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In a news story first broken by the Los Angeles Times, then reported across the globe by media outlets ranging from Britain's The Scotsman newspaper to Russia's Pravda, televangelist Paul Crouch has been cited for homosexual and other misconduct.
Crouch, founder of Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), the world's largest Christian television network, reportedly carried on a tawdry sexual relationship with a TBN employee, Enoch Lonnie Ford.
Ford, an ex-convict, drug user and convicted child molester, had been employed by TBN as a limo driver, telephone receptionist, and also as a photographer, even though he had few job skills and did not know how to operate a camera.
Gay lovers Ford and Crouch evidently had a falling out, and a legal dispute ensued. Ford was given $425,000 in hush money by Crouch, a TBN lawyer says, and he agreed to keep quiet about his and Crouch's sexual relationship.
| Paul Crouch and his alleged homosexual lover, Enoch Lonnie Ford (right), as pictured in the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 12, 2004, page A29. |
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However, more recently, Ford came back to demand a staggering ten million dollars from Crouch and TBN, or else! Allegedly, TBN and Crouch then offered one million dollars to Ford in exchange for his not publishing a finished book manuscript that Ford had threatened to publish detailing the gay tryst between he and lover Crouch.
In the unpublished manuscript, Ford alleges that Paul Crouch not only had gay sex with him, but forced him to submit to sex to keep his job. Ford also says he and Crouch visited an L.A. area nightclub together and spent two nights at the fancy and luxurious Regent Wilshire Hotel in ritzy Beverly Hills, California. According to Ford they also had sex together at a cabin at a Lake Arrowhead resort owned by TBN.
TBN and Crouch admit that $425,000 hush money was paid Ford, but, predictably, deny all other charges. The broadcast network's attorneys are asking a judge to order Ford to keep his end of the hush money bargain by killing the potentially damning manuscript.
According to L.A.Times reporter William Lobdell, when Paul Crouch's youngest son, Matt, first learned of his father's sexual transgressions he told TBN lawyer David Middlebrook, "I am devasted. I am confronted with having to face the fact that my father is a homosexual."
James Logden, founder of an internet web site promoting the gay lifestyle, told Power of Prophecy, "Gay people were not taken by surprise. Many of us had always suspected the flamboyant Paul Crouch was queer. After all, he's married to puffy-lipped, pink-coifed Jan Crouch, a drag queen if there ever was one."
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