The Survivor Who Didn't (Jennifer's Story)

Jennifer Lyell is dead. But the battle over her story is not. 

In this second episode of The Silenced Truth, host Carolyn McCulley traces the devastating arc of Jennifer’s life—from a vulnerable childhood in southern Illinois to rising as one of the highest-ranking female executives in the Southern Baptist Convention—and the price she paid for telling the truth about sexual abuse inside the denomination she once loved. 

This episode examines how disclosing sexual abuse can actually be more harmful than the physical violation itself. Jennifer's story follows the six most explosive years of the reckoning within the Southern Baptist Convention and includes interviews with Rachael Denhollander and Dr. Albert Mohler. 

Our executive producer is Rachael Berglund. 

• The Silenced Truth is a project of the Safe to Speak Initiative. 
• Join our Patreon community to advocate for the legal protections that survivors need to safely disclose their experiences. 
• To support the production of this show, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Southern Documentary Fund. 

FOR FURTHER CONTEXT

The Wrath of God Poured Out — The Humiliation of the Southern Baptist Convention

Al Mohler says he was wrong about C.J. Mahaney

Statement from R. Albert Mohler Jr. on Sovereign Grace Churches

ERLC panel on sexual abuse at the SBC19 convention in Birmingham

Ex-SBTS prof. accused of 'grooming' former student in decade-long abusive relationship

The web archive of Jennifer Lyell’s public statements website

A statement from Baptist Press

By What Standard trailer

Motion to Investigate the SBC Executive Committee: Full Text

Southern Baptists’ #MeToo Moment

https://x.com/megbasham/status/1998922448184782854

https://heidelblog.net/2020/01/the-smear-was-intentional

Hunt v. Southern Baptist Convention et al summary judgment

Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force Updates

The Silenced Truth is a project of the Safe to Speak Initiative and is a production of Citygate Communications. It is fiscally sponsored by the Southern Documentary Fund.

Transcript

00:00:00] Carolyn McCulley: Jennifer Lyell is dead, and yet her life remains a hotly contested political and religious institutional football. Was she used to destroy a righteous political movement within the Southern Baptist Convention or did her complex and tragic life story highlight the perils that sexual abuse survivors face whenever they disclose what happened to them?

[00:00:25] Jennifer Lyell: One of the things that people need to understand is that when someone comes forward and they make the public disclosure that they have been the victim of sexual violence, unless they have some official authoritative declaration, whether that be a criminal conviction or an institution that immediately corroborates very clearly, then that individual will have no choice but to be perpetually stuck on the witness stand, defending the facts of their allegations to anyone in the public who wants to make an accusation or question. There's no end to the testifying. There's no end to bearing witness. There was no way for me to anticipate all of the loss that would come from me simply telling the truth.

[00:01:31 Carolyn McCulley: That's Jennifer Lyell from an interview recorded in October 2021. What neither of us knew then was that the losses because of her disclosures were about to get worse. Much worse. I'm Carolyn McCulley, and this is The Silenced Truth Podcast, a project of the Safe to Speak Initiative. It is an audio documentary series that examines the cost survivors pay for their disclosure of sexual abuse and the price faith-based groups are willing to pay to protect their institutions, instead of confronting and removing their predators.

Jennifer grew up in southern Illinois. She became a Christian during a Billy Graham crusade in St. Louis in the late nineties when she was just 20 years old. At that time, she had been living in her car for six months to save up money for an apartment, a goal she had just attained. 

[00:02:32] Jennifer Lyell: I grew up in a tiny town. 3,900 people. A four-way stop. A Dairy Queen, a local family-owned pizza place, one breakfast cafe, also locally owned. And historically it had been a coal mining town. And you know, there were stories of when my grandparents were young that there was a movie theater, and a town pool, and there were all these things.

And then Illinois passed the Clean Air Act and most of the mines shut down. And most of the men in town, most of my friends' dads lost their jobs. And when I was growing up, certainly drugs were incredibly prevalent. It, it was an area that was incredibly economically depressed. And my mom left whenever I was an infant.

I was raised by my dad and ultimately a stepmother. And by no means could someone describe the circumstances as, you know, stable. We moved around a lot. We had a house, didn't have a house. We're staying with friends. Weren't staying with friends, house burned down twice. I experienced so much confusion and so much instability before I became a Christian that the reason once I was a Christian that I turned to the Southern Baptist Convention was because of the strength of the convictions. The strength that said, we know what's true and we're going to walk by it. 

What I didn't know until it was too late was that that only applied to certain theological beliefs. And if there's anything devastating about my circumstances, it's that everything has become a full circle and I'm right back.

Every single thing that I experienced outside of the church as a child who by any statistic would've been measured as vulnerable—every negative, harmful, difficult thing I experienced outside the church, I have experienced inside the church 

[00:04:54] Carolyn McCulley: The year that Jennifer became a Christian, the Southern Baptist Convention, usually just called the SBC for short, updated its official statement of faith for the first time in 35 years.

[00:05:06] Adrian Rogers: Uh, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and, uh, we bring this report gladly today, and I'm very pleased to release this report, uh, and recommend it, uh, to the Southern Baptist Convention. 

[00:05:19] Carolyn McCulley: The addition called for a wife to quote, “submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” Two years later, the SBC further amended the document to limit the office of pastor only to men.

This gender hierarchy was known as complementarianism, and it was one of the key theological distinctives of the 20-year-old Conservative Resurgence within the SBC. And side note here, if you want to know more, episode one of The Silenced Truth provides more of this history. 

This was the Christian denominational identity that Jennifer chose, and initially she was all in.

After graduating college, Jennifer wanted to prepare for a career in ministry or missions. So she applied to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, usually called Southern Seminary or SBTS for short. Upon graduation from seminary with her Master of Divinity, she became an acquisitions editor at a Christian book publisher called Moody Publishing.

Two years later, she was hired by LifeWay Christian Resources, the SBC's publishing arm. Within a few years of that, she was promoted to vice president of book publishing and merchandising, managing a $190 million business. She also used her leadership skills to start a missions organization called Reaching and Teaching International, where she was a volunteer chief operating officer.

She started this organization with a man who had been her missions professor from Southern Seminary, David Sills. 

[00:06:47] Jennifer Lyell: I've said to people that I think that perhaps no one else in my lifetime has been as well supported and as encouraged by key leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention. I have had incredible opportunities.

I have been given so much by the denomination of which I'm a part, but I have also had more taken than really anyone else I know. And that is because while in seminary, in the context of a relationship with a professor's entire family, that was very much one of, sort of, an adopted family, which was not rare to have in seminary for professors to have those sorts of relationships between their family and students, I experienced repeated sexual assaults over the course of many years—and those assaults were happening simultaneously to what was also a very real relationship with that whole family. Family members in large did not know that was happening. And it was also while I was growing in opportunities and influence within the denomination myself and throughout my career, which made not only the circumstances more confusing, but it certainly made me more aware of how complicated it would be for me to ever tell.

But it was the complication of the circumstances that he created, that the professor was able to actually exploit to keep me tied up in it. And then so much of what I feared would happen if I told didn't happen, but things I never could have expected that were devastating in their own ways did happen.

[00:09:09] Carolyn McCulley: Jennifer's world cracked open in January 2018 when another sexual abuse survivor burst onto the national consciousness. 

[00:09:16] Inside Edition Reporter: Rachael Denhollander is being hailed a hero. If it wasn't for Rachael, Dr. Larry Nassar might still be abusing young girls today. 

[00:09:24] Rachael Denhollander: Larry is a hardened and determined sexual predator. I know this firsthand.

[00:09:29] Inside Edition Reporter: Rachael was 15 when Nassar assaulted her in 2001. The memory she says haunted her, so she spent years researching Nassar’s so-called treatments and gathering evidence. She even became a lawyer. Then in September 2016, she told her story to the Indianapolis Star newspaper. It was the beginning of the end for Nassar.

[00:09:51] Jennifer Lyell: Rachael's work within the sports community is absolutely historical, but the first time I ever heard of Rachael was when I was sitting in my office at LifeWay Christian Resources where I was the book publisher. My boss came in with his laptop and he said, have you seen this? And he turned it around and it was YouTube video of Rachael's victim impact statement at Larry Nassar's sentencing.

[00:10:20] Rachael Denhollander: You spoke of praying for forgiveness. But Larry, if you have read the Bible you carry, you know forgiveness does not come from doing good things, as if good deeds can erase what you have done. It comes from repentance, which requires facing and acknowledging the truth about what you have done in all of its utter depravity and horror—without mitigation, without excuse, without acting as if good deeds can erase what you have seen in this courtroom today. The Bible you carry says it is better for a millstone to be thrown around your neck and you thrown into a lake than for you to make even one child stumble and you have damaged hundreds.

The Bible you speak carries a final judgment where all of God's wrath in its eternal terror is poured out on men like you. Should you ever reach the point of truly facing what you have done, the guilt will be crushing. And that is what makes the gospel of Christ so sweet because it extends grace and hope and mercy where none should be found. And it will be there for you.

I pray you experience the soul-crushing weight of guilt so that you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me, though I extend that to you as well. 

[00:11:46] Jennifer Lyell: What immediately concerned me as someone who was in the midst of my own context of dealing with abuse that I had not at that point disclosed to anyone other than my therapist, was the fact that just days after Rachael's victim impact statement, there was all of this, you know, viral social media flurry within evangelicalism that was, Hey, who is this woman? And hear this incredible testimony that she gave, where she's so clearly sharing the gospel. And her husband's a PhD student at, you know, a Southern Baptist seminary.

We've got our new evangelical star. And then I started to hear, oh wait. There's something else. 

[00:12:34] Martha MacCallum, Fox News: Rachael Denhollander became a household name earlier this year when she bravely stood in front of a packed court and television cameras detailing the abuse she suffered from former USA gymnastics team doctor, Larry Nassar.

Rachael was the very first woman to go public with her accusations and the final woman to make her victim impact statement. Now she's taking on the evangelical community for sweeping accusations within their own ranks under the rug. 

[00:13:04] Carolyn McCulley: I well remember that pivot that Rachael made, because she was talking about my former church and employer.

[00:13:11] Trace Gallagher: Sovereign Grace is a massive Protestant network with 70 churches in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. In 2012, a lawsuit was filed against the organization alleging a years-long pattern of child sexual abuse from church leaders and other employees. The suit also claimed that everyone from Sovereign Grace pastors to President CJ Mahaney were complicit in covering up the abuse by pressuring alleged victims to forgive their abusers and discouraging them from going to police.

Sovereign Grace denied the accusations and the suit was dismissed in 2014, mostly because of statute of limitations, though a former church youth leader was convicted in a separate case. 

And that's where Rachael Denhollander comes in. Though she is not a member of Sovereign Grace, Denhollander believes her church in Kentucky helped restore President CJ Mahaney to his position. But she acknowledges that getting Evangelical Christians to speak out against their own is a tall order. Sovereign  Grace responded that “she is mistaken in her accusations made against Sovereign Grace churches and CJ Mahaney.”

Rachael Denhollander maintains the critical evidence was never heard in court, and she's now fighting to have Sovereign Grace provide answers about their handling of the allegations. 

[00:14:29] Carolyn McCulley: At one point, I'd worked for Sovereign Grace and had been a member of two of its churches.

I had left Sovereign Grace a decade earlier because I'd seen and experienced the disconnect between what was taught and what actually happened in that church context. The story of Sovereign Grace Ministries is a convoluted and complicated one but suffice it to say that I could see the high-control, high-authority culture that bred a lot of bad fruit.

I just didn't know how bad it was until years later when the sexual abuse scandal broke. 

[00:15:01] Trillia Newbell: Today on the podcast we have Jennifer Lyell. She's the Vice President of Book Merchandising and Publishing for LifeWay Christian Resources. Jennifer and I have been laughing…

[00:15:13] Carolyn McCulley: Book publishing is how I first got to know Jennifer.

She was the editor for two of my three books, and we became good friends. Through that connection, we had both become Christians as adults. So many of its cultural customs were new to us, and our awkward attempts to fit in were a constant source of amusement for us. We had so many good belly laughs together.

That's a side of Jennifer that wasn't captured for this podcast, and that's a shame because I have countless comical memories of our adventures together. But no one was laughing on May 18th, 2018, when Jennifer decided to disclose her abuse to her boss at LifeWay and then to Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Seminary.

[00:15:57] Albert Mohler: I didn't have any idea that Jennifer would ever come to me and to Southern Seminary with what was brought to us on that day. And so that day began pretty much like any other day, but it didn't stay that way. So what I received first was a contact from LifeWay telling me, me that Jennifer wanted to speak to me and to share some information with me.

And I don't remember exactly all that I was told, other than it was clear that this was going to be related to some kind of sexual abuse. And that Jennifer had reached the point where she wanted to have this conversation. I knew enough to make certain that Jennifer was safe to be able to have the conversation.

I wanted someone else to be there. So I called for Adam Greenway, who was then the dean of the Billy Graham School. And so that means that evidently I had to know that school was implied—a faculty member of that school. And Jennifer shared with us the story. 

And I can first say that there is an immediate moral revulsion that kind of washes over one in that context. But there was the immediate ring of two or three issues. First of all, I knew Jennifer, knew who she was. I understood what this meant for her to call. Secondly, there was specificity that meant that this was a true or false question. There was, there's the specificity. And third, there was the sense of urgency because he was on our faculty.

And so I understood what was at stake, at least at that point. And so we had that conversation, prayed with Jennifer, and then we had to get to work and it was a complicated situation. Professor was out of the country at the moment. We had to do a lot of pretty instant investigation, had to get help. And that help meant that as the leader of the institution, I had to pull together the kinds of legal and other responses we needed to be ready, and we were ready.

But I want to make one thing clear, and this is just absolutely necessary, and this is a part of what we're dealing with in the SBC right now. It was sexual abuse. It was a direct accusation in specific terms of sexual abuse, of abusive behavior, and thus, that is Southern Seminary's responsibility. When a report like that comes, that's my responsibility.

It's the first time in all the years I've been at Southern there's been a report of anything like that. And I pray to God I never receive such a call again. But I understood at the time the responsibility is to deal with a credible, urgent report of sexual abuse. 

[00:18:56] Carolyn McCulley: Jennifer's disclosure was in May 2018.

If you heard episode one of The Silenced Truth you might recall this was also when Paige Patterson, a major SBC leader, and one of the architects of the Conservative Resurgence, was fired from his position at another SBC seminary for the way he handled a student rape case and also for his counsel to a domestic violence victim to go back to her husband and submit to him.

There were other high-profile resignations around this time as well, which led Mohler to write an article titled, “The Wrath of God Poured Out: The Humiliation of the Southern Baptist Convention.” In that piece, he said, quote, “The SBC was in the midst of its own horrifying #MeToo moment.”

He wrote, quote, we thought that this was a Roman Catholic problem.The unbiblical requirement of priestly celibacy, the organized conspiracy of silence within the hierarchy helped to explain the cesspool of child sexual abuse that has robbed the Roman Catholic Church of so much of its moral authority. When people said that Evangelicals had a similar crisis coming, it didn't seem plausible—even to me. I have been president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for 25 years. I did not see this coming. I was wrong. The judgment of God has come.”

The same day that Mohler penned this piece, he confronted David Sills about Jennifer's abuse disclosure. The judgment of God was a lot more visceral to Mohler than most people knew at the time, which is likely why he framed it this way:

Quote: “The #MeToo Moment has come to American Evangelicals. This moment has come to some of my friends and brothers in Christ. This moment has come to me, and I'm called to deal with it as a Christian, as a minister of the gospel, as a seminarian college president, and as a public leader. I pray that I will lead rightly.”

[00:20:53] Albert Mohler: I knew of Rachael simply because of the scandal with Dr. Larry Nassar, and so I knew of her role and knew of the fact that her husband was a student at the seminary, and so there was an immediate connection. I ended up having a conversation with Rachael and Jacob that was very transformative. And I will simply say it was at Rachael's initiative, but she confronted me with some, I'll simply say, truth and evidence that required me to rethink institutional responsibility, Southern Baptist Convention responsibility, my personal responsibility in dealing with these issues.

I have found Rachael to be incredibly helpful in helping me and others to understand how rightly to think about and how rightly to act in not just response, but proactively to the challenge of protecting and advocating for and investigating and dealing responsibly when matters do arise, when abuse becomes evident and visible.

[00:22:06] Carolyn McCulley: This is where we have to return briefly to the Sovereign Grace story. Mohler had co-founded a very large pastor's conference with CJ Mahaney and two other pastors called Together for the Gospel. After the class action lawsuit brought by survivors against Sovereign Grace was dismissed in 2013, Mohler publicly defended Mahaney. But by 2018 he had changed his mind.

[00:22:29] Albert Mohler: I had long called for a third-party investigation when it came to Sovereign Grace Ministries and had frankly been assured that it had happened. With documentation of the who, the what, and the where—and as an independent third-party investigation. Rachael challenged me on whether what had been produced there was an independent third-party investigation of the matters that were central to the question. And when I pressed a bit further, it became clear to me it was not what I thought it had been. And, uh, there was not going to be an independent third-party investigation. There was not a concern for, and was a rejection of, the idea that some kind of external vindication was necessary.

And at that point, I had to change my relationship. I, I had to make some decisions. I can't make decisions for another ministry, but I have to make decisions based upon what I believe is my responsibility as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Boyce College. And that became pretty clarified.

[00:23:36] Carolyn McCulley: But back to the crisis on the seminary campus. Only if you were skilled in the high art of reading between the Baptist lines would you have had a hint of what was going on when, a few weeks later, the SBC publication Baptist Press reported the resignations of two seminary professors. The first was Christian George at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the second, David Sills at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The publication reported that George's resignation was quote, “due to a personal moral failing,” which is nearly always the code for sexual misconduct. As for Sills, the publication said that Mohler had “received the resignation of Dr. David Sills from the Southern Seminary faculty on May 23rd, 2018.

“Southern Seminary is committed to the highest standards of both principle and policy. Our policies and procedures are clear and are consistently applied because this is a personnel matter. We cannot comment further.”

Mohler may have thought the judgment of God had come for the SBC in May of 2018, but there were many more revelations that had yet to come. 

Nine months later on February 10th, 2019, the Houston Chronicle published the first article in its bombshell “Abuse of Faith” investigative series, exposing decades of sexual abuse in SBC churches.

[00:25:01] WLKY News Reporter: The headline read 20 years, 700 victims, Southern Baptist Sexual Abuse Spreads as Leaders Resist Reforms. That was an investigative story published by the Houston Chronicle. 

[00:25:14] Carolyn McCulley: The next day, Jennifer learned that Sills had been appointed as a missionary by another organization. That's when she decided to go public with her disclosure.

[00:25:23] Jennifer Lyell: The incredible irony of the Houston Chronicle investigation on Abuse of Faith was that within days of those pieces releasing, I was in communication with the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention regarding the details of my soon-to-be-public disclosure about my own abuse case.

And certainly that wasn't planned. It just happened to be, coincidentally, the time in which that decision came. And so at a time when they were obviously in damage control, right? And trying to figure out how to respond to this and the public scrutiny on them, rightly so. Even as they made denials about those stories reflecting the reality of the culture or the system, when given my story, my statement with corroborated statements from two Southern Baptist entities who were in positions of authority over the case, and two Southern Baptist churches all independently coming to the same conclusion, the executive committee instead directly rewrote my story and maliciously reported it as a consensual affair. And in doing so, exposed me to unbearable and truly, to this day, unending harassment and additional abuse. If I had known that agreeing to come forward publicly would cause more broad destruction in my life than the actual abuse had, there is no way that I would have done that. 

[00:27:29] Carolyn McCulley: Baptist Press published this article on March 8th, 2019. The negative blowback to Jennifer on social media was immediate, so she raced to post online the exact statement she'd given to Baptist Press, in an attempt to provide the correct allegation and specific details that the Baptist Press had not published.

In that statement, she wrote that what she had reported was that she had been sexually abused by one of her seminary professors, and that he had first sexually acted against her on a mission trip in 2004, a pattern that continued and escalated for more than a decade following that trip. Then she provided further details:

“The reason that a professor was able to continue grooming and taking advantage of his student was because I became like part of his family. This wasn't by accident. I believe it was by design. Having known that I experienced sexual abuse growing up, Dr. Sills assured me that the first incidents that happened on that mission trip weren't really my fault, as I naturally felt, even though I'd not initiated them and was shocked as the actions took place. He explained they were because of what happened to me when I was a child.

He said that he could fix it by me becoming part of his family, and then once I was part of his family, that sort of thing would never happen again. I now wonder if the only reason that a family relationship was ever presented as an option was to ensure I wouldn't tell what had happened in those first instances.

A family relationship did develop over the years. I spent weekends with them. My holidays with them became an aunt to their grandchildren, and their grown children became like siblings to me.”

She concluded with her motivation for disclosing: “It is my hope that my story, one in which an SBC entity and its leaders acted swiftly and justly to remove an abuser, but in which the same individual was also in a ministry position only months later, will also help to illustrate the need for some form of a reporting tool that can ensure that those who have victimized others from a ministry position are unable to ever do so again. The only way I know how to do that is to come forward myself. So this is my way of doing just that. May God be glorified.” 

[00:29:46] Phillip Bethancourt: Hey, good evening, friends. We're so grateful for you to join us tonight. If you haven't had a chance to make a connection to the ERLC, my name is Phillip Bethancourt. I serve as our executive vice president, and tonight I'm going to be leading our conversation.

On sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention. And as we get started, I'd just like to get a sense for the room by a show of hands, for how many of you, is this your first Southern Baptist Convention? Will you raise your hands? Wow. Alright. 

[00:30:11] Carolyn McCulley: A few months later, in June, the 2019 SBC annual meeting was held in Birmingham, Alabama.

The SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, usually called ERLC for short, hosted a special panel on sexual abuse the day before the convention, one to which Rachael had been invited to speak, It was the first time that she'd been part of an SBC event and she didn't mince words. 

[00:30:36] Rachael Denhollander: When you see the survivor community, many of them even outside the SBC tomorrow, what you need to understand is that these men and women have been pleading with the church to hear their voices for decades, and they have been shut out over and over and over again in the name of Christ.

Yes, that's what the SBC has done to these survivors. You need to understand the perspective that they come from. You need to feel the grief and the betrayal and the harm and the hurt that they have felt. And when you do that, we can start talking about the range of emotion in the survivor community.

There is a lot of skepticism, and I think some of it is justified because the survivor community is used to hearing a lot of words. We are used to hearing abuse is terrible. We're used to hearing placations about what we have experienced. What we're not used to seeing is action. What we're not used to seeing is repentance.

And what we're doing up here on this stage is a start. But these are words. Where the rubber is going to meet the road is what the SBC does tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. 

[00:31:47] Carolyn McCulley: Rachael's comment about the survivors outside of the SBC meeting referred to an upcoming planned protest by dozens of survivors during the convention.

[00:31:56 ] CBS 42 Anchor: They spent the evening protesting. Tonight, survivors of sexual abuse rallied outside the Southern Baptist Convention as part of a call to action here in Birmingham. This comes after SBC leaders voted to make changes to their bylaws when it comes to abuse. CBS 42 News reporter Michael Clark tells us why some victims say even more needs to be done.

[00:32:50] Rachael Denhollander: I first heard Jen's story when Dr. Mohler reached out and said, Hey, we've got this incident, you know, I want to make sure I handle this well. This is what I think I need to do, but I want to double check that 'cause I know I'm not an expert. And he told me just a little bit, protected her confidentiality. I didn't know who she was. And then, you know, eventually when she published her statement and came forward, I was aware of her identity. But we didn't meet in person until the SBC's convention in Birmingham in 2019. 

[00:33:14] Carolyn McCulley: Jennifer later described her experience at the 2019 Convention as “being faced with threats and harassment from the moment I arrived. Notably, I was pulled out of my chair at a convention event by a woman who threatened me while physically restraining me. Someone shouted ‘whore’ at me while I was walking down the convention hall, as well as while I was looking for a seat during the President's sermon. Several other strangers made other disparaging comments to me, including pastors, as well as some sexual abuse survivors who understood me to be an ‘adultress’ using their victimization to avoid consequences for my sin.”

This is what was going on when Rachael first met Jennifer at the convention. Ironically, this meeting took place in a guarded safe room where Jennifer and another survivor had been placed before the sexual abuse panel even started, due to the fact that the harassment had become so bad for both of them.

In an interview recorded in October, 2021, Rachael described this scene: 

[00:34:16] Rachael Denhollander: Jen and I were in the room and we were there with another survivor, Megan Lively, and what was so striking about that is that we had to be there for Jen and Megan's protection because both of them had spoken out against key SBC leaders.

Both of them had been subjected—Jen in particular—to such intense harassment and just vitriolic and dangerous conduct, both online and in person, and such intensive patterns of intimidation that we actually had to be brought to a safe room, that they had to be escorted by people whose job was to keep them safe and to run interference for them because there was so much vitriol directed at Jen and at these survivors who had dared to speak up.

The fact that you could be at a Christian conference and have to be under protection should be galling to us in the highest degree. 

[00:35:05] Jennifer Lyell: Initially, when I first disclosed, I wanted to use the language of abuse, this more general, generic term. I felt that I don't want to have to give details to the public that no one deserves to have and no one needs to have.

But what I found was that by not doing so, people used the lack of specificity against me. And that the only way it seems that I can ever stop the retaliatory attacks is to give so much specificity that people become, like, aghast with the reality of what physically was done to me. But that can't be best. It certainly isn't for me. And yet, I don't know another way. Because what I know in my case is the reason I did not report the first sexual assault against me. Well, I was first of all, out of the country under the individual's authority when it happened. I was in a place where I didn't have a car or I didn't know the language. I don't think logistically I could have, frankly at that time. 

But when I got back to the United States, I do distinctly remember being in the car on the way home from the airport, thinking of what had happened, knowing it was a crime, knowing it was sexual assault. I was very confused by how the professor had explained it away and what it meant in the context of the church.

But I legally knew what it was, and yet there were two reasons I didn't report. The first was because of the theological confusion that he introduced in that moment, drawing on my background and my own sense of vulnerability. But the second, I think, the reality that anyone really informed deals with as it relates to reporting sexual abuse, and that is the raw statistics.

So according to RAINN, which is respected as the foremost organization for gathering these statistics of those who report sexual assaults, 310 out of a thousand report, but there's only 50 arrests. And then you go, well, okay, but that's on the person for not reporting. Well, why don't we report? Well first of all, if someone beats you up, yes, they're going to take pictures, they're going to perhaps look at your wound, you might have to go to the hospital. That is a far cry from the experience of a rape kit and the experience of a rape kit, right after being assaulted.

[00:37:35] Carolyn McCulley: In July 2019, one month after the SBC's convention gathering, the conservative Founders Ministries released a four-minute fundraising trailer for their upcoming short film that intended to argue that the SBC was compromising biblical authority through social justice advocacy, critical race theory, and egalitarianism, or equal roles for men and women in the church and home.

The trailer became immediately controversial for how it portrayed Rachael. It featured narration about the principalities and powers that the Apostle Paul describes in Ephesians 6—a reference to demonic forces—while simultaneously cutting to distorted and stylized footage of Rachael speaking at the ERLC panel on sexual abuse just the month before. The visual juxtaposition strongly implied that Rachael's advocacy work was representative of the spiritual dark forces attacking the church. 

[00:38:31] Film trailer: We're always having, uh, the powers, the spiritual powers, and principalities exert pressure on us. That's not new. 

[00:38:40] Carolyn McCulley: There was an immediate uproar. Several leaders who were shown in the trailer asked to be removed from the project entirely.

Three Founders Ministries board members resigned. So Founders president Tom Ascol posted a lengthy statement that said, in part: “Some expressed concerns about a one-to-two second clip of Rachael Denhollander, accusing us of presenting her as demonic. Certainly, no one at Founders Ministries believes that, and we did not foresee people taking it that way. That was not our intention, and admittedly not our wisest editing moment. We regret the pain and confusion we caused by this unwise alignment of image and idea.”

Founders then revised the trailer to remove Rachael's image. 

I remember at the time thinking that, as a film editor myself, this was no accidental alignment of footage. It was a visual effect that took some deliberate effort to achieve. Plus, every editor knows that in the craft of editing, your visuals are supposed to either support or add subtext to the audio. Things just don't accidentally show up on your editing timeline. It was an unwise alignment of image and idea for sure, but it was a deliberate one.

Five months later, the editor, David Shannon, who goes by the name Chocolate Knox, admitted on a December 17th, 2019, podcast that this edit was indeed intentional to illustrate what was being said.

[00:40:37] Jennifer Lyell: People tend to see Rachael first as the advocate, as the fighter. And when they have anything to be defensive about or they feel threatened in any way, they're very quick to respond to her strength and her capacity and what she brings to the table. But I really wish that every time someone hears about Rachael Denhollander that they would be reminded that she is known because she is a survivor. She's known because she has gone through this. She is going through this. People think that the case with Larry Nassar who abused her and hundreds of other gymnasts that got resolved, that’s not resolved. Rachael continues to have to work and advocate and deal with the anniversaries and dates, his appeals, all of that. She is still walking through her own trauma and that is the trauma of Nassar’s abuse. On top of the fact that she was sexually abused as a very small child in the local church. 

[00:41:45] Phillip Bethancourt: Let me welcome you to this important conversation we're about to have on sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention. We had an opportunity … 

[00:41:51] Carolyn McCulley: Following the ERLC panel at the Birmingham convention, Rachael was invited to speak at the next ERLC event later that fall, focused on the SBC's sexual abuse crisis, called the Caring Well Conference. It was to be a conversation with ERLC president Russell Moore.

[00:42:08] Jennifer Lyell: Rachael had been wanting to correct the inaccuracies that the Southern Baptist Convention had created about my abuse case for months, and she was going to be speaking at the Caring Well Conference that the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission was holding and it was going to be live-streamed to churches all across the country. And the crazy thing is that, in my professional capacity at the time, I was actually publishing the material that was being distributed through that conference. And my marketing budget was paying for the live stream of the conference. And so I knew how broadly it was going to go out. And the night before she was set to speak, Rachael called me. 

[00:42:58] Rachael Denhollander: I had been asking Jen for so long, since I had heard in June, let me tell this story. Let me help you get help. People need to know what's going on here. And she wanted so badly to not have to take that step.

She was in just a really difficult place that night. And I talked with her on the phone, said, please, please let me tell this story. Can I have your permission to let everybody know what's going on? 

[00:43:20] Jennifer Lyell: And I told her what I had told her countless times before, which was, Rachael, I'm not going to have 40,000 plus churches be disrupted by drama that comes from the press attention of you pointing out what essentially, like, 10 or 12 really bad actors have done within the SBC leadership. I knew that if there was a public awareness of conflict between me and the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, that there was no way I would be able to continue in my job because you don't stay working in Southern Baptist leadership while being in conflict with the CEO of the Southern Baptist Convention. And so that's the position it would place me in. 

But at the same time, I knew that if this could happen to me—with all of the corroboration I had from two Southern Baptist entities and two southern Baptist churches in a position of leadership within the Southern Baptist Convention where I knew virtually every single Southern Baptist leader, I had even published Dr. Floyd, who was the CEO of the Southern Baptist Convention at the time, and one of the individuals who refused to simply tell the truth and make the corrections on my story—that I was just absolutely petrified for what would happen to someone else. 

[00:44:50] Rachael Denhollander: And she said, yes, you can do that. But her one request was that I made sure that Dr. Moore was not surprised by that. So I found him and I said, I have talked to Jen and this is what I am going to do, and I just, I wanted to let him know, and of course, he didn't try to stop me at all. He knew what was coming. 

[00:45:06] Russell Moore: Well, we're honored to be joined today by Rachael Denhollander. I'm sure everybody in this room is familiar with Rachael Denhollander, and probably almost everybody watching on the live stream. 

[00:45:17] Rachael Denhollander: I entered that stage and I was just praying nonstop for a question that would give me that segue and looking for that opportunity because it needed to be told. And somebody needed to fight for her, and everybody needed that veil lifted to what the executive committee was really doing to one of their own.

Because the reality is, if you could do that to Jen Lyell, who has been the trusted confidant and the person who's handling so much of the SBC's work, people needed to realize if this could be done to our highest-paid female executive, what are we doing to all these survivors who are standing outside the door?

[00:45:53] Rachael Denhollander: Well, at the core of sexual assault, there's shame. Yeah. You know, who in this room wants to describe their most positive sexual experience in front of an audience? I imagine that would be none of you. So imagine how much worse it is to describe the worst sexual experience, to draw attention to things that you never wanted attention drawn to?

Uh, there's an intrinsic shame, uh, that goes with that. Uh, but most importantly, what we need to understand is that survivors' fear of coming forward is very, very well-founded because most of the time when they speak up, they are trampled on. And this has happened in the SBC over and over and over again.

In fact, there is a very prominent survivor, a precious friend of mine that this happened to just a year ago. Most of you know Jen Lyell. She works for LifeWay. She is one of our most treasured people in the SBC, and the work she does is incredible. Over a year ago, in order to protect the people around her and in order to keep her abuser from being able to prey on others, she came out publicly as a survivor of David Sills, a prominent professor at SBTS, and she spoke with the Baptist Press because she trusted the SBC to protect her and to handle her story well.

And instead of doing that, the Baptist Press changed the article after she saw it. They used the same language to describe her abuse that is used for consensual affairs. And a survivor of horrific predatory abuse, instead of being surrounded with love and care and support, was cast away as someone involved in a consensual affair. That happened last year to one of your own, by one of your own, including members of your executive committee. And that is to our shame. The SBC has over and over again trampled on these precious survivors, and that is why they are afraid to speak up. That fear is deserved. And it is up to you as members of the SBC to surround these survivors with care, to make sure that the truth is told, to understand what abuse looks like, so that victims like Jen are protected and cared for. 

To hold your leaders accountable to not trample on these survivors and to understand that when you do, you are meddling in matters of life and death. Because sexual assault survivors are six times more likely to suffer from PTSD, 26 more times likely to have substance abuse, and four times more likely at minimum to attempt suicide. And the extent to which they heal is directly linked to the response they receive when they speak up. And we talk all the time about how the Southern Baptist Convention is a convention that is made up of a congregation-type system where there is mutual checks and there's mutual accountability. And there's accountability to the messengers and to the members of the Southern Baptist Committee.

That's you. That is you individually in your churches, individually in your capacity. It is up to you to change the tone and the culture. It is up to you to elect people who are going to tell the truth and fight for survivors. It is up to you to surround them with care and support so that the fear of coming forward becomes no longer well-founded.

[00:49:48] Carolyn McCulley: Two days after Rachael's appearance at the Caring Well Conference, Jennifer added to her online statement about her case. She named four individuals specifically that had all been involved either in the initial inaccurate reporting or the subsequent refusal to correct the inaccuracy. She listed SBC Executive Committee CEO Ronnie Floyd, Vice President Roger “Sing” Oldham, General Counsel Augie Boto, and the Baptist Press editor Shawn Hendricks.All Jennifer wanted from Baptist Press was for them to accurately report what she had alleged. 

These two events seemed to motivate Baptist Press to finally issue a partial correction. On October 15th, they wrote: 

“Following Denhollander's comments, our staff worked diligently to reexamine Lyell's statement that she provided and all communications surrounding the original publishing of her claims. After a thorough review of what was presented to the writers and editors and discussions with those involved with its publishing, we confirm and acknowledge that our story that ran on March 8th, 2019, did not accurately communicate the allegations made by Lyell. The story in its original draft form, as submitted by the writer, clearly communicated the emotional and sexual abuse that Lyell alleged took place at the hands of David Sills as she maintained a relationship with his family.

“However, the story in its finished state omitted references to abuse and was framed as a morally inappropriate relationship. This change in language seems to have led to a general public understanding that what happened between Sills and Lyell was a consensual affair. Baptist Press ultimately failed to convey that the heart of Lyell's story was about sexual abuse by a trusted minister in a position of power at a Southern Baptist seminary.

“The story as written, made concessions to legal and policy concerns, and Sills never responded to Baptist Press’s request for comment. While we acknowledge these issues are always present in journalism; in this case, our story apparently made it easy for some to miss what should have been the main focus. For that, we are deeply sorry.”

 Then they added that they were changing their comment policy on Facebook, so that quote un-Christlike slurs” would be prevented. 

That was seven months after the initial publication. While they never got any response from Sills, they also did not publish any interviews with other individuals—like Mohler—who could have said that Jennifer brought an allegation of assault and not an affair. This possibly could have changed the public perception about Jennifer. Without that, it was still a “she said/he didn't respond” story. 

The apology was long overdue, but it didn't stop the fallout. Sadly, Jennifer was right. You don't stay working for the SBC when you are in conflict with its leadership. Within days of the Caring Well conference, Jennifer had to resign her position. She had medically verified complex post-traumatic stress disorder and had lost 50 pounds since her disclosure, and now she was without her job's medical insurance coverage, too. An apology did not pay for her expensive medical care.

On January 10th, 2020, her new lawyers sent a demand letter to the executive committee. It was from Manley, Stewart and Finaldi, the same high-powered firm that represented scores of Larry Nassar survivors and more than a thousand Catholic clergy abuse survivors. Five months later, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, she engaged in a marathon 11-hour mediation via Zoom that resulted in a settlement provided by the SBC’s insurance company.

Due to the pandemic, there was no SBC annual meeting in 2020. By the spring of 2021, Jennifer was still unemployed and suffered from complex PTSD. She was referred for a specific eight-day treatment that had been successfully used to provide relief for military members with the same trauma diagnosis, Stellate Ganglion Block, that anesthetizes a cluster of nerves in the neck that control the “fight or flight” trauma response.

It was one of the many medical interventions she endured after her public disclosure, but the energy around sexual abuse reforms was only gaining momentum and it showed up in the drama leading up to the 2021 SBC annual meeting that year. Now, what happened before and during the convention is worthy of an entire podcast episode itself, but because we still have so many more plot twists to go in Jennifer's story, I'll simply summarize the outcome here.

Around 17,000 messengers--that's what delegates are called in SBC parlance—and guests showed up in Nashville for that year's meeting, widely viewed as one of the most consequential SBC gatherings in decades. The most historic action of the meeting was the overwhelming vote to authorize an independent, third-party investigation into the executive committee's handling of sexual abuse allegations over the past 20 years. The messengers bypassed the executive committee's initial resistance and created a Sexual Abuse Task Force to oversee the investigation, including the controversial step of waiving attorney-client privilege. The investigation had a very specific scope: a review of quote, “any allegations of abuse, mishandling of abuse, mistreatment of victims, a pattern of intimidation of victims or advocates, and resistance to sexual abuse reform initiatives. The investigation shall include actions and decisions of staff and members of the executive committee from January 1st, 2000 to June 14th, 2021.”

With a nearly unanimous vote, it was a rare moment of the messengers overriding denominational leadership, and a signal that abuse accountability had become a defining issue for the convention.

[00:55:51] Brent Epling: It is long past time that we address the horrific treatment of abuse survivors by men who may be among our heroes and mentors. As a lay person and a messenger from a small, or normative size, Southern Baptist church, I demand to know the whole truth, regardless of what idols must crumble to dust to bring us to a place of justice. I urge passage of the motion. 

[00:56:28] JD Greear: Thank you. The allotted time for our deliberation on these motions has expired. Are you ready for the question? Okay. All those in favor of adopting this motion, if you are in favor of that, please indicate so by raising your ballot. All opposed the same sign. The affirmative has it, and the motion is adopted. [applause]

[00:57:00] Jennifer Lyell: What people often don't understand, and what's been reported so far fails to almost always appreciate, is that the quote investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention’s abuse crisis was an investigation into like roughly two dozen people. Literally, it was the smallest office of every aspect of the Southern Baptist—you could not find a smaller slice that is legally identifiable than this tiny slice that was investigated. And then even within that, it was a slice of time. 

[00:57:33] Carolyn McCulley: This is an important point. I hope it's been clear so far that there were many people within the SBC who were concerned about the denomination's response to sexual abuse claims. By this point, for example, the SBC's ERLC entity had already held several events about sexual abuse and had published a curriculum to better equip local churches about this issue. And the 2021 annual meeting in Nashville was the largest in 26 years, this while COVID was still a major concern. The sheer scale of attendance by people who have to fund their own travel suggests that Southern Baptists sense their denomination was at a genuine crossroads.

But what the messengers specifically voted for was to have the executive committee waive its own attorney-client privilege so investigators could access internal documents and communications about how abuse claims had been handled, going all the way back to 2000. This was not something the executive committee was ready to do.

The committee's refusal to waive privilege at the September meeting—reinforced then at a second meeting in early October—triggered threats of resignations and escalating pressure leading to the October 12th reversal, where the committee finally voted to waive attorney-client privilege. 

[00:58:46] Jennifer Lyell: There was a vote to do an investigation, and then there was me participating in trying to get the executive committee to go through with what they had been commanded to do by the messengers, which was to waive attorney-client privilege and to hire a third-party firm, faced with tremendous opposition.

While that was happening, such that I ended up having Zoom meetings direct with all the trustees and going through, I mean, more than a dozen hours of having to relive every single thing I had been through. Being questioned to explain to these individuals why it was crucial that the attorney-client privilege be waived, that the investigation go forth.

So they made that decision in October in 2021, and that was really when the investigation commenced. 

[00:59:38] Carolyn McCulley: Two days after the executive committee reversed course, Ronnie Floyd resigned as CEO and, by the end of October, 13 members of the executive committee had also resigned in protest over the waiver of privilege.

But at the next executive committee meeting in February 2022, nearly three years after the original story about Jennifer was published in the Baptist Press, the committee issued a formal apology to her via a printed statement issued simultaneously with the rather awkward and perfunctory statement from Chairman Rolland Slade.

[01:00:10] Rolland Slade: So now let me report to you, uh, the actions that were taken during our executive session. Uh, the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee considered and approved a recommendation from its legal counsel. And the recommendation is that the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee authorize a resolution with Ms. Jennifer Lyell that includes a release of past and present and future legal claims. 

[01:00:38] Carolyn McCulley: And then he rolled right into other personnel news. The written statement that was issued said in part: quote, “The SBC Executive Committee acknowledges its failures to Ms. Lyell, including the unintentional harm created by its failure to report that Ms. Lyell's allegations of non-consensual sexual abuse were investigated and unequivocally corroborated by the SBC entities with authority over Ms. Lyell and her abuser. The SBC Executive Committee apologizes for all the hurt it has caused, is grateful for Ms. Lyell's perseverance and engagement, and prays for her complete healing from the trauma she has endured.”

[01:01:15] Jennifer Lyell: I knew that there were going to be many people who've been waiting much longer than me, who had been treated, frankly, even far more horrifically than I had been treated, who had not nearly the access to leaders as I had, who were still going to experience another meeting of that body who had turned against them, who had used the influence and the power they had to either ignore them, silence them, or slander them, and that they were going to experience that again while watching me get an apology.

But I made it clear in my statement that was because of the timing of the fact that I happened to have civil claims that were viable and were not outside the statute of limitations and were actionable within that timeframe. And still at the same time, you know, reach out privately to many of the survivors that I was the most concerned about that hurting. I mean, who wants to be part of that community? It's not a club that anyone's like, sign me up for that. 

[01:02:23] Carolyn McCulley: Three months later, the third-party report was released and it made global headlines. 

[01:02:28] CBS Mornings Anchor Tony Dokoupil: A scathing new report commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention describes decades of coverups within its clergy and membership and leadership.

[01:02:37] CBS Mornings Reporter Nikki Battiste: The independent investigation commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention concluded that members of the group's executive committee responded with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility to almost two decades of sexual abuse allegations against clergy. According to the report, they kept a secret running list of accused Baptist ministers to avoid being sued, even as the committee publicly claimed it didn't have the authority to create such a list.

More than 400 people on it were believed to be affiliated with the SBC at some point. But the report quotes a May 9th, 2019, internal email where the SBC's then general counsel called the focus on sexual abuse, quote, “a Satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.” 

[01:03:27] Carolyn McCulley: The report and the recommendations from the SBC's sexual Abuse Task force, to which Rachael was an advisor but not a member, were the focus of the 2022 annual meeting in Anaheim, California. Task Force Chair Bruce Frank was very direct when he presented the task force's recommendations. 

[01:03:45] Bruce Frank: Loved ones, this is a gospel issue. This is a gospel issue. When somebody says it gets us off mission, not only is protecting the sheep from the wolves part of the mission, how are you going to tell a watching world that Jesus loves them, Jesus died for them, Jesus rescued them—when his church won't even do their very best to protect them?

[01:04:13] Carolyn McCulley: The Sexual Abuse Task Force's recommendations were voted in by the messengers. But this momentous event was clouded by an article published by The Daily Wire on the same day. Written by Megan Basham, it was called “The Southern Baptists’ #MeToo Moment.” It was critical of the third-party firm that produced the report, Guidepost Solutions. It claimed Rachael had conflicts of interest that should have prevented her from being on the task force, and it called into question Jennifer's abuse allegations and defended the character of David Sills through interviews with his friends.

Upon its publication, commentators on ultra-conservative sites made deeply hostile remarks about Jennifer and framed Basham as a lone truth-teller, fighting SBC institutional corruption. Many claimed that the SBC sexual abuse scandal was an effort to purge conservative leaders and their allies from the SBC. So the next task force iteration, the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force, had to issue a statement clarifying that every individual involved with either task force was, quote, “thoroughly vetted to ensure that no conflicts of interest were present” and that Rachael served as an advisor, due to her expertise in this area. She did not serve as legal counsel.

[01:05:27] 11 Alive WXIA News Anchor: Well, within the last few hours, we have learned that the Department of Justice is investigating the Southern Baptist Convention and its handling of a widespread sexual abuse scandal. 

[01:05:36] Carolyn McCulley: The United States Department of Justice was also interested in the results of the Guidepost report. In August, 2022, less than a month after the Anaheim convention, SBC leaders publicly disclosed that the DOJ had initiated an investigation into multiple SBC entities.

The DOJ never commented publicly on this investigation, and three years later, in March, 2025, the DOJ quietly closed the case. No abuse charges were ever filed against anyone as a result of the broader Guidepost report. The only criminal outcome was related to Matthew Queen, a former Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor and provost, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to lying to the FBI and producing a set of fake notes about a student's sexual assault at the seminary's undergraduate program. He was sentenced to six months of house arrest, a year of supervised release, and a $2,000 fine. Queen is now an associate pastor at a Southern Baptist Church in Irving, Texas. 

The SBC's executive committee reported it spent more than $2 million on legal costs related to this investigation. 

But an even bigger shoe dropped for Jennifer in November 2022 when David Sills and his wife, Mary, sued her and a dozen other SBC entities and leaders, including Mohler, Southern Seminary, the SBC's Executive Committee, and her former employer, LifeWay Christian Resources.

The lawsuit claimed defamation conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligence. 

[01:07:10] Jennifer Lyell: Weeks after the Guidepost report was released, I started getting just absolutely mopped with trolls. But the reality is that means that this is going to be, you know, unless they retreat, another couple years, at least, of this being a full-time, constant distraction and threat in my life.

And sometimes I, you know, get a really dark sense of humor dealing with this a lot and, you know, I think I have to have some sort of record for being the individual who's had to discuss the most personal, physical, intimate details with the largest number of, you know, old men on planet Earth because of the number of lawyers and investigators and everything.

I'll now go through the next two years of legal proceedings to provide it, and it just, it's hurt upon hurt. 

[01:08:09] Carolyn McCulley: The only bright spot for Jennifer in this lengthy legal process came from a May 12th, 2025 summary judgment in a similar defamation case brought by a pastor who was also named in the Guidepost report, Johnny Hunt.

Both Hunt’s and Sills’ lawsuits were before the same person, District Court Judge William Campbell, Jr. In dismissing the jury trial in the Hunt case, Judge Campbell wrote that the Guidepost report quote “relates to broad issues of interest to society at large rather than matters of purely private concern. Specifically, the issues the report highlights—allegations of sexual abuse involving clergy members and how allegations of such abuse were handled—are matters of public import.” 

Indeed, allegations of sexual abuse involving clergy members are matters of public importance. That's what Jennifer and every other survivor within the SBC had been saying all along.

But Jennifer will never get her day in court.

She had been suffering dangerously high blood pressure for many months prior, something her physician attributed to the accumulated trauma and PTSD—which actually accelerated after the executive committee's actions and the lawsuit.

On June 5th, 2025, she was found on the floor of her Nashville home. She had suffered multiple strokes.

She was rushed to the hospital, but she remained unresponsive. Two days later surrounded by friends and family. Jennifer passed away. She was 47 years old.

Jennifer's life had ended, but a slow drip of publicly posted, partially redacted discovery documents had just begun. It was a revealing but incomplete window into the Sills lawsuit. The first document that I became aware of was Jennifer's response to a motion from the Sills team to compel additional discovery documents from her therapist. This was filed on May 20th, 2025, just weeks before she died. She had just gone through a two-day deposition a month before, in April. 

One of the oddities in this response document involved someone on the Sills legal team fronting for a dead lawyer. Because the Sills team is not local to Tennessee, state law requires them to have local co-counsel. Unfortunately, that local attorney had passed away on March 31st. But during Jennifer's deposition on April 9th and 10th, this local attorney appeared to participate via Zoom without his camera on. This document says that when remote participants were asked to introduce themselves on day two of the deposition, an unknown individual stated on the record, “Gary Brewer for the plaintiff.” But Jennifer's legal team only learned of Brewer's death after reading an obituary posted in the Tennessee Bar Association's newsletter. 

This document went on to provide the first grim details of the sexual assaults Jennifer had alleged, described in even greater detail during a tranche of discovery documents filed later that fall. It also revealed that there was another woman who was ready to testify that Sills took advantage of her vulnerability after she and her husband came to him for marriage counseling at a time when he was their pastor, and Sills manipulated her into giving him oral sex.

This document summarized Jennifer's experience in four terse—and it should be stated, startlingly graphic—sentences. It said: “David Sills sexually abused her for over 10 years. He forced her to give him oral sex repeatedly. He would hold her head as she attempted to pull away, ejaculate in her mouth, and then tell her to fix her face and repent. At times he did it while his family was upstairs waiting for dinner. He did it all while telling Lyell that there was something wrong with her, that he, her professor, and a renowned religious scholar, could help her fix. That is what Jennifer Lyell is ready to prove at trial.”

 But her untimely death prevented that from happening.

In the fall of 2025, both legal teams filed documents containing additional revelations that drew both press and social media attention. One key item was a May 30th, 2022 email from Meg Basham to Sills through Founders Ministries president Tom Ascol. This was sent just weeks before her Daily Wire piece was published.

In it, she wrote, quote: “I know you've spoken with Tom Ascol about my desire to speak with you and hear your version of events surrounding Jennifer Lyell's accusations. Candidly, the pieces highlighted in the Guidepost report on the SBC don't fit together to me. I've also spoken with a couple of faculty members at Southern who have told me that Lyell's abuse claim never made sense to them either, and they strongly doubt that it is a truthful characterization,” unquote.

Then she went on to reveal her own family's backstory: “When I was in middle school, my dad was a lay leader of our church's young adult ministry. He had an affair with a woman in that group. She was in her mid-twenties. I have a half-sister from that relationship. I knew the woman well. She was like a part of our family and often babysat my siblings and I. She was a close friend of my mother and went on many vacations with us, and I frequently spent weekends shopping and having outings with her. Looking back, I don't know if she insinuated herself into our family or if the situation developed naturally, but certainly she became very entangled in all of our lives.

“You can imagine how the affair upended our family. When it became public knowledge, we left the only church I'd ever known. We moved states. My parents sought counseling, and it's been a rough road, but they managed to keep their marriage together. When I see them with my children today, I'm so grateful God preserved their union against all odds. 

“This was in the early nineties. So though my father was a leader in the church, it was, I believe, rightly characterized as a consensual adulterous relationship. But my dad and I have often talked in the last few years about how his sin might have been described if he had committed it today. We've talked about how he most certainly would be characterized as an abuser today, and how that would've impacted my mom, siblings and I. 

“I believe that a movement that tells adult women they have been abused when they participate willingly in sexual sins is unbiblical. It keeps them in a state of unrepentance and creates incentives for dishonesty, even in one's own mind.

“In short, I believe the ‘believe all women’ narrative of the #MeToo movement is godless, and the church undermines its power to cleanse souls and change lives by capitulating to it. Perhaps this is not Lyell's story. Perhaps you'll tell me you have decided that abuse was a factor, but I have strong doubts.

“I would love to speak with you and get a chance to get a better perspective on your story, which is being used to shape a national narrative, which is in turn being used to shape the direction of the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.” unquote. 

As these additional discovery documents attracted more attention, Basham posted a tweet in December, 2025 that clarified this perspective even further. She wrote quote, “Why does this matter? Because leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, took steps to rid themselves of the conservatives who were leading the executive committee. They did this through claiming an abuse crisis.”

This is the crux of the issue. One side wants their Christian leaders to protect the vulnerable and tell the truth. The other side sees this through the lens of denominational power.

Obviously, these discovery documents are not a complete picture, redacted as they are and offered in pursuit of a legal argument. But there are a few admissions in the depositions that are striking. One being that Mary Sills knew that her husband had extramarital relationships going back as far as 1981.

Even so, in her deposition, Mary Sills confirmed that including Jennifer as a single adult in their family was a form of ministry. This was something she noted in her diary in June 2004, after the family had known Jennifer for possibly a year. In her 2025 deposition, she said: "Jennifer was a lonely, needy person. And we thought it would be a good ministry to welcome her into our family, and to make her feel less lonely, and cared for." But in her 2004 diary, she wrote: "Lord, please help this to be the right thing. Don't let this be another disaster. Help us to minister to her. Don't let David get carried away and ruin it."

A month after Mary Sills wrote that in her diary, Jennifer went with David Sills on a mission trip he was leading to Ecuador. On one of the last nights there, she says he sexually assaulted her and she resisted him. His statements made it clear that he knew what he did was wrong, but he also suggested that what happened was somehow or another her fault. He suggested his actions were related to his knowledge of the trauma she experienced in her childhood. He told her that she could not tell anyone what had just happened because others would not understand, but that he did. And that the way to ensure nothing like that ever happened again was for her to submit fully to becoming part of his family, as that would, quote, “redeem the broken parts in her that made him do that.”

Her deposition testimony continued with this account, quote: “Subsequently, on the plane trip back from Ecuador days later, Ms. Lyell was seated between Professor Sills and his daughter. While his daughter was asleep in her seat, Mr. Sills rearranged his travel blanket so that it covered the space between his and Ms. Lyell's seats. He then forcibly grabbed her right wrist from under the blanket and pulled it toward his exposed genitalia, trying to force her hand onto his penis. She resisted repeated attempts to pull her hand toward him and eventually freed her hand, after which she moved his blanket, while making clear panicked facial expressions to him to express her lack of consent and resistance. He relented and Ms. Lyell spent much of the remainder of that trip in the airplane's bathroom.”

I remember when Jennifer first told me about this event before she went public. I was struck by the red flag audacity of Sills assaulting someone on a plane who was sitting right next to his own daughter. 

We don't know Sills’ side of that story, however, because the publicly available pages of his deposition skip over it. All we can see from his deposition is that the legal team had spent the day before talking about that plane ride back from Ecuador. We can presume that there was sexual contact then, because the next day the lawyer asks, “When is the next time after that that you recall having sexual contact with Jennifer Lyell?”

Sexual contact, however, is not what the Sills’ pastor, Bill Cook, recalled David Sills confessing to him. In his January 17th, 2025 deposition, Cook says, “What he described to me was that he had engaged in tawdry behavior, that he had snuggled on the couch with Jennifer after Mrs. Sills had went to bed. They had long hugs that he felt were inappropriate and that Jennifer was suggesting that the behavior was non-consensual.” But when asked if he believed Sills had physically forced Jennifer to have sexual contact with him, Cook simply replied, “Yes.”

But Sills knew he couldn't keep a position in the seminary even if it were a consensual extramarital affair and not an allegation of abuse. In his own October 2024 deposition, Sills says that when Mohler confronted him with Jennifer's claims, he was presented with two options: the seminary would perform a third-party investigation, or he could resign. Sills chose to resign. He said he did so because the seminary and the Christian ministry is a “zero tolerance world” and an extramarital affair alone would result in his termination.

I don't know what will be the result of this lawsuit and whether critical documents will remain under seal. But I do know this: Jennifer Lyell did not survive her disclosure of sexual abuse. And despite the fact that the reforms recommended by the Sexual Abuse Task Force were overwhelmingly approved by messengers, Southern Baptist leaders ultimately never acted on them.

The Silenced Truth Podcast is written and edited by me, Carolyn McCulley. Rachael Berglund is our executive producer. It is fiscally sponsored by the Southern Documentary Fund. If you want to support the production of this series—please and thank you—you can make a tax-deductible donation online to the Southern Documentary Fund. To find the link for that fund or the links for the historical materials referenced in this episode, check out our show notes.

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