This article is part of “Pastors and Prey,” a series investigating sex abuse allegations in the Assemblies of God.
TULSA, Okla. — The women kept their eyes fixed on the man seated three rows ahead of them as they waited for his case to be called in a Tulsa County courtroom.
It had been decades since they had seen pastor Joe Campbell, the Pentecostal preacher they say sexually abused them as children.
The hearing was procedural. But for the four women, it was anything but.
They’d come to send a message: “We’re not those little girls anymore,” Lisa Ball said.
Nearly a month after his arrest, Campbell, 68, appeared before an Oklahoma district court judge Monday on charges that he sexually abused two girls, including Ball, in the 1980s. The brief hearing focused on the terms of Campbell’s release while he awaits trial. For his accusers, the appearance marked a long-awaited reckoning.
“It’s exciting knowing that it’s here, what we’ve been waiting for all these decades,” said Kerri Jackson, now 53, who has said Campbell sexually abused her repeatedly in Tulsa in the early 1980s, beginning when she was about 9.
Campbell is charged with first-degree rape in connection with Jackson’s allegations and one count of lewd or indecent acts against Ball, 56, who says Campbell invited her to live with him after she became a teen mother and then sexually abused her repeatedly.
Campbell has not entered a plea. If he is convicted, he faces the possibility of life in prison. Neither he nor his lawyer responded when a reporter approached them for comment outside the courtroom.
Campbell’s appearance was the latest development in a case that grew out of an NBC News investigation last year documenting years of sexual abuse allegations against the longtime preacher. Jackson, Ball and three other women told NBC News that Campbell sexually abused them as children in the 1970s and ’80s when he was a young pastor in the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination. Nine other people, including four men, said Campbell showed them pornography, made lewd comments or touched them inappropriately when they were children during the same period.
Beginning when they were still teenagers, some of Campbell’s accusers reported his behavior to pastors, law enforcement and child welfare officials. Time and again, they said, the complaints went nowhere and Campbell remained in ministry.
