Ex-pastor at Greg Laurie's megachurch: I'm too broke to fight all these sexual abuse lawsuits

Harvest Christian Fellowship funded Paul Havsgaard’s ministry. Then they allegedly ignored warnings of abuse and exploitation.

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There are church scandals, and then there are the jaw-dropping allegations being made against one of the largest megachurches in America.

The allegations involve California’s Harvest Christian Fellowship, led by Pastor Greg Laurie, and his former right-hand man, Pastor Paul Havsgaard. While news reports on the allegation have been coming out at a steady drip since September, we now have a response from Havsgaard himself.

Pastor Greg Laurie (screenshot via YouTube)

The details are damning. In short, Harvest Christian Fellowship funded the creation of several Romanian orphanages, led by Havsgaard. But due to a lack of proper oversight from the church, children who stayed at the buildings now say Havsgaard sexually abused them for years.

The complaints, filed [in September] by 33-year-old Marian Barbu and 40-year-old Mihai-Constantin Petcu, said former Harvest Christian Fellowship pastor and missionary Paul Havsgaard severely abused them and dozens of other children at the shelter over eight years. The lawsuits also name the church’s founder and senior pastor, Greg Laurie, a well-known evangelist and author, as well as other senior church leaders, saying they failed to prevent abuse.

Havsgaard denies everything, and he has yet to be charged with any crimes. The church claims this is all part of a targeted attack on them by the lawyer (Jan Cervenka) and law firm (McAllister Olivarius) representing all the plaintiffs.

“This misplaced lawsuit wrongly targets Harvest Riverside and our pastor as a form of financial extortion,” the statement [from Harvest Christian Fellowship] said. “It does not seek the truth nor does it seek to stop the purported wrongdoer.”

The lawsuits allege the church had minimal oversight into what Havsgaard was doing in Romania despite giving him upwards of $17,000 a month to run his orphanages. They ignored warning signs, the Plaintiffs said, allowing Havgsaard to create a “torture chamber inside a prison.”

… Havsgaard would show up regularly in the bathroom while boys were showering or undressed, stare at them or masturbate in their presence. Both plaintiffs have also accused Havsgaard of “pimping out” older boys for sex work via video chat or at bathhouses and taking a cut of their earnings.

The complaints detail sexual assault, inappropriate touching and abuse where children were made to kneel on walnut shells or were tied to their beds or radiators. According to the lawsuit, Havsgaard told the children while abusing them: “I know what God wants; what I want, God wants.”

What were the warning signs? Among them, a missionary who visited the orphanages in 2002 heard about allegations of abuse, and left a message with the church, but was ignored. Another minister’s wife told Harvest’s leaders about her suspicions of abuse, but they ignored her. In 2004, a trio of pastors supposedly investigated the matter and gave their report to the church’s missions pastor Richard Schutte, who gave it to Laurie… but he also ignored the matter. The church cut ties with Havsgaard in 2005, but no explanation was offered. Havsgaard did, however, receive a severance package worth around $200,000.

In 2009, however, Laurie publicly praised Havsgaard as a decent Christian who “faithfully served the Lord for many years at Harvest Christian Fellowship.” Because of him, Laurie added, “hundreds of young lives have been saved.”

In fact, it wasn’t until 2024 that someone from the church finally reported Havsgaard to law enforcement.

While the descriptions in mainstream news outlets of the lawsuits are horrifying, none of them really give you total insight into how disturbing the allegations are. You can read any of the nearly two dozen complaints here. But let’s just pick one from a child who was orphaned at the age of eight and found living on the streets of Bucharest, “desperate for food, shelter and stability.” He was taken to Havsgaard, and that’s when the child’s life got worse.

(The following section is not for the faint of heart. It’s disturbing.)

The church should have anticipated that, the lawsuit alleges, because he had previously abused his foster daughter—when he was in his late 30s and she was 15 or 16. His wife also knew he was capable of this but she felt duty-bound to stay by his side as a “good Christian wife.”

… He did not want to have sex with her, and when they did, perhaps two or three times a year, he only wanted anal sex, which she disliked, and also to urinate inside her vagina. Havsgaard had also told Kathy that during his time in the Navy, he had strong sexual feelings for a man, whose name he would shout out during their sporadic sexual interactions. (She believed he had had sex with the man, but Havsgaard denied this.) She had reason to believe he had raped a four-year-old girl and urinated inside her…

(They eventually divorced in 2007.)

When Havsgaard launched the orphanages in Romania, he never bothered to learn the language and “recruited” kids by buying them McDonald’s meals. He used children who were bilingual to recruit others. He eventually had enough money to buy a property near Bucharest.

Even as the ministry expanded, Havsgaard would continue running Bible studies in English, “a language most of the children did not understand,” suggesting that religion was merely a ruse to get them in there. But the kids didn’t mind because they had food and shelter.

That’s when the abuse allegedly began. He would punish them for damn near anything by removing their pants, placing them “over his knee, directly on top of his crotch,” and spanking them. Then he would massage them to make them feel better… a move that included inserting his finger into a child’s anus.

“Sometimes he would smell or lick his fingers after doing this, even if covered with feces, a signature fetish.”

He did this both in private and in front of other kids—sometimes several times a day—and if the kids cried, he would choke them.

There are other allegations that involve taking boys to hotel rooms, watching them shower, masturbating in their bedrooms (“sometimes while groping one or more boys”), forcing kids to stimulate him, and taking/keeping videos of his assaults on them. At times, boys under his care witnessed him assaulting other boys in his care.

Beyond the sexual abuse, there were also allegations of other kinds of abuse.

For example, Havsgaard put brothers in different homes to keep them isolated and increase his own power over them. He put children who displeased him out on the street in the winter, letting them plead in the cold and dark for re-entry.

Havsgaard strangled and smothered children with pillows, letting go just before they lost consciousness, had them tied to beds and radiators, and kept them under “room arrest” for days.

…

Also, with Havsgaard’s encouragement, some of the underage boys accessed online sex forums. The boys then procured customers, sold their naked pictures, and also met for paid sex, with Havsgaard taking a cut of the proceeds.

In the evenings, Havsgaard also took boys to bathhouses where men, usually foreign tourists, would pay to wash and masturbate the boys, or for the boys to masturbate them.

Havsgaard took a cut of their earnings. He picked the boys up late at night after their activities, taking them back after he received his share.

Despite all this, even when members of the congregation visited the homes to see how their donations were being used, Havsgaard always said he needed more cash… even though one donor saw that kids had no winter coats, and the homes were dirty, and bicycles were broken. Another donor couldn’t get access to his ministry’s financial information. When donors tried to help fix these things, Havsgaard refused their generosity, possibly because he didn’t want them coming inside the homes.

Again, Havsgaard has denied all of this. But the lawsuit implies his wife knew what he was doing, and donors could have known something was fishy, and the church was told they needed to do better oversight but failed.

The mandated reporters didn’t report anything and Greg Laurie “turned a blind eye” to what was going on, as did the rest of his church.

And when the orphanages were finally shut down, around 2008, the church didn’t do anything to help the kids who were still there. They just set them loose.

… Defendants dumped the children on the street and gave them no exit money, no plan, not even a number to call in an emergency.

Few had any education that would help them survive safely, let alone prosper; some were not even literate.

Many roamed the streets hungry, homeless, in despair and fear, and were routinely assaulted. Laurie and Harvest abandoned them.

Having learned from Havsgaard that the route to survival was to sell their bodies to him and others, many turned to sex work.

Not that Havsgaard was affected. He remained in good standing with his religious community back home, Even as recently as 2023, he was leading a Bible study group for seniors:

Again, Havsgaard has denied all of these allegations. The lawsuits bring forth claims of negligence by the church and its leaders, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy, aiding and abetting, trafficking victims, and illicit sexual conduct.

And now, months after those lawsuits were filed in a federal court in California, Havsgaard has sent the court a letter pleading poverty—because he’s the real victim in all this, don’t you know. He can’t even “afford to hire an attorney,” he says.

In all of Ms. Olivarius’ and Ms. Cervenka’s efforts to round up information to discredit me and to bring false accusations against me, they say nothing of all that we accomplished in the lives of the children. We put them through school, after first helping to build that school because street kids were not allowed in Romanian schools because they did not have proper documentation that was required to attend them. We provided food, shelter, clothes, even Christmas and Birthday presents and much more. They were treated well by all the staff and myself. When staff did not treat them well, they were fired.

…

This lawsuit has cost me everything. I was teaching a Bible study for senior citizens but had to step down when I told them about these lawsuits. These lawsuits have ruined any hope of being able to minister because no church wants to risk a potential lawsuit as well. My wife and I live paycheck to paycheck on Social Security and my veterans benefits. I worked as a pastor for 27 years prior to becoming a missionary in Romania and there was never, ever, a complaint about me. This lawsuit is about money, it’s all about money. I don’t know what will become of this lawsuit. Prayerfully I will be proven innocent. But if not, and my accusers gain wealth, when the money is gone and our bodies decay, there is a judgment coming. We will all stand before God and see Him with our own eyes. But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives and He will prove me to be innocent on that day.

At no point in the letter does Havsgaard respond to any of the specific allegations made against him. He just says they’re “false” without actually rebutting anything.

The Roys Report, a Christian news outlet, says that Harvest settled a lawsuit involving “allegations of sexual misconduct overseas” in 2016, and it cost them a lot of money. While there are signs that suggest that settlement involves the same Romanian ministry, the details of that settlement are not known to the public, so it could be unrelated.

Meanwhile, Harvest Christian Fellowship and Greg Laurie are asking the court to dismiss all of these cases.

What makes these allegations so damning isn’t just their brutality if true; it’s how much moral rot existed in the church. It’s not like this was one rogue employee whose actions were unknown to everyone in leadership. There were repeated warnings, internal reports, and first-hand accounts that allegedly reached the highest levels of Harvest Christian Fellowship—including Greg Laurie himself—but were ignored.

The same institution that preaches moral clarity and divine authority is now accused of providing neither one when it mattered the most.

The hypocrisy here is staggering, especially given Laurie’s platform as an evangelist with a massive budget at his disposal. It’s not like he can’t afford oversight of his ministries. And yet, as the allegations suggest, Havsgaard invoked God to justify abuse against children who had nowhere else to turn.

While Havsgaard has every right to defend himself in court, his letter only makes things worse. Rather than engaging with the accusations, he’s pretending to have suffered far more than the people filing the lawsuits. Even a large severance package isn’t enough to satisfy his greed, I guess.

This whole controversy also shows why churches shouldn’t be operating with no real transparency. Ministries like the one led by Greg Laurie rely on trust, charisma, and the assumption that religious leaders are inherently more trustworthy than anyone else. We’ve seen so often, though, how that kind of unearned trust is never a safeguard against abuse. If anything, it fuels even worse behavior because participants know that no one is really looking over their shoulders.

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