A preacher's dark secret: Sleepovers, porn and sex abuse allegations dating back decades

Joe Campbell says his calling is to share God’s love, but a group of women say he sexually abused them as girls. An NBC News investigation uncovered decades of missed warnings and failures to act.

TULSA, Okla. — The women have spent decades trying to forget, but some memories haunt them. The way the children’s pastor wrapped them in his arms. The terrifying stories he told about demons and the warmth in his voice as he promised to protect them. The chill of his hands on parts of their bodies where no grown man’s hands should be. The blood some of them found in their underwear afterward.

They can still picture the spaces where it happened: A church nursery. A childhood bedroom. His garage during a youth group sleepover. 

This, they say, is the dark secret behind the public ministry of Joseph Lyle Campbell, a magnetic Pentecostal preacher who built a national following with fiery sermons on sin, salvation and America’s moral decline. As Campbell tells it, he was a teenager when God gave him a mission: to share his love of Jesus with children. In the decades since, as he evangelized from church to church across the South and Midwest, he has repeatedly faced accusations of child sexual abuse, an NBC News investigation found. 

“Joe Campbell needs to be in jail,” said Cheryl Almond, who says he lured her to his home when she was a teenager, pushed her onto a bed and penetrated her with his finger. “I just pray one day I can hear a judge tell Joe, ‘You’re guilty, and here’s your sentence.’”

Almond is one of five women who told NBC News that Campbell, now 67, sexually assaulted them when they were children in the 1970s and ’80s. In Oklahoma, Kerri Jackson says he molested her once to twice a week for three years starting when she was about 9. In Arkansas, Lisa Ball says Campbell invited her to live with him after she became a teen mother, then raped her repeatedly. In Missouri, Kim Williams had just turned 15 when she says Campbell reached his hand up her shorts at his parsonage. In that same home, Phaedra Creed says Campbell sexually assaulted her night after night, at age 14, while his wife and children slept upstairs.