“This is written notice to @bartbarber @keahbone @jnelson @toddbenkert: Quit contacting @abby_e_o & HK w/ the “we care for you” schtick,” reads a post on Twitter by Robert G. Callahan, an attorney representing an alleged sex abuse victim against the Southern Baptist Convention. “If you care, you & the EC can vote to settle your suits next week. 7 figures. Further contact may be reported as harassment for prosecution.”
This sounds pretty serious, so what’s going on? Capstone Report reports that the “SBC President Bart Barber and his sidekick Todd Benkert are allegedly harassing an alleged abuse survivor in hopes she will drop her lawsuit against the SBC or commit suicide, her attorney alleged in a bombshell Twitter thread.” Below is a screenshot of the alleged message transcription that Todd Benkert left on the victim’s voicemail.
According to Capstone, the attorney, “alleged that SBC Elites including Barber and Benkert were inappropriately attempting to contact his client in hopes she would either drop the lawsuit or kill herself.”
“Lemme explain how dark this is,” Callahan continued in his tweet thread. “The foolishness of directly contacting a party in a suit is too great, too unethical to be accidental. Thus, IMO, the strategy is to guilt HK into dismissing suit or push her into a mental break & unaliving herself – literally killing the suit.”
The attorney appears to be accusing SBC President Bart Barber and his associate Todd Benkert of causing the victim to have a mental breakdown or commit suicide. Benkert has a history of mistreating victims of sexual abuse, as he did to Jennifer Buck, the wife of Texas pastor Tom Buck. Benkert allegedly knows who leaked a draft of Jennifer’s abuse story without permission but has not confessed, despite being repeatedly questioned by the Bucks.
