Six women filed a civil suit May 20 in Craighead County alleging church officials allowed children’s pastor Anthony “Tony” Waller to sexually abuse them despite warnings years earlier, the complaint says.
Stephanie Davis, Samantha Davis, Elizabeth Dryer, Victoria Collins, Taylor Perrin, and Jane Doe 1 filed the suit against regional and national entities of the Assemblies of God denomination.
The suit “exposes a horrific, multi-decade institutional framework that enabled children’s pastor Anthony ‘Tony’ Waller to systematically molest, groom, and secretly film young girls for approximately 15 years,” the Gillispie Law Firm said.
The complaint said the Assemblies of God gave the pedophile “unfettered, unsupervised control” of the church’s children’s programs and physical spaces. The child molester is alleged to have installed multiple hidden cameras in church bathrooms and showers and captured thousands of hours of explicit footage of children.
“For years, Waller forced a generation of young girls to enter the bathroom one by one, strip naked, and perform structured “stretching exercises” meticulously aligned with camera angles, utilizing a list of poses openly taped to the bathroom wall,” the suit said.
The lawsuit alleges that the Jonesboro Police Department warned church leadership of Waller’s predatory behavior as early as April 2000.
The pervert was not arrested until 2015, when police found more than 400,000 images of child sexual abuse material in his possession. He was sentenced to life in prison for child rape in 2016.
Several plaintiffs also said they discovered hidden bathroom cameras in 2004, but church leadership again failed to act.
“Despite being handed physical proof of the camera, the written stretch list, and direct disclosures of sexual assault and drugging from the child victims and their mothers, senior pastor Mike Glover and denominational executives refused to contact civil authorities or the Arkansas Child Abuse Hotline,” the complaint said.
The complaint says the church chose to handle matters internally and only suspended Waller for several weeks before allowing him to resume his duties with unrestricted access to children.
The lawsuit names as defendants the Refuge Church of the Assemblies of God, Inc. of Jonesboro, the Arkansas District Council of the Assemblies of God, the General Council of the Assemblies of God, former head pastor Charles Michael “Mike” Glover, and the church’s liability insurance carriers.
The General Council and District Council are accused of protecting abusive clergymen and failing to protect the victims.
“The Assemblies of God caught this predator red-handed in 2004, holding his camera and his list of nude exercises in their hands. Instead of calling the police or protecting vulnerable children, they actively chose to shield the denomination’s reputation and treat a child molester with tenderness and forgiveness at the expense of children’s innocence,” said Joshua D. Gillispie, lead counsel for the plaintiffs. “Our clients are bringing this lawsuit to permanently tear down the wall of institutional secrecy, demand absolute transparency, and ensure that no other religious organization can ever again treat the sexual exploitation of children as an internal administrative detail.”
A separate lawsuit was filed in February in Pulaski County Circuit Court and named the church’s governing bodies as defendants.
“Churches are supposed to be beacons of light, truth, and goodness,” said Joseph Gates, co-counsel for the plaintiffs. “Here, the Assemblies of God allowed this Jonesboro church to become the hunting grounds for a prolific child predator and the scene of his unspeakable crimes for more than 15 years, and they did so knowingly.”
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