Guidepost Solutions also reported that Hunt told investigators he never entered the room of the woman he has been accused of sexually assaulting or sat on the balcony of her condo while on vacation with his family.
Hunt further claimed he had “no contact whatsoever” with the survivor and denied the survivor’s claims that he kissed her, pulled at her shorts, fondled her, or made any sexualized comments towards her.
Investigators determined Hunt not to be credible in their report, but they did conclude that the pastor and survivor’s testimony was credible due to the corroboration by four other witnesses—including Hunt’s acknowledgment there had been some type of interaction with the survivor.
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Lawsuit Says SBC, Guidepost Solutions Used Hunt as ‘Their Scapegoat’
The suit described Hunt’s interaction with the survivor as a “private failing by Pastor Johnny,” stating that the “story should have ended there. But it didn’t.”
“Like the Catholic church before it,” the suit states, “the SBC was facing allegations that it had improperly ignored reports of child molestation, rape, and other sex crimes occurring in SBC-affiliated churches for years, enabling perpetrators to move from church to church with impunity.”
Citing the Houston Chronicle’s 2019 six-part article series titled “Abuse of Faith,” which pulled back the curtain on sexual misconduct that had been occurring within SBC churches for 20 years, the suit points to the fact that others named “were convicted of or pleaded guilty to sex crimes.”
“Pastor Johnny had nothing to do with these awful allegations. Nonetheless, the SBC, its leadership, and the firm hired for ‘damage control’—Defendant Guidepost Solutions LLC—decided to use Pastor Johnny as their scapegoat,” the suit claims.
The suit goes on to state that Hunt’s encounter with the survivor should have never been included in the Guidepost Solutions report, because it “had nothing to do with the types of reports that led to Guidepost’s engagement.”
RELATED: SBC Sexual Abuse Survivor Tiffany Thigpen: The Four Pastors Have Done Johnny Hunt ‘A Disservice’
“On May 22, 2022, Guidepost, the SBC and its leadership publicly released a report that purported to focus on whether the SBC’s executive leadership had inappropriately responded to allegations of child and other sexual abuse,” the suit reads. “But the first name mentioned in the report was Pastor Johnny—not because he was accused of ignoring reports of child or other abuse and not because he was accused of some similarly heinous crime. Instead, Pastor Johnny was named because the woman with whom he had the brief, extramarital encounter in 2010 had disclosed that encounter to the Guidepost investigators.”
Hunt’s suit claims that it was a “strategic decision” by Guidepost Solutions to feature him in their report as a way 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.”