Let's All Read This Lawsuit About Creepy Assaulting (Allegedly!!) Masturbating Quiverfull Pastor Guy

Last year, Douglas Phillips, the head of Vision Forum Ministries, one of those deeply creepy Quiverfull churches, and total superfriend of Clown Car Vagina Family Duggars, stepped down after revealing he'd had a "lengthy, inappropriate affair" with a ladyperson. He kinda sorta forgot to mention that the "inappropriate affair" was actually a 6-year pattern of (ALLEGEDLY, JESUS) grooming and sexually abusing one of his parishioners, which is actually a tad more than inappropriate. Now the woman, Lourdes Torres-Manteufel, has sued Phillips and Vision Forum Ministries and the complaint, as the kids say, is a doozy. 

How many counts does this lawsuit contain? All of them, Katie! She's suing Phillips for assault, battery, sexual battery, inflicting emotional distress upon her, and frauding her (more on that later), and suing Vision Forum for negligent supervision and retention, which basically means they knew full well he was sexually assaulting Torres and decided to do nothing about it and let him stay on as leader. That is a lot of things! Let's lawsplain AND read the best/worst parts of the 30-page complaint, shall we?

On one level, this case is about Phillips (ALLEGEDLY) sexually assaulting Torres over a number of years, pretty much every time he got her alone. These excerpts are disgusting, so read or don't read accordingly.

While Ms. Torres was living with Douglas Phillips and his family in October of 2007, Douglas Phillips entered Ms. Torres’s bedroom and without her consent began touching her breasts, stomach, back, neck, and waist. Phillips then began to masturbate and ejaculated on her. Ms. Torres asked Phillips to stop and broke down crying. Despite Ms. Torres’s repeated requests for Phillips to stop masturbating and ejaculating on her, Phillips proceeded to return and repeat this perverse and offensive conduct. Each night that Phillips returned, Ms. Torres requested that he stop. Defendant blatantly disregarded her requests but continued to masturbate and ejaculate on her each night.

See? That does not sound inappropriate. That sounds crime-y and assault-y. But where things really get interesting, and by "interesting" we mean "more terrible," is the way the lawsuit details how Scientology-ish the whole Quiverfull movement is. First step, get all insular and government-fearing.

There is a pervasive sense within Phillips’s tight circle of people that they are engaged in a cosmic war, and that they avoid contact with the government and other outside groups that might hold them accountable or ask questions. Phillips used his training as a lawyer to help foster an unregulated community that operated as a “total institution” where Ms. Torres would have limited access to outside support as she came to see her situation as abusive.

You smell that? That's the smell of fresh cult in the morning. Next step, create an internal disciplinary system that actively discourages people from going to the cops or the courts.

Douglas Phillips’s community had its own church-court system. Disputes were brought before a board of all male elders in what resembled a legal proceeding without any of the rights of the accused in secular courts. For Ms. Torres, this system would force her to go up against Phillips [....] If Ms. Torres were to lose, she likely would be excommunicated from her church and all other churches that are legitimate in the eyes of her community. Seeking advice from others would have been labeled as gossip and treated as a very serious sin. One could be excommunicated for this, a practice that very much protects the men in power.

Step three: train ladies to believe that their sole job is to please the old creepy patriarchs.

Voddie Baucham, a leader in the patriarchal and quiverful movement, explains the patriarchal men’s desire to be revered by younger women: “A lot of men are leaving their wives for younger women because they yearn for attention from younger women. And God gave them a daughter who can give them that.”

And that, people, is about the most shudder-inducing thing you'll read today. Dudes crave younger ladies, so God gives them a daughter! Yay God!

There's also one million more paragraphs about how the Quiverfull movement works, which is to say it is gross and awful and pretty much designed to make sure someone like Torres would never come forward even though the leader of the church was masturbating on her all the time. Oh, and he was also totally telling her he would leave his wife and marry her, which is where the fraud part comes in: he basically lied to her and promised her a thing -- marriage -- that he never intended to give her in order to induce her into letting him use her sexually.

Are you full up on terrible yet, or would you like us to cram more of this lawsuit at your facehole? Too bad, we are going to, because we had to read the whole fucking thing. Under Texas law, Phillips is considered a mental health professional, which is totally correct because he was providing some bullshit form of counseling to his parishioners, likely instead of letting them talk to an actual licensed mental health person who could actually help them. So, Phillips was abusing Torres while she was a patient under his care, which leads us to the sexual exploitation count of the complaint: it is a no no to fuck your patient, because that person cannot really consent to sex with you, given that you are their goddamn therapist.

So let's sum up: Douglas Phillips? Terrible. Vision Forum Ministries? Terrible, and also too incomprehensible meaningless name. What the fuck is a "vision forum"? Quiverfull movement? So fucking terrible.

Jesus, we need a Silkwood shower to get this lawsuit out of our brains now.

[ Right Wing Watch / Torres v. Phillips ]