NASHVILLE (TN)
Baptist News Global [Jacksonville FL]
December 8, 2025
By David Bumgardner and Mark Wingfield
A sprawling collection of discovery material now made public has unearthed explosive new details and previously unknown facts regarding the Southern Baptist Convention, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the sexual abuse allegations involving former professor David Sills and his former student, Jennifer Lyell.
The documents, stemming from Sills’ ongoing defamation lawsuit against the SBC and others, expose a staggering chasm between the supportive public statements made by key denominational leaders and the private doubts, skepticism and hostility expressed in internal communications regarding abuse allegations and the survivor community.
Although Lyell, who became an executive at Lifeway Christian Resources in Nashville, died earlier this year, the legal battle continues. Sills has declined to sue her estate but continues to seek a court judgment against the institutions and leaders he claims scapegoated him.
This article is based on publicly available discovery documents — including sworn depositions and copies of text message records — filed with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. The Sills lawsuit is one of several outstanding cases against the SBC related to sexual abuse claims.
An important caveat for the reader: None of these claims has yet been debated in a court of law. These are the materials that will form the basis of what a potential jury might hear. And as will become clear in reading this article, different players have different memories or interpretations of what happened. Even the written communications such as emails and text messages reflect only what the parties involved knew or believed at that time. It is clear the opinions of some of the key players shifted over time as more information came to light.
Also, key players mentioned here mostly could not respond to BNG’s request for clarification because of the ongoing litigation. One source said: “To my utter frustration, I must refrain from any comment on these matters so long as litigation is pending.”
What is abundantly clear, however, is that the SBC and its institutions lacked sufficient structures or processes to investigate claims of abuse. And all this happened against the backdrop of immense pressure from abuse survivors to make the person in the pew understand there actually is a clergy sexual abuse problem.
To this day, there are competing forces inside the SBC that claim some “victims” have been willing participants in immoral behavior fighting against those who are quick to label sexual behavior as “abuse.”
Lyell became the poster child for this tug-of-war, with some SBC insiders calling her a “whore” and others call her an “abuse survivor.”
She’s gone now, no longer able to tell her own story, and the paper trail is cluttered.
Eric Geiger
Among the thousands of pages of court documents, new details from the deposition of former Lifeway Senior Vice President Eric Geiger provide a harrowing glimpse into the specific nature of the abuse Lyell reported to SBC leadership in 2018 — details that paint a far darker picture than the “morally inappropriate relationship” initially reported to the public by Baptist Press.
According to discovery documents and deposition testimony from Geiger, Lyell allegedly described a theological trap in which she felt compelled to “please the patriarch,” a twisted spiritual justification that allegedly framed years of sexual violence.
The alleged abuse took place over a period of 12 years — beginning while Lyell was a student at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and continuing after she moved to Nashville to work for Lifeway.
When asked to describe Lyell’s initial disclosure, Geiger gave this sworn testimony:
She said, at time, she would go down to the basement even while his wife was upstairs. … The wife even knew that she would go down to the basement and that she would pleasure him in some way.
When asked by counsel if he asked questions about the alleged relationship and why it was ongoing, Geiger replied:
I did ask questions about — because I was trying to understand, “Is this some type of romantic relationship that has now happened between you and David Sills?” I was trying to understand if this was a consensual romantic relationship, and what was described to me was not. And I have heard lots of those as a pastor in my day of people dealing with the fallout of an affair, and that is not the nature of the relationship that was described. This was not roses and dinners. This was go down to the basement and please the patriarch of the family.
Newly revealed allegations from Geiger’s deposition also include claims that Sills pinned Lyell against a wall to forcibly grope her on a mission trip and allegedly sexually assaulted her under a blanket on a plane ride back to the States from a mission trip.
Sills has not yet had the opportunity to respond to these allegations in court.
Discovery documents also show records of Lyell placing multiple phone calls to the Jeffersontown, Ky., Police Department. That was documented in response to conservative writer Megan Basham questioning Lyell’s description of events, her claims to have reported the abuse to police, and her ability to enlist others to corroborate her story.
Lyell said Basham did not contact her case detective to ask for details or attempt to corroborate Lyell’s claims. She said Geiger later called her ahead of the story to warn her of the spin Basham allegedly was going to place on the narrative and to say he corroborated her original disclosure as one of assault and abuse.
The ‘patriarch’ in the basement
The conflict officially exploded within the SBC infrastructure on May 21, 2018. An internal SBTS memorandum authored by Jonathan Austin, executive assistant to SBTS President Al Mohler, records that Thom Rainer, then-CEO of Lifeway, called Mohler to discuss a “serious matter.”
Court documents reference a transcript of that call but neither that transcript nor a recording of the call are included in the public record.
According to the memo, Rainer, along with Geiger, joined a call with Lyell, Mohler and Adam Greenway, then dean of the Billy Graham School of Evangelism at SBTS and later president of Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.
On this call, Lyell accused Sills of “sexual misconduct and assault (all unwanted) over a period of years.” The memo notes that Lyell “did work at Dr. Sills’ home from time to time, which is where the bulk of the alleged misconduct occurred.”
While the memo summarizes the call in bureaucratic terms, Geiger’s deposition offers a graphic account of what Lyell conveyed to these top leaders. Geiger testified that Lyell described a dynamic of spiritual grooming where Sills positioned himself as a father figure and spiritual authority she dare not disobey. It was within this power structure that Geiger testified he believed Lyell was conditioned to “please the patriarch.”
Sills’ own written records appear to support the assertion of a familial dynamic.
Among the discovery material is Lyell’s application to the Southern Ph.D. program in November 2004. Her references included Russell Moore (then dean of the SBTS School of Theology and senior vice president for academic administration) and David Sills.
In his reference form, Sills gave Lyell consistently high marks for her academic performance and spiritual vitality, although he rated her as a “2” on a scale of 1 to 5 on the subject of “spouse/family relations.”
He then added the following hand-written comment: “Jennifer’s family of origin was/is extremely dysfunctional. To her credit and by God’s grace she has been able to walk through and rise above that background.”
Geiger’s testimony contradicts the narrative that the relationship between Sills and Lyell was merely a consensual “affair” or ambiguous “misconduct.” It suggests that as early as May 2018, the president of Southern Seminary, the CEO of Lifeway and other high-ranking officials were informed of allegations describing forcible sexual contact and high-stakes coercion occurring inside a faculty member’s home.
The confrontation
After the spring 2018 call from Rainer, Mohler acted quickly, arranging a confrontation with Sills. In his own deposition, Mohler framed this meeting as an “ambush,” designed to catch Sills off guard. Mohler testified Sills admitted to “inappropriate sexual activity or contact,” but Mohler claimed in his 2024 deposition he did not press for specific details regarding whether they engaged in sexual intercourse.
However, Geiger’s deposition adds more urgency. Geiger said Mohler called him shortly after the confrontation with Sills, and Mohler described the meeting in harrowing terms: “That was the most evil conversation I have ever had in my life.”
Geiger testified that Mohler told him Sills did admit to having sex with Lyell but offered a shocking justification.
Crucially, Geiger testified that Mohler told him Sills did admit to having sex with Lyell but offered a shocking justification: Sills allegedly claimed the sexual relationship was acceptable because his wife, Mary Sills, knew about it.
Despite this “evil” conversation and the graphic nature of the allegations involving the “patriarch” and the basement, Sills was allowed to resign. The initial public statement from the seminary cited only standard personnel reasons, keeping the nature of his departure — and the danger he potentially posed — hidden from tithing Southern Baptists and the churches of the convention.
Denhollander, Moore and ‘Caring Well’
On Feb. 10, 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News copublished a lengthy set of articles detailing hundreds of mishandled cases of sexual abuse in SBC churches. The “Abuse of Faith” series launched a national awakening to the issue of clergy sexual abuse among Southern Baptists.
That, in turn, led to an independent outside investigation by Guidepost Solutions in 2021 that was published in May 2022. The report sent shockwaves across denominational leadership. Critics of the investigation immediately complained about Guidepost’s methodologies and biases — criticisms that also show up in the latest trove of documents in the Sills case.
But behind this was yet another sexual abuse scandal that put the topic on the map beginning in 2014. That involved C.J. Mahaney, then pastor of Sovereign Grace Church in Louisville, Ky., and head of a network of Reformed churches endorsed by Mohler.
That year, a class action lawsuit was filed in Maryland claiming Mahaney and fellow ministers at his former church and ministry conspired to cover up allegations involving 13 alleged perpetrators and 11 child victims between 1982 and 2014.
Mohler continued to support Mahaney until the week the “Abuse of Faith” series was published. On Feb. 15, 2019, Mohler issued an apology for “serious errors” in his handling of concerns surrounding Mahaney.
Rachel Denhollander was the first former member of USA Gymnastics to accuse former team coach Larry Nassar of sexual abuse — an event that launched an avalanche of accusations and landed Nassar in jail. Denhollander and her husband, a student at Southern Seminary, were living in Louisville at the time of the Mahaney fiasco and she became an advocate for the abuse survivors. That got her and her husband run off from their Louisville church, but it also established her as the go-to advocate against clergy sexual abuse in the SBC.
With influence on Russell Moore, then president of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Denhollander became a keynote speaker at an October 2019 national conference put on by the SBC called “Caring Well.” Moore and the ERLC staff pivoted at the last minute to change the agenda of that conference in light of the “Abuse of Faith” series.
That was the place Denhollander brought Lyell’s story to light from a survivor perspective. She said Baptist Press had “trampled on” Lyell’s story by portraying it as consensual sex rather than abuse.
This conference and Denhollander’s speech set in motion a series of events and a series of reactions to events that came to define the SBC’s response to clergy sexual abuse today. For example, when Adam Greenway was nominated to become president of Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth — leaving Southern Seminary where he had a role in the Lyell matter — he was asked by Southwestern trustees about what had happened. Trustee Bart Barber — who soon after would become SBC president — publicly tweeted that he voted against Greenway because of concerns about how Lyell’s case had been handled.
And perhaps most importantly, two weeks after Denhollander accused SBTS and Baptist Press of mishandling Lyell’s case, Mohler began cutting checks to Lyell, according to the documents.
The 2004 warning: A lost report?
Perhaps the most damaging revelation in the discovery materials is evidence that Southern Seminary might have been tipped off about Sills’ conduct 14 years before Lyell’s 2018 disclosure.
In a deposition given Jan. 17, 2025, Bill Cook, senior pastor of Ninth and O Baptist Church in Louisville and a professor at SBTS, testified he learned from Sills that a student named Justin Clark had observed what appeared to be an “inappropriate” relationship between Lyell and Sills during a mission trip in 2004.
Clark allegedly reported this observation directly to Moore, then a dean at the seminary and Sills’ immediate supervisor. Mary Sills also worked for Moore at SBTS as an administrative assistant in the School of Theology.
Moore was not deposed in this case, so his voice appears nowhere in the documents. BNG contacted him to inquire about the sequence of events that happened in 2004, and he recalled being approached by Cook, as Cook said in his deposition. Armed with that tip, Moore spoke personally with Clark, the student, whom he said backtracked on the accusation, and then also individually with Sills and Lyell, both of whom denied any inappropriate relationship. David and Mary Sills were like family to her, Lyell told him.
Moore said he did not understand what had been going on between Sills and Lyell until Lyell went public in 2018.
In the beginning
By Sills’ own admission, as he testified under oath, he first had Lyell as a student in late 2004 and early 2005, around which time he believes the relationship first became “inappropriate, sexually.” Still, Sills alleged Lyell was the one who initiated sexual contact and that the two came to a verbal agreement to stop all physical contact more than a decade later — in 2016.
The discovery materials reveal that Sills’ history of marital infidelity predated his time at Southern Seminary.
Furthermore, the discovery materials reveal that Sills’ history of marital infidelity predated his time at Southern Seminary. In his deposition, Sills admitted to a prior “inappropriate relationship” with a congregant while serving as a pastor in Mississippi before he was hired by the seminary in 2003. Sills never disclosed the relationship to the church, which ended up dismissing him over concerns that he was actively trying to turn an ostensibly traditionalist congregation into a “Presbyterian” or Calvinist church.
Additionally, Sills testified he had engaged in adulterous “one-night stands” with women whose names he could not recall when he was newly wed and still playing music in bars — all before he claimed he and his wife were “believers.”
When asked if this history would have disqualified Sills from being hired had the seminary known, SBTS President Al Mohler stated bluntly: “We would not hire someone … with that in the background, period.”
2019: The battle over narrative and ‘oral sex to completion’
The tension between the graphic details known privately and the sanitized narrative released publicly came to a head in 2019. On March 8, 2019, Baptist Press published a story about Sills’ resignation. Rather than using the term “abuse” or “assault” as Lyell had reported in 2018, the article framed the relationship as “morally inappropriate.”
This linguistic choice, reportedly driven by internal liability concerns from Executive Committee staff and SBC lawyers, ignited a firestorm. Lyell said this framing implied a consensual affair, destroying her reputation and career. Lyell noted that, on Facebook, commenters called her a “whore” and questioned why Sills had been dismissed from Southern Seminary while she kept her position at Lifeway.
Cook’s deposition reveals that even Lyell’s pastor was kept in the dark regarding the severity of the acts. When asked if he knew the relationship had progressed to “oral sex to completion,” Cook testified, “He (Sills) did not” admit that. Cook stated that if he had known the sexual contact had progressed to that point, he would not have written a letter of transfer for Sills to another church. Sills allegedly told Cook the relationship consisted only of “tawdry behavior” and “cuddling and snuggling” — assertions that, if true, contradict Sills’ own sworn testimony that their relationship was sexual and involved activities such as groping and oral sex.
Further, Sills testified that when he relayed the relationship to Cook, he told his pastor he was willing to undergo church discipline if necessary, to which Cook allegedly replied church discipline was for those who refuse to repent, which was not the case for Sills.
What did Mohler know and when?
This raises a critical timeline question: If Mohler and Geiger knew in spring 2018 of the “patriarch” dynamic, the pinning against the wall and the basement oral sex, why was Sills’ pastor and new church left with the impression that the relationship consisted merely of “cuddling and snuggling”?
Publicly, Mohler positioned himself as Lyell’s champion. On Oct. 15, 2019, Mohler tweeted: “When Jennifer Lyell came to me with (her) report of abuse, she never described ‘a morally inappropriate relationship.’ It was clearly a report of sexual abuse.”
“When Jennifer Lyell came to me with (her) report of abuse, she never described ‘a morally inappropriate relationship.’ It was clearly a report of sexual abuse.”
However, private communications reveal Mohler’s conflict. When the controversial BP story was published in March 2019 — the very story Mohler later denounced as inaccurate — he texted his former spokesman, Colby Adams, who commented: “They handled it really well.”
Mohler replied, “Yes they did.”
Months later, Mohler began to privately express reservations about the changing set of information known to him. In an Oct. 27, 2019, text exchange with O.S. Hawkins, former head of GuideStone, Mohler discussed Lyell’s resignation letter from Lifeway, which she had tendered just days after the “Caring Well” conference ended.
“Is that resignation letter of Jen Lyell the most bizarre thing you have ever read?” Hawkins texted Mohler.
Mohler replied from a plane: “I am trying just to be quiet. I had not seen this … That is sick. So I am guilty of not being guilty??”
Mohler continued, suggesting a conspiracy: “This has someone’s fingerprints all over it,” later adding, “I think this is the narrative from you know who, PB (most likely former Ethics and Religious Liberty Committee staffer Phillip Bethancourt). I have never ever made this case or commented nor thought about it.”
Another question thus arises: If Mohler privately had doubts about Lyell and expressed dismay at her public statements, why did he later disparage the very BP report he first thought handled the relationship “very well” and later agree to a private settlement with Lyell with an arrangement to cover her legal expenses?
Here again is a situation where we cannot yet know the essential clarifying details absent their full airing in open court. It is possible Mohler’s position evolved as more information came to light. It also is possible Mohler, while running for SBC president during this time, was seeking to placate all sides.
The Guidepost report: ‘We didn’t conduct an investigation’
The discovery material also casts a harsh light on the landmark Guidepost Solutions report released in May 2022. The report listed David Sills as an abuser, a designation central to his defamation lawsuit.
In a stunning admission during her deposition on July 29, 2025, Krista Tongring, a leader of the Guidepost investigation, clarified the firm’s methodology regarding Sills. When asked if Guidepost investigated the underlying truth of Lyell’s sexual assault allegations, Tongring replied: “We didn’t conduct an independent investigation. We reviewed evidence that was presented to us.”
Tongring admitted Guidepost never interviewed Sills or his wife. Instead, they relied heavily on the “corroboration” provided by Mohler.
“Dr. Mohler’s email stating that he believed that it was sexual abuse after speaking with her … and he was the one that also talked to Dr. Sills and fired him,” Tongring cited as a primary reason for listing Sills as an abuser.
The circular logic exposed by the depositions is striking: Guidepost relied on Mohler’s judgment to label Sills an abuser, assuming Mohler had investigated. However, Mohler testified in his own deposition that he did not conduct an investigation beyond the initial confrontation.
“You did not make any investigation beyond the recorded phone call with Jennifer Lyell and the recorded meeting with David Sills?” an attorney asked Mohler.
“Those are the two meetings,” Mohler confirmed.
When asked if she would have liked to know that Cook (Lyell and Sills’ former pastor) testified he did not investigate the abuse claims before listing Sills, Tongring admitted: “We didn’t rely on anything that Dr. Cook did, so, no.”
‘Burn things to the ground’: Hostility toward survivors
A key figure here is Jonathan Howe, who at the time oversaw Baptist Press.
Howe previously worked at Lifeway and in September 2019 was named vice president for communications at the SBC Executive Committee. He took that job one month before the “Caring Well” conference where Denhollander lambasted Baptist Press.
Discovery materials show Howe was primarily — if not solely — responsible for a statement of apology and retraction for the original BP story in a move Executive Committee staff deemed “ill-advised” in private internal communications.
The same internal memorandum alleges Howe had a collegial relationship with Lyell and therefore could have been more sympathetic to her claims than other Executive Committee staff members.
Perhaps the most damning document to emerge regarding the culture of the SBC Executive Committee is an internal email from Howe sent to then-President Ronnie Floyd in October 2019. The email reveals deep-seated hostility toward the survivor community that was lobbying for reform.
Discussing the online activity of abuse survivors, Howe wrote: “The ‘survivor community’ is all up in arms about things they have no clue about. … With these online survivor folks, they just want to burn things to the ground. They just have to be ignored. They don’t reason; they don’t listen.”
These comments were first published in the Guidepost report in 2022, and Howe ended up apologizing for these remarks.
However, the full text of this email now has been made public through discovery, and new details regarding Howe’s initial derision of the survivor community and doubt surrounding Lyell’s story have emerged.
“They are hurt people, and they just want to destroy everyone.”
In the same paragraph as the quote above, Howe went further, relaying an unverified and explosive claim about Ed Stetzer, a prominent missiologist: “When Stetzer hosted a survivors thing a few years back at Wheaton, they were even threatening his kids. It was sick. They are hurt people, and they just want to destroy everyone”.
BNG could not independently ascertain whether abuse survivors threatened Stetzer’s children.
Turning his attention to Lyell, Howe undercut her credibility to the Executive Committee president, stating: “Yes, she instigated a lot of this through her tweets. … I wouldn’t exactly say she has the correct narrative. Not even close.”
Financial silos and settlements
The discovery documents also clarify the financial toll of the scandal — money paid out of tithes and offerings of Southern Baptists to manage the legal fallout.
Jennifer Lyell eventually reached a settlement with the Executive Committee’s insurance carrier for $1,050,000 regarding the alleged mishandling of her case.
Separately, Southern Seminary entered into a confidential settlement with Lyell in October 2019 for $100,000, ostensibly to cover medical and counseling expenses.
Additionally, despite Mohler’s initial testimony that he only agreed to support her legal defense “to the best of my ability,” internal documents reveal SBTS paid about $300,000 to fund Lyell’s personal legal fees.
Conclusion
The release of these documents has reconfirmed the worst fears of survivor advocates: That while SBC leaders were publicly apologizing and launching task forces, they were privately disparaging victims, managing liability and ensuring their own survival.
“Most hauntingly, the discovery reveals the specific, graphic nature of the ‘patriarch’ dynamic Lyell reported.”
The dissonance is summarized by the stark contrast in Mohler’s communications. To the public, he was the definitive corroborator of Lyell’s abuse, the moral authority upon whom the Guidepost report rested. To Geiger, he was a witness to an “evil conversation” where a professor justified sex because his wife knew. But to his former aide, the initial downgrading of that abuse to a “morally inappropriate relationship” was handled “very well.”
Most hauntingly, the discovery reveals the specific, graphic nature of the “patriarch” dynamic Lyell reported — a dynamic Lyell alleged to her colleagues at Lifeway that involved unwanted physical contact, sexual coercion and a twisted family dynamic in her alleged abuser’s family home.
These were not ambiguous details; they were specific allegations known at the highest levels of leadership, yet they remained hidden behind carefully crafted public statements until the legal discovery process forced them into the light.
In response to the newly revealed internal Executive Committee email and allegations, retired former appellate attorney, abuse survivor and advocate Christa Brown characterized the private actions of the leaders: “In dealing with clergy sex abuse survivors, Southern Baptist leaders’ duplicity knows no bounds. While I am greatly saddened by this new evidence, I am not in the least surprised. It fits the pattern of two-faced treachery that scores of survivors have experienced with SBC leaders. Almost always, there is a vast chasm between the charade of what SBC leaders say up-front and the betrayal of what happens behind the scenes.”
But maybe there is another way to understand this series of events. For now, we simply cannot know because while the discovery documents are public, they remain heavily redacted by the court. What’s more, public testimonies that potentially could support or rebut them have not yet been given their day in court.