NBC News uncovered a 50-year pattern of sex abuse, silence and cover-up in the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination. A children’s pastor was caught filming girls in a church bathroom in Arkansas. Elders suspended him for a few weeks. In Illinois, a preacher was accused of sexually abusing children. Church leaders sent him to therapy rather than call police. In California, a worship minister went to prison for molesting boys. His congregation threw him a party when he returned. All of these men remained in ministry in the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination. All...

Boy Scouts, which this year rebranded as Scouting America, was facing nearly 300 abuse lawsuits when it filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware in February 2020. The bankruptcy came after several states passed laws allowing adults to file previously time-barred lawsuits against their childhood abusers and negligent institutions. The 115-year-old nonprofit said it anticipated at least 1,700 abuse claims when it entered Chapter 11, but an aggressive blitz of law firm advertising and publicity brought an avalanche of claims. Within a few months, the number of alleged victims topped more than 80,000, though not all the claims would end...

Jess Michaels & Jennifer Freeman join The Lead

With support from World Without Exploitation, Liz Stein and more than 20 survivors led a powerful call on Capitol Hill for the release of the Epstein files and real accountability. Earlier this summer, I sat with Liz Stein at a kitchen table in Brooklyn. A survivor of abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, she was exhausted, and she was angry. A storm of media coverage of the Department of Justice’s interview of Maxwell left her surrounded by photos of her abusers, who had been enabled by the system so many times. When news came that Maxwell had been transferred...

The family of Virginia Giuffre — one of the women who accused Jeffrey Epstein of sex trafficking and who died by suicide earlier this year — said Thursday that she would have wanted documents related to the disgraced financier to be made public, as the Trump administration faces mounting pressure around the case. Amanda Roberts, Giuffre’s sister-in-law, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” that in one of their last conversations, Giuffre called for the release of the documents. “She wanted the world to know what they’ve done to her and so many other survivors, and she had...

A bill to stop the use of nondisclosure agreements to prevent sexual abuse victims from telling their stories has advanced in the Texas legislature. On March 19, the Texas House Committee on Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence voted unanimously to report House Bill 748 favorably to the full House of Representatives and recommend passage. The bill, authored by Rep. Jeff Leach (R-Plano), is called “Trey’s Law” after Trey Carlock, a sexual abuse victim of Kanakuk Kamps’ employee Peter Newman. Carlock died by suicide after suffering in silence due to an NDA. His sister Elizabeth Carlock Phillips spoke to...

A group of women from across the country have joined a "club" they never wanted to belong to, nor did they ask to join. They are survivors of childhood sexual abuse allegedly perpetrated by International House of Prayer founder Mike Bickle and members of his staff. They say the systematic grooming and abuse spans decades and includes dozens of women and men. IHOPKC abuse survivor, known as Gracia, says, "Over 100 women have confided in me, sharing firsthand accounts of rampant sexual abuse at IHOPKC and the systemic cover-ups that enabled it." They, along with other...

One by one, the speakers walked up to the small table early Wednesday, then sat and faced the panel of lawmakers in front of them. Several came from across the country — Michigan, Minnesota, Tennessee and Texas. For some, it was their first time in the Missouri Capitol building. They came to testify in support of two bills under consideration by Missouri lawmakers dealing with child sexual abuse. One would eliminate the statute of limitations in lawsuits involving child sex abuse. The other would prohibit the use of non-disclosure agreements in child sex abuse settlements. But the...

In August 2019, my little brother’s obituary was published in The Dallas Morning News. My family decided to mention he was a Kanakuk Kamps abuse survivor at the end of the obit. But, the truth is, he didn’t survive. Trey was a child sexual abuse victim silenced to his grave by Kanakuk Ministries, a summer camp conglomerate based in southwest Missouri popular among Texans. I used to refer to him as a “survivor,” but he didn’t survive, so now I refer to him as a victim, and I’m trying my best to be his voice. Trey endured a decade...

A nondisclosure agreement could have kept Cindy Clemishire from speaking out against former North Texas pastor Robert Morris. Cindy Clemishire was 12 years old when a traveling evangelist began to sexually abuse her in the 1980s. He made her promise not to tell anyone about it. “The first time he made the premeditated decision to violate and defile my purity, he told me … 'You can never tell anyone, because it will ruin everything,’” Clemishire recounted to a Texas House panel Wednesday morning as the lawmakers heard testimony for a bill proposing to ban nondisclosure agreements in sex...