NASHVILLE (TN)
Baptist News Global
June 24, 2019
By Bob Allen
Details behind the “break her down” comment cited by trustee leaders in last year’s firing of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Paige Patterson emerge in a lawsuit now pending in federal court.
A lawsuit in the Sherman Division of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas initiated March 12 and unsealed June 6 claims the Southern Baptist Convention seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, “had a custom of ignoring female students’ complaints of sexual harassment and stalking behavior by male student-employees.”
A former student using the pseudonym Jane Roe claims a seminary student also employed as a plumber on campus began stalking her soon after she enrolled in Southwestern Seminary as an undergraduate student in the fall of 2014. She told one of her professors, the lawsuit claims, who replied the young man could come and talk to the professor any time he wanted.
The man allegedly showed her a gun and told her not to say anything while raping her for the first time in October 2014. Subsequent attacks became physically brutal, the woman says, and twice he forced her to take a “morning after pill” – a form of contraception not covered by SBC insurance plans because the denomination’s leaders view it as morally equivalent to abortion.
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