TBN founders Paul and Jan Crouch, and granddaughter
Brittany Koper
She may have been an heir apparent to the world’s
mightiest Christian broadcasting empire, but Brittany Crouch Koper grew
up in Irvine thinking she was a regular kid.
It wasn’t until grade school, when the teacher asked what
everyone did over winter break, that the truth began to hit. ”I said, ‘We went
to Texas to shoot a family Christmas TV special,’” Koper said, recalling the
shock of her classmates. “That’s when I started to realize that not everyone
was on TV for the holidays, and that my grandparents weren’t like other
people’s grandparents.”
Indeed. Her grandparents are Paul and Jan
Crouch, founders of the Trinity Broadcasting Network empire, which
now has 16 global television networks distributed on 76
satellites, multiple foreign and domestic affiliates, and thousands of
cable affiliates on every continent save Antarctica, in its own words — not to
mention nearly $1 billion in net assets.
When TV sets came into the classrooms at Woodbridge
High School, kids would tune to TBN for kicks. “People who didn’t know
would say, ‘Is that really your grandma?’ I was halfway embarrassed and halfway
proud. They accomplished so much. You have to be proud of that portion of it.
They came from nothing and created this huge empire.”
And now that empire is under attack, largely due to Koper
herself.
Koper, who worked for Trinity from 2007 to 2011, has accused
the mighty Christian broadcaster of playing fast and loose with the ministry’s
millions, and provided internal
documents to back up her claims. She says it unlawfully
distributed charitable assets worth more than $50 million to the
company’s directors (her family members); bought a$50 million jet
through “a sham loan to an alter ego corporation” for the personal use of the
Crouches, as well as a $100,000 motor home that’s used as a mobile
residence for her grandmother’s dogs; falsely reported “multiple residential
estates” as guest homes or church parsonages to avoid income disclosures; doled
out meal expenses of up to a half-million dollars per company director;
paid personal chauffeurs with Trinity funds disguised as medical payments; and
engaged in “multiple cover-ups of sexual and criminal scandals.”
She has provided documentation to law enforcement and the
Internal Revenue Service, and said she is cooperating with their
inquiries (though neither the IRS nor the Orange County District Attorney’s
office will comment).
If the things Koper says are true, laws have been broken,
and family members could go to prison. How does one transform from insider to
accuser?
‘CLEANING HOUSE’
“I don’t want to sound nuts,” said Koper, 27, during a
lunch break from her HR job in New York. “But God uses people to different
ends, and he’s using me to expose this. He doesn’t want the money-changers in
his house anymore. God is using me to clean house and get TBN into the hands of
someone who will make sure it’s run properly.” She sighed with resignation.
“Fabulous. OK. I can handle it. I’m strong. I’m educated. God has provided for
us this whole way, I expect he will continue to provide for us.”
Trinity’s take on her journey from insider to accuser is
very different.
“…I can only say that under no circumstance is her
‘decision’ an effort ‘to do the right thing,’ ” said Colby May, an
attorney for Trinity, by email. “Instead, as I have explained previously, she
and her husband, Michael Koper, are attempting nothing more than a
diversionary tactic from their own embezzlement, fraudulent actions, and
deceit.”
That, Koper’s attorney said, is nonsense. Koper and her
husband admit to taking company loans for a house and condo, but say those
loans were approved by higher-ups with clear repayment schedules.
“Brittany objects to the free TBN parsonages provided to
her uncle and grandparents. She refuses her own and instead takes out a loan
for her humble house like the rest of us, and then TBN has the hypocritical
audacity to call Brittany’s loan the embezzlement? Brittany’s loan is the
precise legal opposite of embezzlement, and yet all you hear Colby May singing
is ‘I know you are, but what am I’ whenever TBN gets caught at something,” said
Tymothy MacLeod, Koper’s attorney, by email.
More on that back-and-forth soon.
GRANDMA, A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND
Jan Crouch and Brittany Koper
When Koper was young, Trinity’s glitz and glamour
happened at a distance. Her dad, Paul Crouch Jr., ran his own Christian
production company, separate from TBN. Her mom stayed at home with the three
kids. They lived in an upper-middle class Irvine community, Koper played
softball at Woodbridge High, and they mostly saw their grandparents around birthdays
and holidays. “I had a beautiful childhood,” she said.
In high school, she and her grandmother grew very close.
“She was every girl’s dream come true,” Koper said. “She has a funny sense of
humor — really different from what you see on TV. We’d talk about boys, gossip,
get magazines and look through at the celebrities. It was a teenage-girl type
of relationship. She’s the one who encouraged me to dye my hair blonde, wear
blue contacts and go on a diet. When she lived in the mansion in Newport Beach,
I’d go over and she’d do my make up and put her wigs on me. We’d go to movies
together, she’d take me on shopping sprees for clothes, and when I went away to
college, I was very homesick. She’s the first person I would call to talk to.”
Those shopping sprees — and birthday extravaganzas that
cost thousands of dollars — were always paid on the TBN credit card, Koper
said. She was a teenager then. She didn’t think anything of it.
Koper went to college at St. John’s, a Catholic
university in New York, on a softball scholarship. That’s where she met her
husband Michael. They married in 2007, and moved back to California. Her
husband had a scholarship to Whittier Law School, and she began work on
her MBA at Concordia University in Irvine. She was 22.
RETURN TO GOLDEN STATE
“When we first came to California, I said, no way am I
working at TBN,” she said. “But I talked to my dad, and he said Ruth
(her great aunt, who was approaching 80) could use help in personnel
department. So, I thought, OK, I’ll work there through grad school.”
And since her husband Michael was in law school, he went
to work for John Casoria, TBN’s in-house counsel, in the legal
department.
“That’s when the reality of everything — this illusion
that had been created for me about my family and what they did — really became
apparent,” she said. “Before then, I really wasn’t close enough to what went on
on a daily basis to know. It wasn’t until I got my education that I said,
‘Wait, I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to be doing this.’ ”
At first, she just tried to understand what was going on.
Every dollar TBN spent was supposed to further its ministry purpose — to spread
the gospel.
Those five bottles of expensive wine, were those a
ministry expense? Guess you could say that’s communion wine, she reasoned.
Those expensive dinners with family members charged to
TBN credit cards? “That’s a business dinner. That’s what their own general
counsel is saying. ‘John (Casoria) says it’s OK.’ You rationalize things in
your head: I guess that could be a ministry expense if you throw the word
‘church’ in a couple of times. I was searching for ways to make these things
ministry expenses.”
Matthew and Laurie Crouch/TBN Newswire
It was the expenses charged to Trinity by her Uncle Matthew
Crouch — her dad’s younger brother — that were the last straw. “His
lifestyle makes my grandparents’ lifestyle look tame,” she said. “You can’t
even compare. My grandfather has a luxury car — but Matt had a new luxury car
every other week, and his wife would have one, too. TBN remodeled an entire
TBN-owned house for them, so they could have a closet for their designer
clothes. That’s where it was, all right, I look the other way on other stuff
that’s in the gray area, but you have to be kidding me.”
TBN, a nonprofit, had sent more than $50 million
to Matthew Crouch’s for-profit film company over the course of a decade, she
said.
By 2010 and 2011, she had her masters degree and her
husband has his law degree, “and we more or less learned what things should
look like,” she said. She started asking a lot of questions of TBN’s auditors
and lawyers, “really hoping they would stand up with me.”
That’s not quite how it turned out.
In August, After Koper and her husband were appointed
treasurer and secretary, they wrote a memo detailing their concerns to Paul
Crouch Sr. By October, they had been fired. And every immediate family member
has gone down with them, including Koper’s father, Paul Crouch Jr., and her
little sister, Carra. She and her husband returned the loans and property they
had through Trinity, but Trinity turned everything back on them and sued them
in retaliation for blowing the whistle, Koper and her attorney maintain.
As the web of suits and counter-suits spiral, the Kopers
moved back to New York for a fresh start. They now live in her in-laws’
basement.
‘SURREAL’
“For me to be in the situation I’m in currently, it’s
surreal,” she said. “It hasn’t really sunk in.”
Her grandmother hasn’t spoken to her since August.
Repeated calls to Jan Crouch go unanswered. “I was heartbroken,” she said.
“It’s like I’m dead to them. ”
Thanksgiving was particularly hard: Jan Crouch’s special
turkey stuffing is a holiday staple, and if Koper wasn’t actually with her
grandmother, they’d be on the phone, with Jan Crouch walking her through the
recipe so Koper could make it herself.
Not this year. Koper spent much of the holiday weeping,
and it was the same on Christmas. ” If we didn’t spend it together, we’d send
presents and call and say, ‘Jesus loves you.’ This year, she got everyone in my
family a gift except for me. I tried to reach her on Christmas day — that was
the last time I tried to reach out to her. I sent her a text that said,
‘Grandmom, I love you so much no matter what. Thank you so much for teaching me
about Jesus.’ I never heard back.”
Koper cried as she recounted this part of the story. ”For
her to cut me out of her life, it’s hard,” she says. “If I saw her tomorrow I’d
run up to her and say ‘I love you and miss you.’ But I forgive her. I’ve
forgiven everyone in my family. I realize they’re human, afraid of what I have
to say. And they should be. So many things they’ve done are unconscionable , if
not illegal.”
Koper has a job working in the human resources department
of a medium-sized company in New York, and her husband’s family has been
terrifically supportive. On days she can’t get out of bed, her husband
encourages her; and on days when he can’t get out of bed, she returns the
favor, she said. When she was on the couch crying over the holidays, her
in-laws were the first to come over and say “Brittany, we love you, no matter
what.” “That’s really what family is about, and it’s unfortunate that my family
has forgotten that,” she said, her voice cracking.
Her friends and in-laws joke that if they’re in a public
place together, no one wants to stand next to her. She checks her brakes before
she drives anywhere. She says a private detective is following her around and
rifling through the trash. “He’s actually a pretty nice guy — he’s just doing
his job,” she said. “I told him, ‘If my grandmother wants to know where I am,
all she has to do is call me and I’ll tell her.’ ”
Koper wants people who have been wronged by TBN to have
the strength to come forward and set things right. If she can provide any
testimony to support their claims, she will. “So many people have been too
scared to come forward,” she said. “I want to encourage them to come forward.
If I have a message, it’s, ‘If you feel like you’ve been wronged, go get an
attorney, because there’s someone willing to tell the truth.’ I’m not going to
be intimidated and frightened into keeping quiet. Ever,” she said.
“I love TBN. It has such potential to be an amazing
outlet for people. I’m a Christian, and my faith is stronger now than when I
was there. I strongly believe in TBN’s mission. If it were under the right
leadership, it would be doing amazing things for the world. This prosperity
gospel, it just makes me sick — but I don’t know. That’s a theological
discussion and I’m not a theologian.”
More Trinity:
- Suit
alleges TBN covered up rape of 13-year-old
- From
beloved granddaughter to exiled accuser: Brittany Koper and TBN
- Settlement
reached in TBN age discrimination case
- TBN
suit: Senior workers ‘too old, too sick, and too lazy'
- Relatives
threatened to ‘destroy' Crouch granddaughter
- TBN
extravagance? Read internal memos for yourself
- TBN
to judge: Stop Watchdog blogger
- Extravagant
spending a pervasive issue for Trinity, internal review says
- Confidential
memo: ‘TBN practices ... violate the IRS Code'
- ‘Christian
sympathy' and ethical violations in Trinity fight?
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