Faith, power, and abuse: The scandal rocking Truett McConnell University
A shocking investigation reveals years of abuse, ignored warnings, and a Christian college culture that protected power over people
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In 2008, Hayle Swinson began attending Truett McConnell University, a Baptist college in Cleveland, Georgia. It wasn’t because she cared about religion, but because they gave her a soccer scholarship. She didn’t care if she had to attend weekly chapel services. It seemed worth it for the opportunity. And after her first year, the school’s Christian mission had its intended effect on her: She “gave her life” to Jesus.
While that was happening, Bradley Reynolds, a pastor from North Carolina, was hired as the school’s vice president by his former colleague Emir Caner, who now ran the school.
Neither story was all that unusual, but their paths crossed pretty quickly during Swinson’s second year at the school. Reynolds and his wife would invite soccer team members to their home for dinner and Bible study—and he soon became a Bible mentor of sorts to Swinson herself. They would hold study sessions alone in his basement.
Swinson eventually graduated and stuck around the area, helping coach the soccer team and doing a mix of other jobs around campus. Reynolds decided to help her out by creating a position just for her: “Life coach.” They continued meeting one-on-one to talk about the Bible.
But those meetings soon became more predatory.
Reporters Thad Moore and Allie Gross at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently published a damning story (archived link here) about what Reynolds did to Swinson, constructed around hundreds of emails he sent her (many of which were sexually explicit), thousands of text messages, and taped interviews with law enforcement.
For example, Swinson told an officer when things took a bizarre turn:
Swinson told Sims she couldn’t remember when their Bible studies turned sexual. But as they prayed during their sessions, she recalled, Reynolds began touching her: putting a hand on her back, then her knee and her chest, and eventually reaching into her shorts.
As Reynolds prayed, she recalled, he would say things like, “You don’t understand. You’re not going to understand. You’re a baby believer. This is from God.”
She didn’t want to be touched that way, she told Sims. But she was still learning who God was, and Reynolds insisted it was OK because she was his betrothed and it was God’s will that one day they would marry.
Reynolds was married—to someone he met when he was her youth pastor (!)—but he let Swinson know that God told him his wife would soon die and she would take her place. Furthermore, they could absolutely have sex.
He asserted that while they weren’t married, God had given them freedoms to have sex. It was OK, she recalled him saying, because he had made a vow of “betrothal” before God. She hadn’t understood what he meant, she said, and she hadn’t wanted a physical relationship.
Among the many disturbing emails he sent her was one from 2015 where he talked about a dream he had:
Hey
I wanted to keep being totally transparent with you and yet please let's keep close. I don't ever want to be so transparent it pushes you away but I do want to be totally transparent. I can't help my dreams. So I've had two in the past week. I'll share them both at some point but for now the one last night was incredible and REAL. So real that it was a wet dream. The first one I've had in over a year now. The fourth I've had since we met. I had never had one since I was like twenty until we were close. Anyway, in my dream I had taken you to the most incredible climax you had ever experienced and as I watched you and our union (spiritual, emotional, physical) I exploded and woke up and I had literally exploded.
I am sorry for being so open but I did want you to know that I slept amazingly except for my dream. And I wanted you to know you really do cool things to me (making me younger in some ways which go beyond human explanation — most young men never have a wet dream after their teenage years — I think it may be physically impossible in their forties.
So — I know I shared way too much but I also know I don't make up dreams and God really has used you to give me life (spiritually first and foremost) and vitality (youthfulness:) and even if I wanted to deny I couldn't cause it occurs when I am asleep.
Anytime he made a move on her, she resisted, and he would back off, but then that cycle would just repeat itself months later. At one point, she said, Reynolds came into the shower with her “though she had locked the door.”
It got worse:
Staying in the family’s guest room, she remembered waking up to find Reynolds on top of her, “touching every part of my body but still saying it’s from God.”
And after a Bible study, she remembered freezing up when Reynolds asked her to pray on the floor. She remembered him pulling down her shorts and urging her to let him penetrate her.
“There’s no part of me that wanted this, consented to it,” she told [the sergeant]. “I just wanted to know Jesus. I didn’t know who God was. I was so confused, and I felt so trapped through it all.”
She continued insisting she wanted it to stop. Not in the moment—she was usually just silent while it was happening—but afterwards. In one email, he responded:
“I am just asking you to be open that perhaps God is answering my prayer that you kinda enjoyed it just a little,” he wrote in September 2016, “even though you feel upset afterward.”
Swinson finally left the area for good in 2018 when she moved to Atlanta and started working with a local church. She also began meeting with a therapist who helped her realize how disturbing her experience had truly been. (At one particularly low point, in 2021, she texted a close friend that she had a knife “and I’m about to use it.”) It wasn’t until 2024, though, that she finally decided to tell law enforcement officials about what had happened.
There were two key issues at this point.
First, did anyone at the school know this was going on? (Did they have a hunch? Could they have stopped it?)
And second, was there anything law enforcement could do about it?
The answer to the second question was pretty straightforward: Probably not.
Reynolds and Swinson were both adults, albeit with a major power imbalance. (The article says “Fourteen states have made it a crime for a member of the clergy to have sex with someone they pastor, but Georgia is not one of them.”) The fact that she admitted she didn’t outwardly resist his advances—but instead “go inward and just try to disappear”—also made it harder to charge Reynolds with sexual assault. Furthermore, the statute of limitations had expired. While there was strong evidence that Reynolds lied to law enforcement when he was questioned about all this, the White County Sheriff's Office ultimately chose to pursue… nothing. They didn’t think there was enough evidence to go after him.
But just because people aren’t going to prison doesn’t mean there are no consequences. Because once Swinson realized the cops weren’t going to make things better, she decided to tell her story publicly. This past May, the Christian outlet The Roys Report published a damning account of how Swinson was groomed by Reynolds—and how the school’s president “reportedly ignored” allegations of what Reynolds was doing.
A former staffer who was the school’s Title IX coordinator said he told Caner about his concerns regarding Reynolds in 2016, specifically after he saw Reynolds and Swinson go into his home together when no one else was around, but nothing came of it. That staffer was soon fired over an unrelated, extremely minor infraction. A former vice president of the school expressed similar concerns, only to be told by Caner that “any more gossip like that will result in the person saying it being fired.” (That’s a paraphrase.)
Multiple former students said Reynolds was “very touchy” and heard rumors of his “inappropriate behavior with students… especially athletes.” There was also a petition signed by over 50 female students on campus in 2019 saying Reynolds’ behavior had troubled them—in his theology class, he told them to write testimonies about their personal traumas, leading some of the women to believe he was trying to identify the most vulnerable targets. But Reynolds still remained on staff until 2024.
In an interview with Julie Roys, Swinson said:
… I was groomed, I was confused, I was targeted. I felt isolated, like I was alone, I can’t tell nobody… It took, and it has taken, and it will take years of my life to unwind every lie that was told to me.
It was only when the Sheriff’s Office investigation was happening, in 2024, and Reynolds told the school he was the subject of it, that they finally placed him on leave. He soon resigned. (You can’t fire him if he quits!)
That means the school has effectively avoided any repercussions for Reynolds’ actions—and the lack of actions from administrators who knew something inappropriate was occurring—until this story finally came to light.
When The Roys Report published its story in May, the school stood by everything it did:
… Jason Graffagnino, the school’s Vice President for Finance and Operations and Chief Financial Officer, said via email, “TMU has aggressively and proactively implemented policies that protect all students, including regular reviews of Title IX policies by outside counsel.”
Graffagnino added, “There had been no previous Title IX or HR complaints filed related to this matter. Had TMU known of this behavior earlier, Reynolds would have been immediately dismissed.”
But since that time, there has been pushback in surprising ways. The TMU staff asked pointed questions at an all-faculty meeting about how the school screwed this up so badly. Some professors said in a letter to administrators that they should never have learned these details through the media first, demanding that the school should have kept them in the loop. Graduates of the school protested on campus. Caner was placed on leave. And the local district attorney reopened the investigation that the Sheriff’s Office closed, though it’s unclear what, if anything, will come of that.
The Journal-Constitution was able to track down Reynolds at a “sandwich shop in Texas,” where he apparently now works, but when they called him for comment, “the man who answered the phone responded, ‘No comment, thanks.’”
Ultimately, this isn’t merely a story about one predatory pastor or an investigation that, so far, hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s about a Christian university culture that thrives on unchecked authority. The problem at Truett McConnell University wasn’t that they hired the wrong guy in Reynolds. It’s that it created an ecosystem that allowed abuse to fester. Administrators were warned. Students spoke up. Staffers risked their jobs to raise concerns. Yet those in power, cloaked in religious authority, chose self-preservation over the safety of the vulnerable. What’s the point of “teaching the Bible as the timeless, inerrant, and absolute Truth” when the safety of students is literally at risk due to willful inaction and quiet cover-ups?
What happened at TMU isn’t unique. We’ve seen it at other Christian schools, too. They create a system meant to shield leaders from scrutiny while demanding complete obedience from students. When the goal of creating a “Missional Community” is used as both lure and leash, when Title IX is treated as optional, and when the preservation of the school’s image outweighs the concerns of the harmed, abuse becomes inevitable.
This wasn’t a personal failure. This was entirely predictable, from top to bottom. Show me an authoritarian religious structure that elevates spiritual leaders to untouchable status and I’ll show you victims waiting to be heard.
The danger isn’t just that another Bradley Reynolds will emerge. It’s that, without very serious changes to the school’s foundation, the very system will keep producing men like him.
For far too long, civil authorities blamed the victims of sexual abuse by the clergy. 'How dare they say such outrageous things about a man of God!' At long last, these stories began making their way into the media, and members of the clergy were no longer able to hide behind their Bibles and clerical collars. These stories have now become common place. You can only wonder what they got away with in the past.
Abuse by Christians shocking? Not to anyone paying attention to the pattern.