Former Southern Baptist leader accused of sexual assault: At least it wasn't "adultery"
Johnny Hunt described his infidelity in a deposition that repeatedly went off the rails
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Former Southern Baptist Convention president Johnny Hunt would like you to know that sexually assaulting a woman by kissing her breasts and pulling down her underwear—all without her consent—doesn’t count as “adultery.”
He made the comments during a deposition this past April, and the transcript was just released this past week.
All of this stems back to revelations from 2022 about the SBC, in which we learned that, over the previous decade, more than 250 SBC staffers or volunteers had been “charged with sex crimes” against more than 700 victims. We also learned in the SBC’s own investigation that a private list of alleged predators (that wasn’t shared with member churches) included “703 abusers, with 409 believed to be SBC-affiliated.” The situation was so bad that the Department of Justice announced it was investigating “multiple SBC entities,” though not specific individuals, about their mishandling of sexual abuse cases. In May, a former seminary professor became the first person indicted in the ongoing investigation. (He has pleaded not guilty.)
But one of the most eye-popping details in that internal investigation was the allegation against Hunt.
According to page 149, another pastor and his wife reported that Hunt, who ran the SBC from 2008-2010, “had sexually assaulted the wife on July 25, 2010.” (That would have been shortly after Hunt completed his second one-year term.)
As per the Motion, we were asked to examine allegations of abuse committed by EC members during the relevant time period. During our investigation, an SBC pastor and his wife came forward to report that SBC President Johnny Hunt (2008-2010) had sexually assaulted the wife on July 25, 2010. We include this sexual assault allegation in the report because our investigators found the pastor and his wife to be credible; their report was corroborated in part by a counseling minister and three other credible witnesses; and our investigators did not find Dr. Hunt’s statements related to the sexual assault allegation to be credible.
Hunt, the report said, “groomed the couple with flattery and promises of help in ministry.” At the SBC’s annual meeting that year, Hunt invited the couple to spend time with his family at a beach where he was spending his planned sabbatical. They grew closer and, at a later date, the woman stayed alone at a condo that Hunt recommended. Unbeknownst to her, he was right next door.
One night, when both of them were alone, he entered her room, commented on her clothing and perfume, and “asked her if she felt safe.” It took a dark turn from there:
Dr. Hunt then moved towards Survivor and proceeded to pull her shorts down, turn her over and stare at her bare backside. He made sexual remarks about her body and things he had imagined about her. During this time, Survivor felt frozen. Survivor said these were some of the longest moments of her life. She mustered the courage to ask him could she turn back over, and Dr. Hunt said yes. When she turned back over, she began to pull up her shorts. Dr. Hunt then pinned her to the couch, got on top of her, and pulled up her shirt. He sexually assaulted her with his hands and mouth. Suddenly, Dr. Hunt stopped and then stood up. Survivor pulled down her shirt. Survivor said she did not want him to ruin his ministry, at which he responded he did not want to ruin hers. But he then forced himself on her again by groping her, trying to pull her shirt down, and violently kissing her. Survivor did not reciprocate, but rather stood eyes open and very stiff, hoping he would just stop and leave. He finally stopped and left.
The victim said that Hunt spoke to her shortly after that and told her “he would like to have sex with her three times a day.”
It was only the next morning that he apologized, begged for forgiveness, and asked for her to keep this a secret.
Hunt was scheduled to return to preach at his home church in Georgia following his sabbatical, but he soon announced he would be extending his break “citing physical and emotional exhaustion.”
Religion News Service later reported what happened after that:
Without telling his congregation — or the millions of Southern Baptists he had represented as their president — Hunt went through a secret restoration process that included counseling sessions with the woman he had fondled and her husband. He then returned to the pulpit.
For a dozen years, no one was the wiser. Hunt retired from First Baptist in 2019 and took on a new role as a senior vice president for the SBC’s North American Mission Board and continued his busy and often lucrative career as a preacher and public speaker.
Life is good when you’re an alleged sexual abuser who belongs to a religious denomination with a history of ignoring sexual abuse…
All that occurred in 2010. The details of the alleged assault weren’t publicized until that report came out in 2022. Until that report was made public, it was all but impossible to connect the dots to understand the real reason for Hunt’s extended leave.
Hunt initially denied those allegations. He then claimed everything was consensual. By the end of 2022, after going through another “restoration” program, Hunt was declared “eligible to return to professional ministry.” He returned to the pulpit in early 2023.
There were never any criminal charges filed against him. His professional career didn’t suffer any real hits. It was like the SBC didn’t really care. (Surprise.)
Despite all that, after the SBC’s investigation brought those allegations to light, Hunt was determined to clear his name. So last spring, he filed a defamation lawsuit against the SBC saying they ruined his life by including him in the report. The encounter, his lawyers explained, “involved only kissing and some awkward fondling.” Infidelity, sure, but not assault. Plus, they argued, Hunt was no longer the SBC president at the time, just a civilian, so including him in the report was nothing more than a “strategic decision to deflect attention from the SBC’s historical failure to take aggressive steps to respond to reports of child sex abuse and other sex crimes in its past.”
“Pastor Johnny was not the president of the SBC or a member of the Executive Committee at the time of the incident,” they wrote in a memorandum, opposing the denomination’s attempts to have the case dismissed. “He was merely a private citizen whose marital fidelity was nobody else’s business.”
It was a bizarre way to clear Hunt’s name.
First of all, citing the SBC’s “historical failure” to deal with sex abuse as an excuse for them coming after him was wild considering that Hunt was the leader of the SBC at a time when many of those failures were occurring. He was effectively blaming the SBC, which he led, for not doing enough to stop guys like him.
The defamation argument was also absurd. He was a public figure. He was the immediate past president of the SBC. He was a hypocrite. He was a part of the abuse that the SBC swept under the rug. There was no evidence that the allegations were made by people who secretly knew they were untrue (which is the whole idea of defamation).
But setting that aside, it was ludicrous that a preacher who made everyone else’s sex life his business now demanded privacy regarding his own alleged assault. After all, Hunt was one of the signers of the 2017 Nashville Statement, which declared marriage could only be between a man and a woman, that all married couples needed to be monogamous, and that transgender people didn’t exist. He wanted to defend the supposed sanctity of marriage… all while ignoring that sanctity in his personal life.
He also signed the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s “Statement on Marriage,” written in response to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling, which said the decision was the result of “marriage’s decline through divorce, cohabitation, and a worldview of almost limitless sexual freedom.”
Finally, it was deeply ironic that, in 2008, at the same convention when Hunt was elected SBC president, the SBC Executive Committee condemned sexual abuse in all forms:
"The Southern Baptist Convention is on record for having stood strongly against sexual abuse. We have long condemned those who would use our churches as a hunting ground for their own sick and selfish pleasure," Chapman said. "At the same time, sexual abuse is a growing crisis in this nation and we must continue to do everything within our power to stop this horrendous crime. Even though the number of Southern Baptist ministers who are sexual predators may seem to be relatively small, we must be on watch and take immediate action against those who prey on the most innocent among us. One sexual predator in our midst is one too many!"
We gotta stop the sex predators! Now everyone please clap for the new guy in charge, Johnny Hunt!
They acted like Southern Baptist predators were few and far between even if sexual abuse was rampant in the culture. Meanwhile they elected a man who was two years away from being credibly accused of that same behavior. They were in the midst of covering up their own behavior, as the 2022 report would later reveal.
For more than a year now, the defamation lawsuit has quietly been proceeding through the courts. Earlier this month, the defendants asked the court for summary judgment, basically saying there was nothing more to dispute, the facts were understood by all sides, and no jury was necessary. Just give us a ruling. To that end, they included the transcript of a deposition given by Hunt on April 18, 2024.
What that transcript reveals is unbelievable.
For example, when a lawyer asks Hunt for his definition of “adultery,” Hunt says it’s when “a man that is married… has sexual intercourse with someone other than his wife.” So what about someone like Bill Clinton? Did he commit adultery?
“I don't know his story,” said Hunt.
The lawyers went back-and-forth on this and got nowhere. So they tried a different tactic. Yet Hunt kept arguing that “infidelity” and having “emotional affairs” might be sins… but none of that amounted to “adultery.”
Hunt later used that odd differentiation to say that what he did inside that condo may have been a sin… but, dammit, it wasn’t adultery! “It was not an affair; it was an encounter,” he said. He may have been “unfaithful,” he admitted, but he didn’t commit adultery! “I stopped when I did and left. And you can deem that fornication. You are severely wrong to call it adultery.”
The lawyers couldn’t understand it. Didn’t Hunt himself admit to kissing another man’s wife? No, said Hunt. He “never kissed her lips in my life.”
The lawyers pushed back again: You admitted you “awkwardly fondled” her. So what the hell was that then?
Hunt’s response: “I did awkwardly fondle her because she was coming on to me.”
He went on to say, “I continued to refuse. She continued to seduce.”
At one point, the lawyers note that the victim was roughly the age of Hunt’s own daughter—in her early 30s. It led to this vomit-inducing exchange:
Excuse me while I take a cold shower to wipe all this cringe off of me…
Elsewhere in the deposition, Hunt admitted that he “fondled and kissed her breast” for “a couple of minutes.” (Still not adultery, though!) And he knew it was consensual and that she was “enjoying it,” he explained, because she never pushed back against him.
Nothing screams enthusiastic consent like a woman who puts up “no resistance” and has a blank stare on her face… As experts will tell you, however, many victims believe that pushing back in the moment will only make the situation worse, so they conclude that giving the attacker what he wants is the safest course of action. Hunt treats that as consensual sex.
In short, Hunt says there was no adultery involved because he never had intercourse with his victim. He fondled her. He touched her. He kissed her breasts. But he insists it was all consensual, even though she says otherwise. To call that sexual assault doesn’t feel like a stretch, much less defamation. But even putting aside the lawsuit, to watch a former Southern Baptist leader insist that what he did wasn’t “adultery” is to stretch the definition of that word beyond comprehension. It makes you wonder how shitty the rest of his advice was when he was in a position to counsel couples.
Remember that the SBC investigators only included this story about Hunt in their report because they found the victim’s explanation to be credible but not Hunt’s. Hunt’s whole argument is that his inclusion in that report made him a pariah among those who would pay to have him speak at their churches, but even that’s not really the case because he seems to have a steady stream of speaking gigs, as explained by Baptist News:
The attorney then lists a series of six conferences and asks Hunt if he still speaks at those, to which he replies yes.
“How many days would you estimate in 2023 you were booked or on the road for speaking engagements,” the lawyer asks.
“Probably 24 Sundays of the year and then the three conferences,” Hunt says, not accounting for two of the conferences he just moments before said he had done in 2023.
And this year alone, he’s already done five men’s conferences, he said.
At one point in that exchange, the lawyer asked Hunt how he put together the material for his speeches. His response is telling:
“Being a man.” That makes him an expert, apparently, on topics like “lust,” “temptation,” and (don’t-you-dare-use-the-word) adultery.
If Hunt wasn’t an anti-LGBTQ preacher who made sexual ethics a focal point in his personal ministry, maybe this wouldn’t have to be a public story… though I would argue it still deserved to be taken seriously because (1) if the allegations were true, it would be a serious crime and (2) he used his religious authority to gain unearned trust from another woman.
Either way, it’s important to remember that Hunt has always pushed the false idea that a Christian ethic means taking the moral high road. Yet he’s a living example of how Christianity can sometimes just be an excuse to cover up bad behavior. He implied that those who reject his belief system are more likely to be sinners worthy of condemnation while never taking those beliefs seriously himself. He acted like his marriage was worthy of praise while treating monogamous same-sex couples as if they were being led by the devil.
He’s not the only Christian leader to be outed as a complete hypocrite. Ted Haggard and Jerry Falwell, Jr. had their reputations destroyed for similar reasons. (At least they were never accused of assault.) But Hunt seems intent on making sure this story stays in the public eye by making the idiotic argument that it never should have been told.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
It wasn't adultery so that makes what he did okay? As disgusting as they are, these things have lost their ability to shock. It's now more of an expectation. If people weren't so willing to delegate an important part of their thinking to the clergy, there would far fewer of these events to report on. People have been conditioned for centuries to believe organized religion is essential to their lives. It isn't, and it's hard to see how organized religion has contributed much of anything to human well-being.
Christopher Hitchens said it a long time ago, how astonishing the things that could be done by a person, were he only to add the title "Reverend" to his name. That sums up what has happened here with Johnny Hunt and his sexual depredations against the victim referred to in this article. What I continue to boggle at is the fact that the victim's husband didn't go to the police forthwith and file charges! Yes, of course, that would put both of them on the outs with Hunt's congregation, and it's almost certainly why they didn't. Then, naturally, Hunt goes through this "secret restoration process" and supposedly is in the clear until the SBC had the unmitigated nerve to mention his name in a report regarding sexual abuse in their organization. And of course, madness follows.
The fox continues to guard the chicken coop, as far as yours truly is concerned. It's long since been demonstrated that churches cannot effectively discipline their own personnel as it comes to issues such as this. Local and/or state law enforcement authorities must and should be engaged, indictments issued and trials conducted, if this aberrant behavior is to be stopped.
Do NOT hold your breath.