the trauma of the world that you grew up in, especially when she was 14 when it began with Mike. So we see a bit of the Bickel playbook, this Darvo playbook, because he goes and talks with Tammy and tries to get her to sort of join the team.

And what happens is that there's this group of women who say, we are not Jango, we were, our names were in this account. Now, there's some truth to that because the group of individual, the advocate group had been collecting different names of like, here's the different red flags. They hadn't talked with these women. They hadn't substantiated it.

It probably was a mistake from a strategic standpoint. It wasn't a character mistake. It wasn't like a moral mistake. They just said, oh my goodness, here are these things that we know are true about Mike. We know that he abused at least these two women. We know because their testimonies support each other. We believe these women. This is undeniably something that is happening.

We are now seen also, he exhibited these behaviors with a bunch more people. So there's sort of this question of how big does it go? How, how many people was Mike Bickel abusing? So they sort of make that list and then from that, this is where you get Mike and the IHOPKC executive leadership gets a bunch of these women to come forward and say that they were not abused by Mike. That they're not Jango and they start to attack the AG group. They attack Duane Roberts and they attack Alan Hood and say they are bitter ex-employees that they're trying to tear down Mike so that they can

go, you know, it's some sort of medieval coup that is going on that they're trying to take over the kingdom and that they're using these women. I remember very explicitly the term that Mike Bickel used and then he had my father use is there's these men who are hiding behind the skirts of women is what the terminology was. Which is just horrific. That is horrific. I can't even imagine being in your shoes. So you're aware your father was doing this and how did that affect your relationship with him? That was one of the instances where I sort of

sever, began to sever relationship with my father. I'm trying to, I'm still close with my father at the time. I didn't know all of the abuse that was going on with him. But when he says that, I know that he's talking about my mom. And I know that he knows. So this is another thing.

I was 100% certain. I mean, it's my mom. I believe her, I believe everything as she says. I was also 100% certain that every, all of her account was true. Because when everything first was bubbling over with Mike, I think I've actually even said this before. I called up my dad first. I didn't call my mom because I was going to talk with my mom over the weekend. So I didn't know the story with my mom. I didn't know what Mike had done with my mom back when she was teenager and when she was in her 20s. I didn't know about the prophecy about dying. I called up my father. And I was like,

hey, have you heard, I very naively thought that my dad would be on the right side of this thinking that he would be like, oh my goodness, I didn't realize Mike was doing this. And I thought that he would have this sort of moral baseline that would keep him from sleeping to defend Mike. Obviously, that is very naive looking back. But I call him up and I say, hey, this is all happening. Do you know any information about this? And my dad says, well, you know, Mike prophesied that Diane was going to die to your mom back in the 1980s. And so I hear that from him, like the biggest

defender of Mike during this time told me explicitly that the core sort of accusation was true. And he then it was so it was so hard and bizarre to then see my dad play into the whole Darvo method because he would go online and he would attack the Jane Does. One of them peed my own mother, like his ex-wife. I mean, the woman he raised children with for 30 years, you know, like that someone who was even if they're not married, you think that there would be some sort of loyalty and he's attacking, saying, none of it's true. When behind closed doors, he had explicitly been the

one to tell me, like it wasn't I confronted him. Hey, mom said this. Do you know if this is true? He offered up the information to me without prompt because, of course, he remembered it. My mom told him when they got married back in the 1980s, this happened and Mike, or sorry, my dad confronted Mike back in the 1980s about that and was very protective of over my mother and was like, hey, you can't do these sort of things.

And so it was something that was very memorable, obviously, for my father and to then see the switch

where it's like these women, it's not telling the truth, duh, duh, duh, and he would even talk with me like all these women aren't telling the truth. And I was like, what, these women is my mother and I know for a fact she's telling the truth and you know for a fact that she's telling the truth and this sort of like the weird sort of, it would gloss over his eyes and he does deal with a lot of mental illness and I think that he can get in this place where he fractures mentally where he doesn't even recognize that he is lying

in the moment, but it was just so bizarre to see this behind the scenes and all of these women are starting to come forward and be like basically to discredit the Jane Does that there is no Jane Does, that these men are fictionalizing these accounts of Jane Does, maybe there's one who had some bad relationship with Mike, but minimizing discrediting and then attacking the advocates who have come forward to make them look like they're the people who are committing the abuse.

They're the ones, they specifically, the rhetoric was these not Jane Does come forward and their rhetoric was identical. You have a bunch of different ones post that almost the exact same thing so they clearly were getting together and they were coordinating their responses and the whole rhetoric is I was abused, yes, but I was not abused by Mike.

I was abused by these men who are putting my name out there and who are putting me in the limelight and it's like no one put their names out there, no one like you are putting your names out there.

No one had mentioned them, they weren't trying to, the document that they had originally drafted was supposed to be for internal use to investigate. Nothing of it was like they weren't saying Mike Bickle and Misty Edwards had him in an appropriate relationship and they should come forward.

I mean, that was true, that was the case, but that wasn't what was being like they did have an extremely inappropriate relationship that was she abused, was she not abused? I mean, I certainly think that she was abused but she is not ready to come forward with that sort of perspective.

So she never was going to be mentioned in the end of this but she inserts herself into the conversation to defend Mike to say that I have been abused but I'm not been abused by Mike but by these different individuals, total reverse victim and offender thing.

It's the people who are speaking up against Mike, those are the bad guys, Mike isn't a bad guy. Mike is, this is all fictionalized, this is all some spiritual account or spiritual attack. At the same time, there's a bunch of these anonymous accounts that are popping up online who are saying the victim's names, who are giving the information, even my mom.

There was one individual who came forward and was like, oh, said the name of my mother publicly, which she's awesome, she's fantastic. Throughout all of it, I've been way more angry on behalf of her than she was.

She was kind of like, let me spend time with my grandkids and I will help this thing, but like she is just so mature and developed and has healed from a lot of these different things.

And as more speaking out, because it was wrong and because she's supporting these other victims who are coming forward, not because she needs some sort of like needs Mike Biggle to suffer for the things that have done against her.

I mean, zero of an addiction in that woman ever, but I see the things that people are saying about her. I see how they're discrediting her and it just makes me furious. And so all of these online profiles pop up, there were stories of that circulated that were just wild.

Just so bizarre and so like laughably false, but yet it's in a world where people believe a lot of the things that they're told them. So one particular story was this man comes forward who I've never heard of.

I don't think he actually exists. He's supposed to be a Israeli defense force agent. He's like this secret agent for the Israeli army or he's an ex CIA agent or something. It was ex IDF agent.

So they're using this sort of like Messianic Jewish character, which I think that his character is entirely fictionalized. He might have been a real person, but I don't know. But anyway, he gives this whole account of how he was at the coffee shop that was higher at higher grounds right next to the House of Prayer.

I don't know if you know that there's a coffee shop called higher grounds, which is funny. I will give you that. I've heard it. Yeah, right next to the House of Prayer. And honestly, most of my good memories of Vihab are actually at that coffee shop.

But anyway, he's the story goes that he's at the coffee shop and he hears Dwayne. Roberts and Alan Hood and these other individuals conspire publicly, like they're at a table and they're conspiring on how they're gonna take Mike down and that he heard this and he's giving a testimony and it's like, it's so stupid because it's like, if you're planning a coup for some king, you don't go plan the coup in the court of his kingdom.

Like, it's just so ridiculous that they would be at higher grounds doing this sort of thing. Also, the idea that this is like a coordinated coup by these men totally is, can only be, only people who are not behind the scenes would even believe that because the individuals who came forward were the women.

They weren't the men first, they wasn't the men didn't find these women and get their accounts and fabricate the accounts. It started with Jane Doe and it started with my mom who testified about it back in 2015.

So just these ridiculous fabrications, but they're spread amongst the community. IHOP leadership tells people not to go online, tells them not to read what is being said, they isolate their community, they say, we don't know what's happening, they do know what's happening.

From the immediate, they could have been like, yeah, it has been very clear, we don't know the extent, but Mike Bickle abused individuals and used prophecy to groom women. This is horrible, we're trying to find the extent.

They could have addressed it with honesty from the beginning. There's this whole thing of like, we don't know, we gotta give due process to all of this and everything. When it's just outright, they're in a strategy to deny attack, reverse victim and offender.

That's all that was going on. You know, it's just so problematic, the way that all of this has been handled. And you know the irony of all of this, this all began, if you read some of my research, you can kind of piece this together, but this all began in opposition to the Catholic church.

And as the Catholic church grew and developed, and problems started emerging in the Catholic church, who's gonna outcry against them most heavily, but the group who did not want them in the United States in the first place.

So this large swath of the Pentecostal movement, the fundamentalist guys, Christian identity guys, they are the first to proclaim that the Catholic church is just filled with predators among their bishops, right? And their priests, et cetera.

And the irony of it all is that everything that you've just described is exactly what was the outcry against the Catholic church. And in recent years, I don't know if you've kept up with it or not, but the Catholic church has made huge strides to reform because of all of this.

as they see the problems. And they go so far as to, I can't remember what state this was in or even what it might have been in another country, but they actually train the people who are in the mass, et cetera, they train them how to properly go and file reports even outside of the Catholic church, right?

So if you go to your church and you've got this group of men who are supporting each other, you're not going to be heard if you're a victim. They're just going to pounce on you, right?

And I think really that's what needs to happen in the United States. There needs to be an education not for the members of the church hierarchy, but I'm talking about the rank and file congregational members need educated.

If this happens to you, go to the police. This other thing happens to you, go to this other place. Teach them how they should handle a situation. And don't teach them that these are prophetic figures that are beyond rebuke, beyond reproach that at the beginning, I didn't unpack it, but at the beginning of this episode, Matthew 18, there has to be that procedural aspect, how you have to go through these proper channels.

Well, there's no way to determine whether or not the entire proper channel is corrupt. And if you go outside of the church, it solves that entire issue. So when we're talking about something that is criminal, which this was, apparently, if everything that is said is true, I'm not going to make the declaration there, but if everything that has been said is true, this was a criminal thing.

The victim should have gone to the police, not the church hierarchy. So I think in the end, more education needs to happen to the church members. I think churches should hold, just like they hold these special groups where they talk about different books of the Bible and they do Bible studies.

They also need to have education on how to proceed if something goes wrong. And it would just largely solve all of this problem, but we've got so much more to cover and we're all ready over an hour.

So I guess we'll cut it off here and pick up back next time. Sounds good. Yeah, but no, I just want to reiterate, you're totally right. You need to have advocacy from outside of the church.

It's because if you said if the system is corrupt, what happens if the system is corrupt? I would even go one step, even back of what if just a single individual in the process is corrupt?

It becomes this cascading effect that if you have a single bad faith actor in this entire process can be manipulated and used to retraumatize the very victim who is coming forward.

That's... Last thought, that is one of the main and most consistent pieces of testimony that you will hear from victims of sex abuse and clergy abuse is that there is the initial abuse that they suffer.

But then there is the abuse that suffered when the church that they love and grew up in or part of then doesn't believe them or denies them and so many different individuals have talked about how that is just as painful of a process.

If not more so in some times because you have this sort of like, I am speaking against the abuse, the most horrific thing that ever happened to me and the people that I love are saying that not only was it did not happen but now that I am the aggressor, I am the abuser who is abusing the pastor and it's just absolutely heartbreaking and it can't happen.

There has to be change. There has to be change. You talk about the Catholic church. In the 80s and 90s, the Catholic church didn't, there was a lot of twisting of the arm that had to happen before a lot of these better procedures have been put in place.

The same tactics were going on, a lot of the same stuff but just too many people rally against the abusers in the Catholic church and forced change to happen and I think that I hope 20 years from now we are looking back at the charismatic community and there is widespread change in accountability.

I don't know if it's going to happen but I hope that it does. I hope so too. Well, if you have enjoyed our show and you want more information you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at www.William-branam.org. For more about the dark side of the NAR you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle and Audible.