Five Women Accuse Pentecostal Preacher Joe Campbell of Child Sexual Abuse in 1970s, 1980s, NBC News Investigation Finds

The women have spent decades trying to forget, but some memories still haunt them. Several describe the children’s pastor who wrapped them in his arms and told them frightening stories about demons, then assaulted them in spaces they can still picture, including a church nursery, a childhood bedroom and a garage during a youth group sleepover. They say this was the hidden side of the public ministry of Joseph Lyle Campbell, a Pentecostal preacher who built a national following with sermons on sin, salvation and America’s moral decline. An NBC News investigation found that Campbell has repeatedly faced accusations of child sexual abuse over several decades as he preached from church to church across the South and Midwest.

Five women told NBC News that Campbell, now 67, sexually assaulted them when they were children in the 1970s and 1980s. One said he molested her in Oklahoma once or twice a week for three years, starting when she was about 9. Another said that in Arkansas, after she became a teen mother, Campbell invited her to live with him and then raped her repeatedly. In Missouri, two women described abuse that occurred at Campbell’s home, one at age 14 and one when she had just turned 15. One of the accusers, now an adult, told NBC News that Campbell lured her to his home as a teenager and assaulted her, and said she hopes a judge will one day find him guilty. Campbell has denied the allegations. NBC News reported that the allegations have not been resolved in court in the accounts provided to it.

Some accusers took their concerns to pastors, local police and prosecutors, child welfare workers and federal law enforcement, beginning in the 1980s when many of them were still teenagers. According to the accounts gathered by NBC News, Campbell denied the allegations each time and remained in ministry. Congregants reported sexual misconduct as early as 1983, when Campbell was a young preacher rising in the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination. Parents trusted him to keep their children overnight and to bring them to youth revivals, until some children returned with accounts of Campbell showing them pornography and taking girls behind closed doors.

The Assemblies of God told NBC News that allegations reached its national office in 1988. The Springfield, Missouri-based denomination said it banished Campbell the following year and that the accusations “were reported to the appropriate legal authorities.” NBC News reported that accusers say church leaders allowed Campbell to continue preaching for years, which they say gave him access to more children.

Campbell moved to the Missouri Ozarks in the early 1990s to start a nondenominational church and a youth campground, Camp Bell, which he has described as “a real life Neverland.” NBC News found that the congregation he built became a haven for people accused or convicted of sexually abusing children, and that Campbell allowed some of these individuals to preach, teach Sunday school and volunteer with children. In 2016, he began working for the PTL Television Network, which has broadcast his sermons nationally. After reporters contacted Campbell, the network removed years of his sermons from its website. Campbell did not respond to numerous inquiries from NBC News, including letters, calls, emails and visits to his home and camp, and the network also did not respond.

NBC News also reviewed hundreds of pages of letters and emails, police and court files, and diary entries written by one accuser as a teenager. Interviews with more than two dozen people, including friends, family, former church members and retired law enforcement officials, supported parts of the women’s accounts, and nine people, including four men, told NBC News they had their own encounters with Campbell as children. For years, the women felt isolated, and some said the trauma led to anxiety and relationship struggles that lasted into adulthood. Beginning in 2000, they found one another and formed a close circle of support around their shared experience, a bond that gave them comfort in the years after they had been unheard (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

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