Granddaughter of TBN's Paul/Jan Crouch Alleges Statutory Rape Covered Up

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2012/06/granddaughter_of_paul_and_jan-crouch_alleges_cover-up.php

Granddaughter of Paul and Jan Crouch Alleges Cover-up of Rape by TBN Employee When She Was 13

A granddaughter of Paul and Jan Crouch, founders of the flock-fleecing Trinity Broadcasting Network, says the company is covering up her rape at the hands of an employee when she was 13 years old.

Carra Crouch, now 19, filed a lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court on June 18 alleging that in April 2006 she was raped in an Atlanta hotel room by Stephen L. Smith, a 30-year-old TBN employee at the time.

The lawsuit alleges battery, sexual battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligence, and is one of several court cases in which Trinity is mired.

Carra Crouch's attorney is Michael Koper, the husband of Brittany Koper, who blew the whistle on alleged financial misdeeds and sexual harassment within the company. Brittany Koper is Carra Crouch's older sister. Michael Koper used to work for Trinity and has been accused by the company of financial misdeeds when he was employed there.

According to Carra Crouch's lawsuit, Jan Crouch had invited her to be a guest on a fundraising "telethon" for the network, and the company paid for her airplane ticket and stay at the hotel.

During the telethon one night, Smith visited Carra Crouch in her hotel room to discuss the telethon and other company matters, then ordered a bottle of wine, according to the lawsuit, which also says Trinity makes it a practice to supply alcohol to employees during business meetings.

According to the lawsuit, Smith coerced her into drinking the wine, which made her intoxicated. She says in the lawsuit that she asked Smith to leave the room, and that he offered her a glass of water to help her feel better. When she drank it, she immediately passed out, according to the lawsuit.

She believes the water contained a date rape drug which caused her to pass out. When she awoke the next morning, she says Smith was laying next to her, and there was blood on her bed sheets. She also claims to have had "severe pain and soreness in her body in places which indicated she had been molested and raped."

Carra Crouch then locked herself in the bathroom and screamed at Smith to leave her room, which he eventually did, the lawsuit says. Later that day, she flew home to California, according to the lawsuit.

Distraught over the incident, Carra Crouch was advised by her mother to inform Jan Crouch and Trinity attorney John Casoria, who also is an ordained minister and a nephew of Paul and Jan.

A meeting took place at the Crouch family mansion in Newport Beach, where, according to the lawsuit, Jan "became furious and began screaming at Ms. Crouch," and began telling her "it is your fault."

Carra Crouch alleges that after the screaming fit thrown by Jan, she approached Casoria, who allegedly became agitated with the 13-year-old, said he didn't believe her, and suggested that she was already sexually active "so it did not really matter," and she "may have propositioned him."

Still, Carra Crouch says Paul, Jan and Casoria actually did believe her accusations, and fired Smith the next working day. She also believes her grandparents and Casoria hid their belief in her accusations so they could "cover up" the incident and make sure it was never reported to the police or to the media.

According to the lawsuit, Casoria fired Smith over the telephone, saying it was a decision by Paul Crouch, that it would be without cause even though Trinity had enough evidence to terminate him with cause, and there was probably enough evidence to bring criminal charges against Smith.

Carra Crouch also alleges that Trinity offered to not disclose the evidence to the police if Smith would not file for unemployment, worker's compensation or an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claim.

The lawsuit also says the Crouches and Casoria, as ordained ministers, were mandated reporters under the Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act.

According to Carra Crouch, none of them made any report of the alleged rape, and she was not allowed to speak with the police or seek counseling from sex abuse therapists.

Michael Koper granted the Weekly, which has requested comment from Carra Crouch, permission to use his client's name in this story.

"We're really not saying anything," Koper said. "The complaint speaks for itself."

Carra Crouch did tell the Orange County Register, which first reported on the lawsuit, that she feels angry, and "Nobody once asked me, 'Carra are you O.K.?'"

Colby May, the attorney for Trinity, said in an email that to his knowledge, Trinity has not been served with the complaint.

"However, based on the document others in the media have sent me, Trinity vehemently denies the allegations and believes them to be without merit and baseless," May said. "Also, the allegations made in the Complaint materially differs from the version Ms. Carra Crouch has reported to third-parties, and is completely at odds with what she told her mother and Trinity at the time. The multiple versions undermine Ms. Crouch's credibility, and support the position that Trinity has certainly done nothing wrong. Unfortunately, such meritless lawsuits have become commonplace in our society, and accordingly, Trinity will fully and vigorously defend itself."

May went on to say that Carra Crouch appears to be a pawn in the larger vendetta of her older sister, Brittany Koper, and Michael Koper, whom he says were fired from Trinity and its related ministry, International Christian Broadcasters "when it was discovered they had embezzled and misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a house and investment condo, among other things, and they have been vainly trying to divert attention from their wrongs ever since."

"This is truly tragic, and is now made more so by the Kopers' calculated use of Ms. Crouch," May said.

All this makes one wonder if God will kill Paul and Jan Crouch's granddaughters.

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TBN Corruption: 180-Pg Declaration by Exiled TBN Granddaughter in Koper v. TBN

http://taxdollars.ocregister.com/2012/05/20/tbn-extravagance-read-internal-memos-for-yourself/155188/

TBN extravagance? Read internal memos for yourself

We’ve been telling you about the charges leveled by the granddaughter of Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Paul and Jan Crouch, who accused the world’s largest Christian broadcaster of playing fast and loose with the ministry’s millions – and then provided internal documents to back up her claims.

Trinity accused her of the true financial misdeeds, called her assertions nonsense, and tried to keep the internal documents she possessed under wraps. They were stolen, and may have been altered, Trinity says.

We’ve been bringing you stories based on Brittany Koper‘s 180-page declaration (Confidential memo: ‘TBN practices … violate the IRS Code’ and Extravagant spending a pervasive issue for Trinity, internal review says) for the past few days, but we hadn’t posted the full Koper document, as it’s quite large.

There have been repeated requests for it from various corners over the past week, and so, after wrestling with Adobe Acrobat and WordPress, we’ve broken it into pieces. You can read the documents yourself by clicking on the links below (and if you don’t see the document on the first try, hit “reload,” and that usually does the trick):

• Pages 1-34 from Brittany Koper Declaration
• Pages 35-69 from Brittany Koper Declaration
• Pages from Pages 70-104 from Brittany Koper Declaration
• Pages 105-130 from Brittany Koper Declaration
• Pages 131- 157 from Brittany Koper Declaration
• Pages 158-180 from Brittany Koper Declaration

There have been a great deal of jaw-dropping allegations in suits related to this one, including that Trinity purchased a $50 million jet through “a sham loan to an alter ego corporation” for the personal use of the Crouches; a $100,000 motor home purchased by Trinity as a mobile residence for Jan Crouch’s dogs; “multiple residential estates” falsely reported as guest homes or church parsonages to avoid income disclosures; meal expenses of up to ahalf-million dollars per company director; “personal chauffeurs compensated with Trinity funds under the guise of medical payments;” and “multiple cover-ups of sexual and criminal scandals.” (Details in Suit: ‘Cover-ups of sexual and criminal scandals’ at TBN)

Koper also accused the world’s largest Christian broadcaster of unlawfully distributing charitable assets worth more than $50 million to the company’s directors.

Trinity Christian Center, which does business as TBN, is a nonprofit in the eyes of Uncle Sam, which means it doesn’t pay taxes on its income. It reported

• revenues of $175.6 million (including donor contributions of $92.5 million),
• expenses of $193.7 million,
• and net assets of $827.6 million at the end of 2010, according to its tax returns.
• Its highest-paid officer was Paul Crouch, with compensation of $400,000.

Losing its tax-exempt status has been the big concern voiced in the documents Koper furnished — which could cost Trinity tens of millions of dollars each year if it came to pass.

Jan Crouch has called TBN Jesus’ TV station, and thanked its donors for keeping it on the air.

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?

TBN Granddaughter Exiled: Koper v. TBN/Paul Crouch

http://taxdollars.ocregister.com/2012/06/08/from-beloved-granddaughter-to-exiled-accuser-brittany-koper-and-tbn/156425/

From beloved granddaughter to exiled accuser: Brittany Koper and TBN

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.”

While working at Trinity, Koper and her husband took money that wasn’t theirs, May said. They acknowledged their wrongs “and purported to want to ‘make it right,’” but after Trinity had recaptured about $500,000 of the more than $1 million the Kopers had taken, cooperation stopped, and Koper “started making threats and a public scandal to try and intimidate a settlement and divert attention from her (and her husband’s) criminality,” May said. “She has continued on that road ever since, even to the point of altering and fabricating documents and continuing to create as big a public scandal as she can. ”

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?