MAGA youth pastor charged with coercing minors to have sex with him
Published By admin with Comments 0
A MAGA youth pastor favored by the evangelist Jerry Falwell Jr has been charged with coercing minors to have sex with him and send him pornographic images.
Zachary Radcliff, 29, of Saline in Michigan, is accused of a string of offenses relating to sexually abusive activity going back as far as 2011, according to state police.
The alleged victims were aged between 12 and 17 at the time, Michigan State Police said.
Radcliff was the music and youth pastor at Oakwood Church in Ypsilanti, Washtenaw County, and once performed a song he wrote titled “I’ll Stand ”at Liberty University in 2019 during the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Falwell, who was president of the school at the time, praised Radcliff’s performance at the time. “I believe this song will become to this generation what Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the USA’ was during the Reagan years,” Falwell said in a press release, which has since been deleted but is visible on a web archive platform.
Radcliff was charged over the weekend with four counts of child abuse and one count of criminal sexual conduct in the first degree. He was arraigned on several other charges, including criminal sexual conduct and charges relating to child sexually abusive material, police said in a statement.
Police said they were first made aware of Radcliff’s alleged crimes on October 2 and that they had found multiple victims.
Content retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/youth-pastor-charges-michigan-zachary-radcliff-b2634209.html.
