Mike Bickle Investigation - The Firefly Report - 32 SURVIVORS Confirm the Abuse

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-brandham.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 this will, I guess this will go out Monday and so last week last was a last Monday night. I got a flurry of emails and some text messages from you and from Bob and everybody's telling me the big news that's going down at

IHOP KC with Mike Bickel and so we're interrupting our flow of questions and answers to talk about this very serious matter. I know what you and I have discussed and what a little bit of research that I've done. I've not read much through the documentation yet. I've not had a chance but maybe it would be good if I pretend that I know nothing and let's just have a conversation and for listeners who don't know this or the significance of this we can talk through what that is, what the documents reveal and in the broad scope of things how much this impacts the new

apostolic reformation. Yeah, yeah and I think it's a big question of how important, like I think that we will still be seeing is this the first step and a lot of reports that are going to be coming out or is this something like the scope of this report that came out is still definitely or the effect of this report that came out is definitely to be determined but it is extremely significant for me and in this time I think that it's a huge huge step forward of bringing accountability and basically a lot of the things that I and others have been talking to you about about what was going

on at the international house prayer. We now have a formal document that sort of points and verifies and gives credibility to all of these testimonies in one location and there's a lot of new information in it that was I don't want to say shocking to me because at this point nothing's shocking but it's certainly hard breaking just to see, I mean, I really grew up in not only a cult, but a sex cult. Like they're the international house prayer became a place of sexual abuse and covering for sexual abusers.

And there's this whole document that kind of goes beat by beat through that. And so I'm still kind of just in the wake of seeing that. What I already knew to be true, but seeing it on paper is just it's it's a big deal. It is a big deal. And it ties to a lot of other things. You know, this podcast has many different spider webs of information. I hop KC is just one channel of information we're publishing. And we also do the our stories where people tell their experience.

It's interesting because what's happening here ties to so many of the things that we talk about and so many of the threads. In fact, just last Friday, we had a testimony from a lady who had been groomed in her church. And it was widely covered up. Her mother actually knew this was happening.

So as you tell as she tells her story and she talks through it, picture this is the same kind of thing. It is a sex cult. However, the the scope and the impact of that particular incident, I don't think it was as widespread as this. It also ties to the authoritarian control that we've been talking about. The building of Joel's army, the hierarchy of fivefold ministry, all of these things that empower these leaders. And what happens is you've got this array of people at the top of each pyramid that are working together, collaborating as though they have the divine insight and special

knowledge from God, basically. But yet each of these men as as we watching them fall, each of the these men had no insight or maybe they knew it and just covered it up. But in either case, the authoritarian control pyramids are starting to topple. Yeah. And and it's it's refreshing to see truth like this come out and to see the beginning of like you said, the toppling of these people who got into authority by all of the means that the latter reign has kind of established and all that, you know, I hope is not unique in how it established

a lot of this authority, but to see that some people are starting to be held accountable. It's just the start. And for anybody watching and this is I'm going to be I want to always encourage people, this document isn't the end all be all. In fact, it probably is just scratching the surface.

I know that I've spoken to a lot of victims who in this their story was sort of reduced to a paragraph amongst, you know, a 68 page, 68 page document, and that just goes to show you the scope of the, I mean, a true investigation that really detailed out everything that was going on with IHOP would have needed to be quite literally probably 10 times as long as this one is, but it's a great start.

Because it really starts solidifying all of the things that we have been talking about and saying this is, this really genuinely happens and for people like yourself, John, who are scholars of sort of everything that has happened in a lottery movement.

I mean, this is a document that you are going to learn pretty well when you're writing books about IHOP and about the Kansas City prophets and referring back to this. I mean, this gives sort of a historical foothold to address some of the abuses that have been going on.

Absolutely. And I will definitely be having it on the research pages that we have and in upcoming books that I'm working on that, you know, that cover this avenue of research. But it is a big deal. So for anybody who isn't aware of what's happening and hasn't been, you know, if somebody's new to this podcast and just comes in and is the first time that they hear you and I, let's summarize for them the impact and scope of this.

What is the International House of Prayer? How does Mike Bickle fit into the picture? How does he fit into the broader scope of the New Apostolic Reformation? Let's talk to that just a brief minute.

Yeah. So Mike Bickle is the leader of the International House of Prayer Kansas City. He isn't anymore as of the last year or so since the scandal has come out. But he sort of created the movement not only of the International House of Prayer, but sort of the prophetic end times movement in the United States.

He really was one of the pioneers for that entire, I don't know if you want to call it, genre or sect of Christianity, but definitely has an expression of the latter room reign movement.

I mean, he's definitely built on the likes of Branum and some of the people who had gone before him. And so he creates this mega church community of which I grew up in and my family was part of that is about ushering in the end times about prayer and worship, about 24, 7 prayer.

And this was this is sort of the movement that was created. And all the while he created this movement, he was sexually abusing and grooming individuals. And this investigation came about because one of the women who was abused by Mike when she was a teenager came forward, I mean, decades after the abuse.

But she finally sort of came forward and started reckoning with her own story. And then it was a snowball situation where other women started coming forward. My own mother was a victim of abuse at the hands of Mike Bickle and had corroborating testimony that supported Jane Doe, who is now actually come forward with her actual name, which is listed in this report, Deborah.

And Deborah is someone who I knew and grew up with and is a great woman. And I know her and her family and she came forward as Jane Doe. But what's been something that's been painful in this entire process is because she came forward with anonymity, her voice was not given the credence it should have been.

And I so appreciate that she is now coming forward with her actual name because she's someone who is a part of the organization and was there from the very beginning, really. And a key member of the community.

And so her and my mother and then other victims who came forward have started the ball rolling. So what this report was is basically a trying to an investigation that was done by a third party investigator that was a it was called Firefly or the and it was done as an independent sexual abuse investigation into Mike Bickle and international house prayer is something that a lot of people have been fighting for for over a year.

It was very difficult to get it going. I know that there was a lot of money that had to be raised to do it. But this investigation sort of seek to collect all of these different testimonies of women and men who have come forward about abuse scandals.

It's not only involving Mike Bickle, but involving I have KC as a whole. And that's where this report comes from. It's a pretty good summary and the way it relates to this podcast as I was working through the research for I can't remember.

It might have been the colonial Dignidad book. Anyway, I was looking at all of the Christian identity sects that emerged from or collaborated with the laterane movement because I was writing a book. I was working with a historian in Chile about the colonial Dignidad compound.

It was a message called compound where there was abuse and horrific crimes against humanity. You can read that outside of this podcast. I was doing that research, and I come across a single article from the Southern Poverty Law Center talking about Joel's army, which was exactly what I was studying, and that tied it to John Wimber, to Mike Bickel, to Paul Cane, and I recognized the name Paul Cane because he was William Brannem's protégé, so that's what started me down this path of research.

I've connected to several people, and we've spun off multiple podcast series based off of this. But that's how, in a summary, that's how it went. From there, I started investigating the types of abuse that were allegations at that point, and I began to try to compare them to what I saw as a pattern in the message that the cult that I escaped, and it was sad to say it was about the same pattern, right?

There were just a lot going on, and the key figures, the authoritarian figures just had far too much power. You couldn't question them, so it was the same framework that really enabled them, and that's how we got to where we are today.

Let's talk a bit about the history of the abuse allegations. Now that we have the document coming forward, we have the Jane Doe's been named. There's a history that built up to this, which we've covered in the podcast to some extent, for somebody who's new, let's summarize that a bit, and then we'll get into the document itself.

Yeah, so in 2023, Debra comes forward and realizes that, hey, she was abused by Mike. So she starts speaking up, but as she does, and this is in the document, too, where it talks about this tendency, but she went to, first, she spoke to her husband, and some people who were close to, she was close to, but there was this pressure to speak to Mike Bickle himself, and we've gone into more detail about this in previous ones, but there is this Matthew 18 process that is used by IHOP and by other similar communities, where there's a proper process, according to them, of ways you're supposed to report abuse and

or to report sin, I think is probably what they would call it. It's to do so, you need to first confront the individual who sinned against you directly and give them sort of an opportunity to repent, and then if they are unrepentant, you go outside.

But the idea is that everything is funneled back through the abuser, and that comes up several different times in this document, and this is what happened with Debra is that she was sort of pressured to...

let Mike Bickle and the other international house prayer leadership team before she sort of spoke out publicly or before she spoke to news organization she kinda went first to the actual abusers and her husband did as well.

And the idea was that they were going to confront them and there was going to be repentance and all of these different things. That's not what happened in 2023 she sort of comes forward and during the summer and basically Mike Bickle Stewart Greaves.

David Sliker the people who are the main leaders at the international house prayer get into defensive mode they they're now this is a scandal it's going to happen Mike Bickle actually gets up and preaches prophetic sermons about how he's going to be attacked in the future and that there is this black horse prophecy where.

See you know he his character was going to be attacked and in that that was going to be representative of demons coming after the prophetic prayer movement so he sort of aligns himself with the the prophetic prayer movement is like if anyone's coming after me they're coming after God's chosen and the whole.

The whole thing we're doing here at international house prayer so to kind of rally his community against the future attack that's coming so in rather than this being like a good healthy process of confronting the abuser and then giving him an opportunity to.

Secret redemption repent for the things that he has done it just provided him with an opportunity to do damage control and that's exactly what happened and so Deborah sort of moves forward and starts.

Game or momentum there's a advocacy group that kind of rallies around her of ex international house prayer leaders and others who kind of say hey we validate here her testimony her testimony very specifically mirrors the testimony of my mother independently and we'll get into more of the details of what that was but they kind of come together my mom's testimony gives credence to Deborah's testimony.

They come forward and it's it's a whole battle basically to summarize very quickly there's this huge battle of these women who start to come forward who are testifying about Mike Bickle specifically and his abusive grooming tendencies and they are every turn attempted the I hop attempts to discredit them to do the whole Darvo deny attack reverse victim of.

Fender, the AG group, the advocacy group that came to support my mother and Debra was painted as villains who were trying to attack Michael Bickle because of grudges and villains who they themselves had issues and were jealous and angry and they were demonic and coming against the move. God, all of this goes on. Eventually another woman comes for Tammy Woods who testifies that she was actually 14 when Michael Bickle did the same abusive grooming behaviors to her as what happened to Debra and to my mother and things started to change after then and the movement

of it switches. IHOP had done a formal investigation themselves. It was sort of internal investigation and it was like basically their investigation came up that Mike Bickle did some wrong things but a lot of what he's being accused of, he didn't really do. The way that it felt was, you know, maybe he had had an affair or he had had an inappropriate relationship with a consensual adult but he had repainted for those things and it was kind of personal and that was private to his family and this it wasn't something that was grand or even some criminal or that civil cases would

involve. It was just sort of your run of the day, you know, run of the mill pastor has an affair with someone in the congregation which is terrible but happens all the time sort of thing and that these testimonies of grooming and of abuse were false and he never he never admits to those different things and this internal investigation that IHOP funds basically supports that and says, you know, we don't find any evidence of these larger things that he's being accused of but then again, Tammy Woods comes forward and the momentum of this whole changes and it becomes

clear that IHOP now cannot investigate themselves and there needs to be a truth third party investigation and long story short this is it was a little bit later but you know a couple months later a ministry organization, a Messianic Jewish community who had been involved with IHOP in the past kind of takes the mantle and starts pushing forward for this independent investigation and I actually don't know all the details of how that came to be but I do know that this this ministry called Ticcan or Ticcan funds this sort or helps fund along with the AG group

of this investigation and it goes on for several months and now we're just finally seeing the report of the investigation. As I said, it matches the pattern. It's either in the one that comes out Friday or I have one that comes out in the future where I think the girl was also 12 whenever the abuse began.

But in a normal church, whenever there's an allegation, if even there is a question of an allegation, immediately actions are taken because this is a problem. But in these new apostolic reformation churches, the leadership, because they're on such a high pedestal in the Sathoritarian pyramid, they're given the benefit of the doubt in every case.

So the investigation is slow to start, the people who are supporting him, try to throw up roadblocks for anybody who is testifying or who has made a claim, granted in the other, you know, in a normal church, people can make false claims that does happen.

But usually there's an investigation that will determine if the claim is false and then the person who makes the false claim is in the same level of trouble because they're causing trouble. But in these new apostolic reformation churches, the leadership is given the benefit of the doubt because you're not allowed to question the leadership.

And so what do you do? So a committee forms and then the committee forms with the same basis. We're not allowed to question the leadership. The person who's making the accusations is automatically under scrutiny.

And that's how it kind of spreads and evolves into what we've seen. Let's get a little bit into the document itself. What is it that they found that was definitive? So the way that the document is laid out first in the introduction, the investigator said,

reports that there were over 224 intakes that he received, ANS. So my mother was one of these intakes and I saw a little bit of the behind-the-scenes process. And I know that he wasn't actively going out and knocking on doors.

This was an investigation, but it isn't like a criminal investigation where you have the force of the law behind you. You're not forced to compel people to speak or to not perturb themselves. And there's a lot of resources that criminal and police investigations can utilize that obviously this sort of private investigation can't do.

And he made a decision that he wasn't going to seek out named victims, which I don't necessarily actually even fully agree with, but he made that decision that he was going to be available for anyone who wanted to come to him.

And so this 224 people that he spoke with were all individual... those who offered their information up to him. I think there was a couple of individuals he might have given his information to just to make sure that they knew.

But the idea behind it is that if people didn't want to tell their story, he didn't want to retraumatize them and make them feel pressured to share it. And so you have this number that's 224, which is an insane number for the so many people who have a specific first-hand account of either abuse that happened to them or happen to someone who is very close to them.

And I believe that this is really just scratching the surface. And he says that only three submissions were made anonymously. So 221 people who came forward with their name and their identities to talk about what happened.

And then within that, there are 32 what he lists as interview survivors or ISs who were sexually abused, experienced sexually abusive misconduct during their time, or experienced sexually abusive misconduct during their time at IHOP KC.

So 32 different victims who all came from just this one local organization, the scope of this, wasn't even to the sort of affiliated international house of prayer churches. It was just IHOP KC. And again, there are more victims than just the 32 who were interviewed, but to have in this report, 32 different people is just astounding.

So yeah, so the scope of it was very large. And basically, he says that the credibility of the report is found in the collective and corroborating testimony of the experiences of the victims and witnesses.

So by talking to these 224 different individuals, he hears narratives that all kind of corroborate one or another and tell the same story. The story that is being told about Mike Pickle and about other abusers at IHOP KC is all the same story.

And he collects it from all of these different individuals. And then he goes more specifically through each of, maybe not each of their stories, but highlights some of the key testimonies within it.

What I find really interesting about this is that the laws and rules that govern a church body are different than the laws that govern the people of the United States. So in criminal law, I can understand you want as many witnesses to come forward.

But remember, in the Bible, it's the mouth of two or three witnesses to let everything be established. So if one person gives a testimony and says, hey, this person is praying upon me, whatever, is the alleg...

And another one comes forward, you can almost determine that this is a process that we need to really investigate and go forward with. But in the New Apostolic Reformation Churches, that's not the case because of the authoritarian control.

Now you have committees who are governing the bodies and the committees automatically are giving favor to the person at the top, right? So you have to get this big of a process and it's mind-boggling to think that it took that many witnesses to start to turn this thing over.

It just shows the sheer power of the NAR, whereas in a normal church, like I say, the first witness usually will start the investigation, but in the mouth of two or three is the biblical answer for this.

Yeah, and in the process before Ticken was involved and this investigation went on, there was one of the narratives that Mike Bickle himself was preaching was that, hey, there has to be due process.

We got to, you know, we can't just accuse people of things and very, I mean, very politically leading to anti-Me too movement and just like, you know, this, this, we can't just discredit, we can't have a man's entire life and legacy discredited by this single female testimony or something like that.

And it worked to try to isolate first Deborah and then my mother and then Tammy as well, but to sort of make them seem like they were the ones attacking Mike and that there needed to be this due process that happened before these accusations could be made.

Meanwhile, there's 224 people who all are cooperating what these women are saying and not just what these three women, but my, like, I have a good friend, Grisha, who is abused at the International House of Prayer and we'll get into that because this isn't just about Mike Bickle, this is about a whole system of abuse and abusers at the International House of Prayer.

And she had been speaking up for several years trying to tell her sort of experiences at I hop and no one was paying attention to her. Just no one was listening and taking any value with what she was saying. So there's this, there's this rhetoric of, hey, there has to be due process, but there's no method of due process.

It literally puts the victims in a position that they cannot win in this sort of ladder rain, new apostolic reformation authority structures because the very people who would need to do the due process, who would do the investigation are the abusers, you know, because they don't want other people involved.

So it's like, hey, let us, you know, sort of investigate ourselves. and until we fully investigate ourselves, these women shouldn't speak for, but there's no method, there's no accountability, there's no way to go to an HR department and put it in writing what the things that happen to you. So it's a total, it's a contrived setting in which the abusers are always going to be able to be the ones to protect their own legacy and protect their own

story where the victims have zero sort of method of reporting their abuse. And fortunately then this became a big enough situation or unfortunately, however you want to say it. But this became a big enough situation where it had to break that sort of ceiling. And it was a process to break that ceiling. It took so much effort and so much work and people like Gratia and Deborah and my mom who had to come forward and know that their testimony was being discredited. I mean, it took so much bravery and patience and courage because not only did they have to come forward, but they had to stick to their

story for, for literal years, especially with people like Gratia who, who came out in 2000, I think that she told her story in 2017 and, you know, hasn't really had anybody validate her story until now. And even here, she's just a paragraph in this whole thing. And so the courage that of many of these women and men who have come forward really is the only thing that broke through this absolute barrier of control that was established by Michael and by this sort of flattering new apostolic reformation structure. 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 McCummery, 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. So let's go a little bit de- deeper in the document because I know that's what everybody has been wanting to hear more and read more.

So if you're listening to the audio version of this podcast, if you go to the YouTube channel leaving the message, I'll have some of the documentation up so you can see it on the video feed.

But as I understand it, we have all of these witnesses and there are terms that we can't use otherwise YouTube will, you know, the content filters will be screaming at us. So when we use the word R, you'll understand that this is a word that YouTube will probably block, but it means a forcible attack of, you know, sexual nature.

So we're not going to say the actual words, we'll try to keep it G rated as much as possible. But let's go through this document and let's understand the scope of what is happening, what this investigation has revealed.

So just as a quick content warning for anybody who is listening to, we're going to be talking about. So in this report, there is a lot of very intense language that is used to describe what pickle and what others were doing.

And so just as a trigger warning for anyone going forward, like this is, we're going to be talking about very serious content here. And this is one thing that I appreciate about the report is that oftentimes I have seen abuse, specifically, essay, be talked around because it's an uncomfortable topic.

And in this, sometimes the scope and the intensity of what was actually going on can be missed because the language is very soft around it. So I think that these very specific stories are meaningful to tell because it gives you an understanding of actually what was going on.

So getting into it, in the document, and I won't be able to go over the entire document if people want to read it, it'll be made available, but I'm just going to kind of go through some of the big things that that stood out to me.

So first of all, there were 17 victims. The report talks about 17 victims that experienced abuse of conduct, including essay. And the R word, clergy abuse and spiritual abuse all perpetuated by or perpetrated by Bickel himself.

And this was huge because we have talked about the three women who came forward about the abuse that was happening in the 70s, 80s, 90s. And they told a sort of very... cohesive story of the grooming patterns of Bickel in his 20s, 30s, 40s.

This sort of concretely states what many of us already knew or assumed that it didn't just stop with those three women. That was the beginning of the pattern and the pattern continued and now there are at least 17 different individuals who experienced some form of abuse and very important family.

The words, the R word and essay was used to indicate that this wasn't sexual miscontact. This wasn't merely sexual misconduct. Not to say that any of the sexual misconduct that happened wasn't also horrific or the grooming patterns weren't horrific but Mike Bickel has definitely tried to skirt around a lot of accountability by diminishing the intensity of the acts that he committed and so to have this stated clearly that he committed the worst sexual crime there is is really meaningful and quite bleak, of course.

That is one thing and then just a skip to the conclusion, I'll just read the first paragraph of the conclusion which states that based on the documented statements of victims and witnesses interviewed in the evidence in the form of documents and correspondence with the accused, this investigation concludes that Bickel has committed spiritual, emotional and sexual abuse within IHOP Casey.

Bickel's reported abuse was ongoing, an ongoing course of action and pattern behavior starting as early as the 1970s based on victim accounts. Through the identified IHOP Casey programs, Bickel systematically groomed and developed inappropriate relationships with women in the congregation while using Matthew 18 meetings to conceal, minimize and silence victims of sexual abuse within the church.

So this conclusion, again, not anything particularly new if you have been following the testimonies that have been coming forward, it just very concretely states that not only was Bickel guilty of this abuse, but that he was actually using IHOP Casey to perpetuate and systematically groom and develop inappropriate relationships with women, including many teenage women.

I mean, the many of the women who have come forward testified that their initial experiences with Bickel and being approached by Bickel happen when they were merely teenagers. So the types of abuse that is happening here, again, it's horrible.

Perfect, this is criminal activity if the allegations are indeed true. The investigation suggests that it is, I guess. It ties back to something that we said in one of our earlier podcasts, we're talking about the prophetic abuse because to allow this to happen, to get to this level where you can groom people in this manner.

In these types of religions, you have a prophet who is the ultimate authority over the people, and he misuses that prophetic abuse to basically entice the people to believe that number one, he's the ultimate authority, number two, he's speaking to God.

Number three, these things that he subtly suggesting that they do for the grooming is somehow related to God. I'm assuming, based off of everything that you've just read, I'm assuming that this document confirms what we had pretty well suggested or at least guessed in that area, does it mention any of the prophetic grooming?

Yeah, very specifically, too. It mentions the story that I've talked about several times on this series, but the story that is close to me because it was the story, it was the prophecy that was used to attempt to groom my mother, but Bickel was prophesied to these women that he was grooming that one day his wife was going to die, because he needed a way of explaining how he was pursuing these women while he was married, you know, this isn't, you know, you're not supposed to have affairs, you're not supposed to have multiple wives, but for him, he was saying,

hey, we're coming to the end times, my, my wife, I have had a dream that she's going to die in an earthquake. I think it changed throughout the years. He used different prophecies of her death, but something is going to happen to her.

And when that happens, I will then take a new person to come and be married to me and that being whatever woman he was grooming at the time. My mom testified about that. She heard that story back when she was in her 20s and that was told to her that Diane is going to die, Mike's wife, Diane was going to die one day and that, that would open the door for her, my mother, to have a relationship with Mike.

And it was the same thing that he told to Deborah and it was the same thing that he told to Tammy. And so in this document, not only does this document kind of share some of those accounts from those three different women, but it actually gives, and I'm just going to read this.

because I'm still flabbergasted by this. On December 6, 2023, Lagardia, which Lenny Lagardia is a IHOP leader, he was actually my youth pastor. He was, when I was just a little kid, he was the youth pastor for all of the youth at IHOP KC and has been the youth pastor there for quite some time, and then his role has changed throughout the years and he has had a very big prominent role within IHOP.

So in December 6, 2023, so right when all of this was being exposed, Lagardia met with the Ministry Outreach team and an attorney who guided them through a 50 page document that the executive leadership team had received from the advocacy group.

So the advocacy group, the people who were supporting Jane Doe, now who has come forward as Deborah, gave a 50 page document to IHOP leadership. Lenny goes through this and in this meeting, one of the witnesses mentioned that Lagardia had urged the group to discredit the allocations against Bickel.

When that witness asked Lagardia about the story of Bickel's wife, Dianne, Lagardia responded by saying, Jesus is going to return soon. Mike and Dianne are going to preach boldly, Dianne is going to die a martyr and Mike will have to marry someone else.

Wow. In December 3rd or December 6th, 2023, this was just a year and a half ago. Mike is 70 now. The story is still being told and this was shocking to me and infuriating to me because that same month, I remember my mom being discredited by these individuals by Bickel himself.

Bickel himself wrote on December 12th a sort of his own account of what was going on and he told all of these, he basically said all of this stuff about Dianne and I and Dianne, all of that is false and it felt like a direct attack on my mother when I saw it and to know that in IHOP circles, in IHOP leadership, they were kind of doing two different things.

On one end, they were like being like, no, this is not true and then behind closed doors, they are saying, yes, this is the prophecy. We still believe it and not only do we believe it, but we're reaffirming it.

instead of being like, no, that didn't happen. Look, RDS says that she's gonna die a martyr and Mike will have to marry someone else. It's just wild. I mean, again, he's 70. He doesn't have to marry someone.

So much is wrong with that, but. Yeah. So that's stated in the report, and there's a lot more about the sort of prophetic abuse, but that just gives you a very clear indication of just the level of not only to gravity, but just insanity that this world has built up.

And it was all to protect Mike Bickle's abusive patterns, and which leads to the second sort of big thing with this whole report. Obviously, the focus so far I've been talking about is about Mike Bickle.

But probably even more damaging, all right? You know, just as damaging is not just what Michael, Mike Bickle himself did, but this culture of abuse that was created had a cascading effect on nearly everyone whoever was a part of the organization.

To some extent, I mean, there's just, it's just so broad in its effect. And this is the second half of this document goes through account after account of women who were,

using the R word, that women who were attacked sexually, and who then came forward to IHOP leadership, and instead of IHOP leadership having them go to the police, or even having IHOP leadership, even appreciate or listen to their story, they discredited those victims, they gaslit those victims, they discouraged those victims from speaking out.

And this very specifically happened with my friend Gratia who she is in the report, she's referred to as IS or interviewed survivor number 14. And she was assaulted, and she then went, she was assaulted by a staff member of IHOP and the Nightwatch program, one of the international hospital prayers programs.

She then reported what happened to her supervisor, Donna Edwards, and they met with Stuart Greaves, who was the director of the Nightwatch program, and he told Greaves told her that the R word was too strong of word for what had happened, which of course it was not.

Then the document talks about how she attended multiple meetings with different people who all questioned her about the incident, which crushed her spirit. Church officials asked her to retract her story and apologize to the fender formally.

I mean, this is just knowing to the extent of her story and in this report, it sort of just scratches the surface. But she was made to apologize to the very person who assaulted her by eye-hop leadership because they had no grasp or grid for consent, no understanding, just they blanked her.

They thought that it was, you know, they put a lot of the responsibility just on her and not on him, excused a lot of his behaviors, treated it like it was a collective mistake like they chose to have sex and it's just unbelievable and the report says, well, she has stated that how eye-hop handled this situation was far more traumatic than the assault itself.

And in the report, it talks about this incident highlighting the critical need for organizations to have proper safeguard measures to take allegations seriously while providing a safe and supportive environment for those to come forward.

I mean, more than just not providing a safe and supportive environment for Gratia, it was decisively a place that was unsafe for her. She would have been better to just never tell her story at all than to say it to eye-hop leadership, which is just frankly a hard, fathom level of betrayal and depravity.

And her story wasn't the only story of this. There were several individuals who were assaulted by either a staff member or someone within the community and then when they went to leadership to talk about it, leadership didn't have them pursue the police, they wanted to keep it internal, they wanted to pretend like it didn't happen and even would then force them to confront their, not to confront, but to address their abusers.

So there were contrived situations in which the victims were then forced to sit across from their abusers and talk about it as if this was a normal thing that people experience and this is an everyday experience, like you're siblings and your sister said something mean to you and you have to talk with her and be like that hurt my feelings and you go through this process and it's like...

Like, this isn't no understanding of the scope and impact of sexual abuse was implemented into the structure at IHOP KC. And that was not a bug of the system. That was a feature in the system.

So much so, there's even a point in it that it was a part of the actual structure of IHOP leadership that, well, I'll just read this excerpt. One of the interviewed witnesses stated that there would be a mass deliverance process where they were made to disclose any sexual history that they may have.

Another witness then reported that IHOP KC counseling department, so the counseling department at the International Hospital received a directive from Bickel via Grieves, mandating that any intern with, quote unquote, sexual struggles be reported directly to Bickel.

That's unbelievable. So counselors at this church organization, if they have a teenager, you know, a lot of these interns are 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, you know, they're young adults, if not teenagers and children, if they report sexual struggles to their counselor,

the counselor was then mandated to tell Bickel about that. And so that, I mean, so that he could know, so that he could have ties on all of the sexual sins of his community to who he should target, who is struggling and whatnot.

I mean, it became part of the structure of the system. It's just hard to believe and it further backs up at what we've been saying all along. The victims are further victimized when they're in this type of cult, this type of environment.

And they have to be extremely brave to come forward in this type of environment because their voices are being suppressed, and they're being told that not just against humans, not just against Mike Bickel, this is them stepping out against God in the way that they've been programmed.

And so I can't even imagine what they would have gone through just to be able to step forward. And all of the questions of, why is this just coming out now? Bickel has been doing this for 50 years and all that.

This gives some of the understanding, like if you read this report, it answers the question of why more people haven't come forward in the past because the whole system at IHOP was built to inhibit people coming forward, for the sake of Mike, but it also then...

In the report, they used the term sanctuary of sexual abusers. That was what IHOP was considered, a sanctuary of sexual abusers. And I think that's a very appropriate term, it was created to be a safe haven for people to commit abuse and for people who have previously committed abuse to not face any form of accountability and to keep those victims who had experienced sexual abuse from speaking up.

And so when people ask, why isn't there been more change? Why isn't more people come forward? It was built to make sure that people wouldn't. And it's only because of incredible courage and incredible dedication and frankly that the ridiculous scope of abuse that this is actually coming out.

I mean, it hadn't Mike Bickle only abused, you know, 50% less or something like that. Maybe this wouldn't have ever come out, which is a wild thing to think about because it just so much of this was built to enable abuse.

So I'm curious, after gathering enough bravery to step forward, now they've got to go through all of this heavy, heavy process in which they're the victims and they're being further victimized. So they're literally, the victims are the bad guys when they're coming into this type of environment.

Was there ever a situation where the victim had to face the accused? Yeah, yeah. And not only was there situations of that happening, that was the method, that was a part of the process.

So one of the excerpts, and I'll just read it directly, is so it says that the investigation revealed that many victims were subjected to Matthew 18 meetings where they were pressured into face-to-face confrontations with their accusers to determine who is lying.

These meetings not only compounded the emotional distress of the victims, but also undermined the integrity of the investigation process. Many victims felt intimidated and coerced, which led to further trauma and a sense of injustice.

As a result, the credibility of the testimonies collected during this meeting were compromised. So that excerpt, and I know very specifically, like my friend Gray should, this is exactly what happened to her. She was abused.

She told the only people she knew to tell, which was her leadership and her community. She told them about what happened. And then... there became this sort of interrogation process, especially when she used the R word, because when you use the R word, it becomes more complicated because you can't dance around that as much.

And so they tried to force her to not say that word, to try to talk about it as sexual indiscretion or something like that, because that's something that you can kind of contextualize. But the R word is a crime and needs to be dealt with in a very specific type of way.

So not only was she sort of intimidating course to not say that word, but she also then was forced

to face her abuser. And in this setting where it was sort of like, hey, these two stories aren't making sense, one of you must be lying. And so to treat the victim like their liars, I understand that you have to like do some due process, but that's what the police are for.

Like if there's a situation of abuse, you're not equipped for this. These people aren't equipped for this, like even from a wisdom perspective, go to the police, send her to individuals who are equipped for this, but that's not, that wasn't their mentality, and it wasn't out of ignorance.

It was out of, we do not want any of these stories ever getting out, because our main dude is doing all of these things. And plus they, I don't know whether they just believed in their own heads that sexual abuse isn't real and that it doesn't matter.

And it baffles me how they excused it in their own heads and how they sleep at night. I genuinely have no idea, but this was a distinct pattern that happened. Well, this is a heavy, heavy subject.

This is not something that, I don't think we've covered anything to this level. We have had stories of abuse, like I said, we just had one last Friday. We have one upcoming, I think next month, if I remember right, but we've had stories of abuse, but the scale and the scope of this is just unbelievable.

That many people coming forward, and they're having to face them to even have their voices heard. It's just mind-boggling that they've allowed this to happen. But, like we've been talking about, this is matching the pattern.

This is what happens whenever you give somebody too much authority, too much control. And all of the stems from the same foundation that we've been trying to expose with not only I hop KC, but many of these other groups.

This is wrong. I'm just gonna say it like that, this is wrong. But thank you for doing this. I can't imagine how much courage it would have taken for you to do it, knowing that your mother is part of this.

And all of the work that you put into to get us to this point, thank you so much for it. Yeah, absolutely, and thank you, John. for everything that you've done and giving a platform for me and others to talk about

the abuse that we've either experienced or seen. I think it's so important. It is. Well, if you've enjoyed the show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, Read Weaponized Religion, from Christian Identity to the NAR, Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.