Romanian Survivors File Lawsuits Against California Megachurch and Pastor Greg Laurie Alleging Decades of Sexual Abuse and Cover-Up

Los Angeles – Survivors of child sexual abuse have filed lawsuits in U.S. federal court against one of America’s most prominent megachurches, Harvest Christian Fellowship of Riverside, California, and its nationally known leader Greg Laurie, alleging systematic negligence, sex trafficking violations and a 20-year coverup of rampant sexual abuse in the defendants’ operation of children’s homes in Romania. In total, 23 former residents of the homes will be bringing complaints.

The federal complaints detail how Paul Havsgaard, a long-time Harvest pastor and associate of Laurie, was sent by Laurie to Romania in 1998 to run Harvest-sponsored homes for vulnerable children. After attracting street kids with a McDonald’s meal and promises of safe shelter, he carried out sexual and physical abuse on an “industrial scale.” According to the complaints, church leaders in California failed basic tasks of supervision, yet profited from the money they raised through charitable appeals and the false impression that they were doing good works. The complaints allege that Havsgaard may be one of the most prolific child sexual predators alive in the United States today, responsible for thousands of individual acts of abuse.

The complaints relate that Havsgaard raped his own sisters when he was a teenager and sexually assaulted his foster daughter while a Harvest pastor. Despite repeated warnings and evidence of abuse, Laurie and his former missions pastor Richard Schutte kept Havsgaard in place in Romania with minimal oversight. Harvest deposited some $17,000 each month in Havsgaard’s personal bank account and did not require detailed accounts as he siphoned off funds to pay for gifts for his sexual favorites. In turn, Havsgaard returned to California frequently to raise money for Harvest and burnish its reputation, often with children in tow whom he sexually assaulted in California too.

The complaints allege that finally, in 2004, other American ministers were sufficiently concerned by what they were hearing about Havsgaard that they intervened with Harvest and caused Schutte, Laurie’s lieutenant in charge of foreign missions, to send an inspection team. When Schutte joined his inspectors in Bucharest, they told him that Havsgaard was a pedophile, and that Havsgaard “needs to be on that plane with you when you leave tomorrow. He doesn’t need to be another day in Romania. He is an embarrassment to every single missionary and Christian worker.”

But Laurie, Schutte and Harvest did nothing to protect the children, the complaints allege. Harvest leaders in California told the inspection team that Havsgaard was too important to Harvest’s fundraising to remove. Harvest cut down its subsidy of the homes but left Havsgaard in place to continue raping and recruiting more victims for another four years, until he returned to California in 2008. Meanwhile, the complaints allege, Harvest gave the cruel and violent pedophile some $200,000 in severance payments. The children were thrown back onto the street, traumatized, with no support and no place to go. The year after Havsgaard’s return to California, despite knowing what he had done in Romania, Laurie publicly praised him as “a pastor who faithfully served the Lord for many years at Harvest Christian Fellowship, the church where I pastor,” and compared his work in Romania to that of Moses with the Israelites, because his “life demonstrates the power that just one godly person can have.”

Life at the Harvest homes was like “a torture chamber inside a prison,” says one of the plaintiffs, Marian Barbu, in his complaint, which details how Havsgaard would show up regularly in the bathroom while boys were showering or undressed and stare at them, sometimes masturbating in their presence. He regularly spanked children in public, fingering and rubbing their buttocks, anuses and genitalia in the process, and digitally penetrating them. One boy regularly defecated in shoeboxes in an attic room known to be Havsgaard’s private playground, where video cameras had been set up, after being anally raped. Havsgaard is also reported in the complaint to have “pimped out” older boys for sex work via video chat or at bathhouses, taking a cut of their earnings.

The complaints further allege that:

• Havsgaard’s abuse included digital penetration, oral and anal sex, pornography consumption, and trafficking of children to third parties.
• He told the children “I know what God wants,” and “what I want, God wants” while abusing them.
• The homes housed street children as young as four, who were groomed, raped, and silenced.
• Children were also punished by having to kneel on walnut shells or being tied to their beds or radiators. Many were so traumatized that they cut themselves, swallowed chlorine or attempted suicide. They departed the homes with PTSD, depression, addiction, and some illiterate, many turning to sex work to survive.
• Church leaders did not institute regular inspections, staff training or child protection policies, and overlooked or ignored reports about Havsgaard’s pattern of child abuse from staff, donors, church members and Havsgaard’s own sister.

Meanwhile, the complaints allege, Havsgaard was welcomed back to evangelical churches in the Riverside area.

During the years of the successful cover-up, Harvest and Laurie reached great heights of prominence, including mammoth annual crusades, a top-100 U.S. podcast, membership in the Southern Baptist Convention, and a Hollywood movie about Laurie’s early days at Harvest, Jesus Revolution, that grossed $53 million in its first year. The church owns over 100 acres in Riverside and earns an estimated minimum of $52 million per year. Laurie’s house has an estimated value exceeding $5 million.

Plaintiffs’ lead counsel Dr. Ann Olivarius said: “Through multiple decisions and actions in California, Harvest, Laurie and Schutte became effectively responsible for the tortured lives to which Havsgaard consigned our clients. The abuse they have endured must be remedied. How Laurie did nothing to protect them, even after Harvest received powerful evidence of sexual abuse, is hard to understand. So is his decision to let them suffer ever since.”

The lawsuits seek damages for multiple forms of negligence committed by defendants in California in supervising and operating the children’s homes, intentional infliction of emotional distress, sex trafficking and conspiracy.

Continue reading more on this case and see the complaints here.

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