Julie Strikes Out

Strikes Two and Three

David Morrill

How long will people continue to take Julie Roys seriously? How many more obvious, manifest lies will she have to publish before she is marginalized into obscurity?

Frankly, I’m getting tired of picking the low-hanging fruit. Julie Roys is barely talented enough to take on the obviously corrupt, much less smear faithful pastors and ministries. The pieces she publishes on her embarrassing scandal blog represent her full-time work. Yet time after time she manages to whiff on even the most basic journalistic standards.

After we comprehensively exposed Roys’ perverse game of Six Degrees of John MacArthur, fair-minded evangelicals wisely put some distance between themselves and her “ministry.” There will always be those who are ready and willing to lap up even the most far-fetched claims made against leaders they don’t like, but the Christians who initially threw away their MacArthur Study Bibles sheepishly pulled them out of the garbage after realizing they’d been had. Roys was (and is) roundly rejected by the vast majority of reputable Christian voices – especially those that represent the theological conservatism she laughably identifies with.

Yet her Ahabian pursuit continues. Roys remains convinced that the great expositional preacher who told Beth Moore to “go home” is secretly evangelicalism’s biggest purveyor of patriarchal abuse, and she continues undeterred in pursuit of her white whale. She momentarily has the attention of the popular evangelical conversation, and she has to fire all her ammunition. Unfortunately for her, the evidence that John MacArthur is corrupt simply refuses to be found. No matter – she simply continues to create the narrative she needs. Enter the cold cases of Paul Guay and Al Alegrete.

Paul Guay

Using her typical technique of staying one step removed from making actual claims (“sources say,” “reports show,” “witnesses claim” are her journalistic tropes of choice), Roys writes about the four-decades-old account of Wendy Guay, the daughter of now-deceased Grace Community Church pastor Paul Guay. According to the article, Wendy reported to her friend Lisa that her father was molesting her. The two girls then reported the abuse to Lisa’s father (John Tucker), who reportedly confronted Guay.

According to Tucker, Guay confessed to “sexual acts” involving his daughter. John and Paul Guay reportedly met with John MacArthur shortly thereafter, and Guay supposedly confessed to molesting his daughter to MacArthur.

It’s here where the story veers into the unbelievable. According to Tucker, MacArthur apparently heard Guay’s confession of child molestation and decided to handle it merely with biblical counseling and discipline. Even more unbelievably, Tucker was apparently okay with no punishment for a man who he believed had molested his daughter’s friend and was “hovering over” his own daughter during sleepovers.

Setting aside for a moment the unbelievability of a father being okay with a pastor who may very well have molested his own daughter continuing to minister and facing no legal action, MacArthur wrote a letter to Wendy shortly thereafter describing Paul Guay as a “wonderful Christian” who was “a faithful part of our staff and will continue to be in the future.” Wendy expressed optimism in a journal entry, writing that “everything has worked out with her dad” after talking to MacArthur. Wendy got married and had kids, and allowed her pedophile father to visit and stay overnight. While Wendy allowing her father to visit and stay overnight in the house with the kids does not demonstrate his innocence, Paul Guay is not the one on trial here – MacArthur is.

Two years after the reported confession, John MacArthur caught Paul Guay pursuing an affair with a church secretary and fired Guay on the spot. When asked later, MacArthur’s secretary responded that, “Paul never confessed anything to John or to our elders at that time about any kind of molestation.” Even more tellingly, Wendy herself realized that MacArthur was not trying to cover up anything, writing on April 12th, 2003 (emphasis mine): “I now see the reason WHY John was NOT worried about potential legal action (unforeseen liability), and the potential and likelihood of more victims surfacing (past, present and future), and was not indeed participating in a cover up (as I originally thought), is because he NEVER took ANYTHING, serious enough to put the needed time, prayer and action into it that it DESERVED.”

MacArthur reiterated in an April 18th, 2003 email that he never received a confession of molestation, writing, “I had no knowledge of any molesting as you claim.” Earlier in the email, MacArthur reminds Wendy that her father was immediately dismissed in 1984 for hugging and kissing a single woman who worked in the office, violating the church’s “zero-tolerance standard for any and all moral offenses or compromises by staff members.”

Roys expects readers to believe that the same John MacArthur that fired Paul Guay immediately for non-adulterous but sinful behavior is the same guy who would receive a confession of child sexual abuse and let the confessor remain in ministry. She also expects readers to believe that John Tucker knew firsthand that Guay molested children, but was willing to let MacArthur brush it under the rug. To top it off, Wendy herself realized the absurdity of the idea MacArthur somehow knew her father was molesting her and did nothing. Roys’ primary witness destroys the credibility of the entire article.

Al Alegrete

In an article entitled, “John MacArthur’s Church Failed to Report Kidnapper & Child Molester for Two Years,” Roys and Sarah Einselen lead readers to believe that Grace Comunity Church (and quite possibly John MacArthur himself) knew about a kidnapper and child molester in their midst and callously did nothing about it. True to the RAG™ (Roys Abuse Grifters) formula, the article bounces back and forth in time, trusting that the confused reader will arrive at the most damning conclusion possible.

In the opening sentence of the article Roys and Einselen report that Alegrete confessed in 1982:

In June 1982, Albert Alegrete, a Sunday School teacher at John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church (GCC), confessed to a pastor at GCC that he had committed sex crimes against children.

Yet a careful examination of the cited LA Times article reveals no such confession. Rather than a confession of sex crimes against children, the article states:

The Rev. Richard A. Hines, pastor of the Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, said that he counseled Alegrete to surrender after Alegrete confessed some of his crimes to him in June, 1982.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-05-15-me-5293-story.html

According to Hines, Alegrete sought counsel for unspecified “sexual immorality,” and was counseled by Hines that if Alegrete had committed any crimes, he must turn himself in. In response to this counsel, Alegrete ghosted Hines, the church, and his family. Not only does the article not specify what Alegrete confessed to (the crimes he was eventually convicted of, for instance), Richard Hines flatly denied that this is what happened. Yet Roys draws a nonexistent connection and publishes anyway.

That Roys’ logical leap is patently anti-journalistic is obvious. But for it to come from a supposed investigative journalist demonstrates sinful malice. A suspect admitting to a “crime” during counseling and then later admitting to the specifics does not show that the counselor knew the specifics. This is journalism 101, and Roys purposefully failed.

The rest of the article recounts horrific specifics that Roys now expects her readers to tie to Grace Community Church and John MacArthur. Yet these ties are entirely dependent on the premise that Alegrete provided specifics during his 1982 counseling – a premise not demonstrated by evidence and flatly denied by Hines.

In reality, Grace Community Church pastors escorted Alegrete to the police station when he confessed to specifics in 1984, making sure he confessed to the police in the presence of Richard Hines. The church financially supported Alegrete’s wife and kids for years following his imprisonment, including GCC elder Phil Johnson’s family reportedly helping Alegrete’s wife who was now raising daughters as a single mom.

Roys and her crack team of investigators couldn’t even be bothered to figure out that Alegrete died in prison, reporting, “The Roys Report could not locate Alegrete, who would be in his 70s now.”

Strikes Two and Three

For Julie Roys to accept and propagate such absurdities reveals just how broken and darkened her heart is. Julie Roys is not merely an incompetent, shoddy journalist. She is an accuser of the brethren, purposefully attacking Christian churches from a position of zero accountability. Knowing her track record of lies, distortions, and hypocrisy, anyone granting her credence rather than calling her to repentance is complicit in her sin (Romans 1:32).

MacArthur and Grace Community Church have never been without enemies. There have always been journalists, malcontents, and forces of darkness trying to destroy their ministry. No doubt there are people near Grace Community Church, Grace to You, or The Master’s Seminary who have been hurt. These ministries (like all ministries) are full of sinners. At P&P and Protestia, we have taken issue with them when we believed they were in error. We will continue to do so because we love them as brothers and sisters in Christ and Christians are charged with holding one another accountable.

Yet Julie Roys is so obsessed and narcissistic that she expects her readers to believe that under the surface of a LexisNexis search lies MacArthur-destroying evidence that his enemies have apparently been too incompetent to use against him. She is treading a well-worn path of failed MacArthur accusers, obsessively dragging the hearts of abuse survivors through the spiritual mud just as she did with her former student “Sarah.” And as she is not a church member, no one can hold her scripturally accountable. All we can do is expose her wickedness (and that of her financial supporters like Judson University), rebuke those who fall under her spell and refute her lies. No Christian should support Julie Roys’ evil quest. Mark and avoid her.