Sexual Abuse, Hazing, Intimidation: How the Sins of a Televangelist Power Couple Threatened to Destroy a Christian Media Empire
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In 2004, the men of the inner circle watched in approval as twenty-year-old Brittany Crouch chugged expensive wine from an oversized glass. Around them, the crowd buzzed at Del Frisco’s, the white-tablecloth steakhouse in midtown Manhattan populated by Wall Street guys wearing expensive suits and tourists spending a few hundred dollars pretheater.
Brittany’s rite of passage—not dissimilar to a fraternity hazing—was supervised by her grandfather, Paul Crouch Sr. (known to all as “the Godfather”), his handlers, and numerous powerful officials of Trinity Christian Center, the sprawling evangelical church they presided over. Brittany was being indoctrinated into the family business. In 1973, long before she was born, Paul and his wife, Jan, had founded the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), a small Christian TV station in southern California. In the five decades since, TBN has become the world’s largest international Christian-based TV network.
“The network’s attorney was Italian, so they made this little club where Paul Crouch was the Pope,” says a family member who has knowledge of the ritual and who asked to remain anonymous. “They made little nicknames for everybody.”
According to an onlooker, after the men cheered her on, Brittany was encouraged to vomit in the women’s room. When she returned to the table, the fuzzy lights of Sixth Avenue blazing outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, she was no longer a young woman watching the family business from the sidelines.
On its website, TBN claims to be the “world’s largest faith-based Christian-televison network” and “America’s Most Watched Faith Channel.” Its stated goal is to “use every available means to reach as many individuals and families as possible.” TBN broadcasts through more than 80 satellites worldwide and reaches more than 100 million households in the United States.
In 2004—around the same time that Brittany Crouch was initiated in New York—the family relations behind the TBN empire started to crack in ways that could never be fully repaired. First, public reports surfaced accusing Paul Crouch Sr., who was by then a millionaire many times over, of sexual harassment, and spread among the Christian community of which he had long been a pillar.
A few years later came another, even darker allegation: that Brittany’s younger sister, Carra, had been raped at age thirteen by a TBN employee at a TBN event—and that Jan Crouch, Carra’s own grandmother, blamed her for this.
Read more https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a69678093/trinity-broadcasting-company/
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