SEBTS indicated that the school’s leadership considers the matter closed.
Shortly after the SEBTS statement was released, Buck referred to it as “a joke.” Now Buck has released a statement of his own.
Buck has also released clips of a Zoom meeting he had with SEBTS leadership, which he posted to Twitter. The meeting, which appears to be a May 6 meeting mentioned in Buck’s full statement, included Tom and Jennifer Buck, SEBTS president Danny Akin, Prior, and at least one other woman who did not appear on screen but whose voice can be heard, likely Denhollander.
In one of those clips, Akin and Tom Buck can be seen asking Prior if she had sent the draft to anyone in the past two years. Prior responded that she did not recollect sending it to anybody but had heard rumors that the draft had been circulating.
“I’ve heard, since all this happened, that the draft has been circulating for a while, like, years,” Prior said.
In another clip, Akin revealed that Whitfield, who was the one to communicate directly with the anonymous person seeking to confirm the draft’s authorship, did not disclose his involvement to Akin until two weeks after Akin first asked who the anonymous person had reached out to.
Buck’s full statement, which former news and religion reporter Janet Mefferd wrote and released on the Buck couple’s behalf, responded to SEBTS’s statement section by section.
“Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary never conducted what could be called a full, ‘careful investigation’ into the source of the rough-draft leak,” the statement said. “What’s more, Dr. Akin told Tom in a June 6 email that he planned to scuttle their mutually agreed-upon plans for an independent, third-party investigation into the leak before it even began.”
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“Given the extended delay on launching the investigation, Tom asked Dr. Akin to select a firm by Wednesday, June 8. Dr. Akin emailed Tom back on June 6, indicating that he would not be able to meet that deadline, due to his hectic schedule,” the statement later said. “He also stated that he was going to contact his Board of Trustees and recommend canceling the third-party independent investigation altogether because he said he knew what any investigation would show and, therefore, it would be a wasteful expenditure of God’s money.”
