Her allegations brought down megachurch pastor Bruxy Cavey. Then the anonymous trolls came for her.
In the world of the internet, nobody knows you better than the people who know you least.
And here was one of them: a former follower who claims to have been silenced by a powerful pastor for daring to criticize an evangelical leader’s marriage.
In fact, that man, who goes by the pseudonym “Bruxy Cavey,” had long been a critic of the megachurch called Willow Creek Community Church. When his critics were discovered – and they were – Cavey resigned from his position.
On April 24, 2017, Cavey wrote an e-mail to his church’s board of directors. It was not an emotional pitch for rehiring him, or his wife, or for moving their family to Colorado, or whatever the subject of the message was. It was a reasoned argument about the church’s direction and its leadership.
When you read it now, Cavey’s e-mail sounds like a reasonable plea for church leaders to reconsider a decision that had made him very uncomfortable: the revelation of his teenage daughter’s relationship with the husband of one of his church members.
Yet, before long, the e-mail was being reposted on an evangelical message board, where another person claimed to have been a follower of a famous pastor who had been caught having adulterous affairs with two different teenage girls. The other person, who goes by the pseudonym “Michael,” claimed he had confronted a man at a Christian music festival in 2017. He said the man claimed to have been the subject of a sex scandal in the 1970s, and he said he had seen the man’s name in a book written in the 1960s.
The first story was true – except that it was not the first accusation. There are hundreds of others on YouTube, on Facebook, and in other social media accounts that were meant to show the man “caught in the act,” or to make him “an example of some type of sexual hypocrisy.”
A closer look at what Michael wrote reveals that the man he accused is not just Bruxy
