Six women sue Assemblies of God, say church enabled children’s pastor’s abuse
JONESBORO, Ark. (KAIT) - 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.
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 Waller “unfettered, unsupervised control” of the church’s children’s programs and physical spaces. Waller 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.
Waller 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.
https://www.kait8.com/2026/05/21/six-wom...ors-abuse/
JONESBORO, Ark. (KAIT) - 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.
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 Waller “unfettered, unsupervised control” of the church’s children’s programs and physical spaces. Waller 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.
Waller 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.
https://www.kait8.com/2026/05/21/six-wom...ors-abuse/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
