Girls told the adults in charge. They described hidden cameras. They brought sealed cups of what they believed was drugged soda. They reported a pastor who made them strip naked and perform stretches in a church bathroom. And for 15 years, according to a new lawsuit, the church leaders who heard those warnings did little but protect the man accused of committing the abuse.
Six women filed a civil lawsuit this week in Craighead County Circuit Court against Refuge Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and regional and national leaders of the Assemblies of God, alleging that repeated warnings about children’s pastor Tony Waller were dismissed, minimized, and buried — allowing him to groom, molest, and secretly film girls across nearly a decade and a half before his wife finally went to police in 2015.
Waller pleaded guilty in 2016 to raping two girls and is serving a life sentence. The women behind the lawsuit say the criminal conviction is not enough.
“Tony’s in prison for the rest of his life, and that’s good,” said Stephanie Davis, one of the plaintiffs. “But he’s not the only one responsible for what happened to us.”
What the Girls Said and When They Said It
The earliest reports about Waller reached church leadership in 2000, the lawsuit alleges. That spring, Jonesboro police and elementary school officials opened an investigation after receiving reports that Waller had been frequently visiting a school to spend time with an 11-year-old girl he had met through a church ministry. A police report reviewed by NBC News described allegations that Waller bought the girl clothes, took her to a hotel parking lot late at night, and had her stay overnight at his home. A teacher reported seeing him speaking with girls on the playground and said he avoided her when she tried to approach.
Police closed the investigation after the girl denied any wrongdoing. School officials banned Waller from campus anyway. Before closing the case in April 2000, a detective, a school resource officer, and an elementary school principal met with Refuge Church’s senior pastor Mike Glover to tell him what had been reported and inform him that Waller had been barred from the school.
Waller remained in charge of the church’s children’s programs.
Around 2004, the situation became impossible to explain away. Girls in Waller’s church homeschool program were required to enter a bathroom one at a time before gym activities, remove their clothing, and perform stretches. Waller told them being unclothed allowed for unrestricted movement. Davis, then in sixth grade, complied until she and other girls found a hidden camera aimed through a hole in the bathroom door.
Shortly after, Davis said, Waller gave her a soda in a plastic cup that tasted wrong and left her disoriented. She ran to the church secretary and called her mother. Her family brought the cup, sealed in a plastic bag, along with their concerns about the camera, to Glover directly. A classmate, Elizabeth Dryer, went to Glover around the same time with her mother to report the hidden camera and tell him that Waller had been groping her during physical activities at the church.
According to the lawsuit, church leaders removed the camera, patched the bathroom door, and suspended Waller for two to four weeks. Then they gave him his job back.
“They did nothing about it,” Davis said. “Absolutely nothing.”
About two years later, another girl, Courtney Blackburn, discovered Waller secretly filming her as she undressed in her bedroom. Her mother, Rhonda Kelly, brought the allegation to Glover. Kelly told NBC News that Glover later informed her the church board had prayed over the matter and that God had told them it was a misunderstanding — that Blackburn was simply being too sensitive.
Waller stayed in ministry.
Two younger women named in the lawsuit allege he continued abusing girls in the same church bathroom between roughly 2008 and 2014. One, Taylor Perrin, alleges Waller played the role of a beloved father figure while groping girls during games. A second plaintiff, identified as Jane Doe, alleges that when she was approximately 12 years old, Waller gave her a drugged drink in a foam cup and recorded himself molesting her. Investigators later found that video on Waller’s computer.
The End and the Evidence
The abuse stopped in 2015 when Waller’s wife found incriminating images on his computer and contacted police. Investigators uncovered dozens of hidden-camera videos recorded inside the church bathroom and elsewhere. Two additional girls came forward during the criminal investigation alleging Waller had molested them for years beginning around 2006 and 2007, when they were 10 and 11 years old. Those allegations formed the basis of his 2016 conviction.
What the Church and Denomination Say
The General Council of the Assemblies of God, the denomination’s national governing body, said in a statement that it did not learn of allegations against Waller until 2015. “Mr. Waller was promptly reported to the appropriate legal authorities, investigated, and his ministerial credentials were dismissed,” the statement said, adding that the response was consistent with a zero-tolerance policy the denomination said had been in place for decades.
Refuge Church, formerly known as Jonesboro First Assembly of God, did not respond to a request for comment. The church previously told NBC News it adopted enhanced child safety policies after Waller’s arrest, including background checks, mandatory reporting requirements, and security cameras.
Glover, the former senior pastor who hired Waller in 1999 and is named as a defendant, disputed the accounts through his attorney, Glenn S. Ritter, who said Glover “denied all accusations of negligence and fault.” In prior interviews with NBC News, Glover acknowledged the 2000 meeting with police but said the officer told him only that Waller had been spending too much time at the school. He said no one ever reported a hidden camera or sexual misconduct to him. “That didn’t happen on my watch,” Glover told NBC News. “He would have been long gone. That was never reported to me.” He also said he had no recollection of the conversations Blackburn’s mother described.
A Yearlong Investigation and a Pattern Across the Denomination
The lawsuit builds on reporting NBC News published following a yearlong investigation into sexual abuse within the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination. That investigation identified approximately 200 Assemblies of God pastors, church employees, and volunteer leaders accused of sexual abuse over the past 50 years. Survivors across multiple churches described the same cycle: children warned adults, pastors minimized the reports, abusers were quietly returned to positions of authority, and more children were harmed.
NBC News found the Assemblies of God had repeatedly resisted mandatory child protection measures, including background checks and requirements to report abuse to police, leaving those decisions to individual churches.
The women’s attorney, Joshua D. Gillispie, put the institutional failure at the center of his statement on the lawsuit. “The Assemblies of God caught this predator red-handed in 2004, holding his camera and his list of nude exercises in their hands,” Gillispie said. “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.”
Davis said her goal in filing the lawsuit extends beyond what happened in Jonesboro. She wants the Assemblies of God to adopt mandatory nationwide child protection standards and reporting requirements so that what happened to her and the other women cannot be replicated in another church with another children’s pastor who understands that warnings will be met with prayer and two-week suspensions.
“These things could have been prevented,” Davis said, “if somebody had listened.”
Institutions That Protect Themselves First
The Tony Waller case is not a story about one predatory pastor. It is a story about what happens when an institution treats the protection of its own reputation as a higher priority than the protection of the children in its care.
The documentary evidence in this case is damning precisely because it spans so many years and so many separate incidents. Police met with Glover in 2000. Girls brought a sealed cup of what they believed was drugged soda to church leadership in 2004. A hidden camera was physically removed from a bathroom. A mother was told God himself had reviewed the situation and found it to be a misunderstanding. At every point where an institution was confronted with evidence that demanded a hard decision, the hard decision was not made.
This pattern is not unique to one Arkansas church. NBC News found it replicated across approximately 200 Assemblies of God cases over five decades. The common thread is structural: a denomination that left child protection decisions to local churches, that resisted mandatory background checks, that prioritized grace and forgiveness toward accused ministers in ways that consistently came at the direct expense of children who had done nothing except trust the adults their parents placed them with.
The Assemblies of God’s statement that it didn’t know about Waller until 2015 may be technically accurate as a matter of what reached the national office. It does not address why a denomination that claims to have had a zero-tolerance policy for decades structured its reporting and oversight in a way that allowed a children’s pastor to abuse girls for 15 years in a single church without that information traveling up the chain.
Davis and the five women with her are asking a civil court to impose accountability that the church declined to impose on itself. Whether the lawsuit succeeds legally, it has already accomplished something: it has put on public record, in granular and documented detail, exactly what the girls said, exactly when they said it, and exactly what the adults who heard them chose to do instead.
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