Hillsong Church Australia’s legal settlement with a former student who was groped by a worship leader fell apart on Thursday when the survivor refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
“I is not going to surrender my voice,” Anna Crenshaw, daughter of Pennsylvania megachurch pastor Ed Crenshaw, told Australian reporters. “This has never been about money for me but about justice and accountability.”
According to lawyers, one condition of the agreement was a joint statement saying the church reported the assault immediately. Crenshaw claims Hillsong—embroiled on the time in a scandal over founder Brian Houston’s failure to report his father Frank’s sexual abuse of a young boy—actually waited 4 or five months to contact police.
Crenshaw was studying at Hillsong College in 2016 when Jason Mays, an administrative staff member and volunteer worship leader, put his hand on her inner thigh. The young woman—18 on the time—got up to depart, but Mays, 24, grabbed her, wrapped his arms round her waist, and touched her legs, butt, and crotch, in accordance with a statement Crenshaw wrote several years later.
“He lifted up my shirt and was kissing my stomach,” Crenshaw, now 26, said in a TV news interview. “So I’m just, like, stuck there with this guy groping me.”
Crenshaw didn’t immediately report the incident because, she said, she was ashamed.
She also didn’t consider she could report Mays to human resources, since the department was run by Mays’s father. Two years later, a counselor pushed her to report back to someone, and Crenshaw went to the top of pastoral care, who said, “I’m sure he’s really sorry,” according to Crenshaw.
The church then assigned Crenshaw to work on a team with Mays’s wife. After several months and pressure from Crenshaw’s father, Hillsong reported the incident to local police.
Mays pleaded guilty to indecent assault in 2020. He was sentenced to 2 years’ probation and mandatory counseling, but no criminal conviction will go on his record.
Mays told Eternity that he accepted he “crossed a boundary” after getting very drunk. But he claimed the media blew the main points out of proportion and made him out to be a monster due to its anti-Christian agenda.
“I wish my apologies had been enough,” he said. “There must be reconciliation. Instead, this story of ours has evolved right into a weapon that’s been used against the Church.”
Mays later returned to work at Hillsong. The church told Crenshaw’s father that there have been “no additional concerns” about Mays, and that “we even have an obligation to look after Jason, his wife, and family.”
Hillsong’s founder also downplayed the incident to the congregation—saying it was really just an attempt at a hug—and told them “the Lord has forgiven Jason, and we felt he deserved one other likelihood.”
Crenshaw sued the church. She claimed negligence and breach of duty.
According to her lawsuit, the church “had no proper or adequate policy or procedure in place for the right or adequate handling of complaints of sexual assault” and had did not take any precautions to guard students, interns, or volunteers “from the final risk of sexual assault by its members.”
The church denied the allegations. It also claimed to not be legally liable, since Mays was not “acting in any capability referring to his paid employment or volunteer duties with Hillsong” when he touched the scholar inappropriately.
The litigation was set to go to trial on Monday in New South Wales. Hillsong, nonetheless, offered to settle the case for an undisclosed sum of cash, and the trial was taken off the court calendar. When the attorneys returned the next day to work out the main points, though, they got here to an impasse.
Hillsong required a non-disclosure agreement. Crenshaw refused.
She wouldn’t conform to “get their money and walk away without my voice,” she told reporters. She wanted “accountability and real sense of justice and hope that they’d really change moving forward.”
Christian abuse victims and victims’ advocates have increasingly opposed using non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements, claiming the common legal tools called NDAs are widely misused to guard powerful institutions from accountability.
NDAs were originally designed to guard tech industry “trade secrets.” They are actually utilized by many industries and are sometimes written so broadly that they include anything an worker learns in the middle of employment.
Many evangelical churches and ministries require staff to sign them, though it is just not clear what trade secrets the organizations could have. One agreement reviewed by CT included the prohibition of the disclosure of any “information regarding ministries,” in addition to the names of anyone the staff member had ever worked with, regardless that their names, photos, and bios were listed on the parachurch’s website. Many of the Christian NDAs seen by CT also include prohibitions against disclosing the non-disclosure agreement, cloaking even the secrecy in secrecy.
It is just not clear whether these agreements would delay in court. To date, they’ve not been tested.
There have been a variety of recent efforts to limit the scope of NDAs. In the US, President Joe Biden signed a law saying these legal agreements cannot cover sexual assault or harassment in the event that they are signed before the incident as a part of the conditions of employment.
The UK is currently considering laws that will say NDAs cannot prevent someone from reporting information to police, lawyers, government regulators, counselors, or close relations. The head of the justice department said, “We are bringing an end to the murky world of non-disclosure agreements, that are too often used to comb criminality under the carpet.”
Not everyone agrees that goes far enough, though.
“We need an entire ban of NDAs in cases of sexual misconduct, harassment and bullying,” a center-left member of the UK parliament said, “to be sure that no victim is silenced.”
A gaggle called #NDAfree was organized in 2021 to push Christian organizations to stop using NDAs and to encourage people to not sign them.
“I’m not against settlement as a process,” one in every of the organizers told CT. “But using payment and NDAs as a method to not investigate something, that’s totally unacceptable.”
Crenshaw, for her part, said she had been hopeful that Hillsong’s approach to accountability had modified with the departure of founder Brian Houston. The condition of an NDA as a part of the settlement convinced her she was fallacious.
“It’s very disheartening and devastating,” Crenshaw said. “I believe that is just evidence that despite their latest leadership, they’ve the identical tactics.”
The Hillsong trial has been rescheduled on the New South Wales court calendar for May 13.
