Julie Roys is the Christian world's version of Gawker

The Christian journalist is providing a public service, but her moral and ethical blind spots raise too many parallels with those of Gawker for me to unequivocally support her.

Julie Roys with Andrew Bacote in 2017 (screenshot courtesy Total Living Network)

Lately, it’s become a badge of honor for liberal bloggers to be thrown in Facebook jail. I managed to avoid getting jailed until October 2019. It still befuddles me to this day. However, I still remember what one of my followers told me during that time. She said that she and a lot of people have not only come to depend on me, but almost automatically share my posts because they trust me. In the decade-plus that I’ve been paid to open my big mouth, I’ve known without being told that I must maintain my readers’ trust. Knowing that my followers depend on me to help cut through the smoke, mirrors, and alternative facts made that an even higher priority.

That priority is a big reason why I haven’t hesitated to put people on blast even when I agree with them or support what they do in principle. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. In the last few years, I’ve experienced this with Christian investigative journalist Julie Roys. She is indisputably doing this country a public service by calling out waste, fraud, and abuse in the church—and doing so in a way that can’t be dismissed as anti-Christian bias. When I first learned about her in 2020, I found myself sharing her work almost on sight.

But in the last few years, it has become increasingly apparent that she has glaring moral blind spots—and they’re glaring enough that I have not been able to unequivocally support her. I see a number of parallels between Roys and another outlet whose undeniably good work was obscured by serious ethical lapses. Namely, Gawker.

I first stumbled on Roys by accident in December 2020, when she reported that one of the titans of the evangelical world, John MacArthur, was covering up a potential COVID-19 outbreak at his San Fernando Valley megachurch, Grace Community Church. Just before Christmas, Roys spoke with a member of GCC’s leadership team who revealed several members had COVID. However, MacArthur and the rest of GCC’s leadership didn’t report it to Los Angeles County authorities even though they were required to do so.

A week later, Roys unearthed evidence that proved not just beyond reasonable doubt, but ALL doubt, that GCC was in the throes of a COVID outbreak. At least two fellowship groups had COVID clusters, and several staffers had caught it after a Christmas party. As outrageous as this was in and of itself, it was even more so because MacArthur had spent the summer of 2020 holding a full schedule of services with no masking of social distancing whatsoever. To pile obscenity on top of insult and injury, Southern California’s hospitals were being stretched to their breaking point during the worst of the winter 2020 COVID surge.

While sounding the alarm on Daily Kos here and here, I decided to look more into Roys—and was impressed. For instance, her reporting was largely responsible for bringing down another evangelical titan, James MacDonald. This was a local story for Roys, since MacDonald was the founding pastor of Harvest Bible Chapel in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, a Chicago suburb; Roys is a Chicago girl. Roys’ reporting from 2018 to 2019 revealed a long-standing pattern of bullying, corruption, and almost Trumpian lying by MacDonald and other church leaders. Harvest fired Macdonald in February 2019 after he was caught on tape degrading Roys and joking about framing the CEO of Christianity Today for possessing child sex abuse material. I also noticed that Roys turned the hot lights on abusive and corrupt behavior from the likes of John Piper and Mark Driscoll.

Seeing this made me want to stand up and applaud. Whenever the mainstream media or liberal bloggers called out the religious right or their heroes, invariably we get charged with anti-Christian bias. That’s been true long before Trump. However, that excuse didn’t fly when Roys turned the hot lights on them.

In an era when this country has become dangerously polarized, Roys seemed to be providing a public service. I was especially pleased since at the start of 2021, I joined Daily Kos’ community contributors team in part because Daily Kos’ staffers saw me as someone who could show there was such a thing as a Christian left. There’s been a good deal of hostility toward people of faith among much of the Daily Kos constituency, in part because of the religious right’s outrages. I saw part of my mandate as highlighting people like Roys, since she was an example of Christians cleaning their own house.

For that reason, I had no qualms about sharing her stories where I could and highlighting some of them on Daily Kos. For instance, I highlighted her work exposing MacArthur for publicly shaming and bullying a domestic violence survivor who refused to reconcile with her abusive husband—and his coddling of said abusive husband. Additionally, I highlighted Roys’ coverage of Franklin Graham’s bullying of Naghmeh Panahi, the wife of pastor and persecution victim Saeed Abedini. Long before The Washington Post jumped on the story, Roys revealed that Graham had the gall to suggest Panahi was cheating on Abedini even after it been amply established that Abedini was an abusive jerk. I even went as far as to publicly come to Roys’ defense when MacDonald targeted her with an ugly tirade that was eerily reminiscent of Trump’s most degrading attacks on women.

But in the summer of 2022, I discovered something that made me realize my past unreserved support of Roys was misplaced. It started with a seemingly unrelated event in June, when The Christian Post reported that Cora Jakes Coleman, daughter of televangelist T. D. Jakes, denied rumors that she had bullied a Texas woman into giving up her daughter for adoption. But The Christian Post buried the lede. That story also revealed new details about why Cora had divorced her husband of 11 years, Richard Brandon Coleman—better known as rapper SkiiVentura. It turned out that when Cora learned that Richard had molested his adopted daughter, Cora reported him to police and filed for divorce.

Roys had broken the news of Cora’s divorce earlier in the year, leading abuse advocate Julie Anne Smith to publicly upbraid Roys on Twitter for allowing comments on the original article and on social media. As Smith saw it, Roys wasn’t doing enough to honor Cora’s request for privacy. This latest development made clear why Cora made that request.

When you learn that your spouse betrayed you in a despicable and depraved way, you naturally want some time to process it. Unfortunately, Roys denied her that chance, even if it was inadvertent. A number of commenters on Facebook and Twitter actually suggested that Cora was no longer qualified for ministry. Those commenters are probably still scraping the egg off their faces. After all, once Cora learned what Richard had done, there was no way she could legally or morally remain married to him.

When Smith saw The Christian Post’s coverage of the story, she posted about it on Twitter, noting that this was evidence Cora had a very good reason to ask for privacy. One of Smith’s followers noted that Roys had broken the news that author and speaker Jen Hatmaker was divorcing before Hatmaker could announce it herself. That floored me. Roys sounded like the very definition of an ethical journalist, unlike other journalists who wear their faith on their sleeve (see Brody, David).

But sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. Roys had announced Hatmaker’s divorce in 2020, which all but forced Hatmaker to announce it herself on her socials. When Roys posted this story to her Facebook and Twitter feeds, the criticism came in fast and hard. Most commenters pointed out, and rightly so, that this was not anyone’s story to break. Was there a public interest in this? Sure. But in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, that public interest wasn’t so compelling that Hatmaker couldn’t be allowed to announce it first. A divorce is a deeply private and personal matter. It is not merely a story to be “broken.”

I initially wanted to address my concerns with Roys privately. But any plans to do so were derailed when I saw Roys’ public justifications for running this story. In response to one outraged Facebook reader, Roys said that she’d gotten Hatmaker’s divorce papers from one of Hatmaker’s Instagram followers. That Instagram follower saw something in Hatmaker’s posts that suggested her marriage was on the rocks, and found the divorce papers on public records. Even more disturbingly, she told a Twitter user that the divorce filing was all but certain to go public anyway.

When I saw that tweet, it was all I could do to keep from screaming “Bullshit!” out loud. Even if the filing was going to go public anyway, there was no reason for Roys to be the one to do it. She dug herself an even deeper hole in my mind when she claimed Hatmaker made her family part of her brand. Riddle me this, Julie. If you knew this, shouldn’t you have had enough respect for her family to wait for Hatmaker to announce it first?

I was especially troubled by Roys relying on a tip from someone who culled public records. This was little different from rummaging through someone’s mailbox and blasting out the information with little regard for potential harm. When I raised this issue in some of my groups for left-leaning Christians, a number of them said that the divorce records were public record. One of them said that approximately two weeks passed between the filing and Roys’ story—more than enough time to make a statement. They also argued that Hatmaker could have had it sealed. Uh huh. How do we know what else was going on with Hatmaker at that time? She may have had a dozen other things to worry about—like how to handle visitation for her kids, dividing property, the lot.

There’s something more fundamental at play here. There may be a lot of things that go with the territory of being a public figure. But something is very wrong if one of those things is having virtually all of your life plastered out for all to see. It’s part of the reason that people are reluctant to enter public life in the first place.

There has been a lot of speculation about why Roys did this. But in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, all indications are that Roys simply saw this as another story to break, and did it to get more clicks. That’s highly problematic in and of itself I can only agree with Smith— as Christians, “we must employ human decency in our behavior.” And common human decency demanded that Hatmaker be the one to announce her divorce first.

Every time I think about how Roys handled this, I find myself thinking back to the moment that cost Gawker any chance of survival when it was forced to cough up $140 million to Hulk Hogan for posting a sex tape of Hogan—a lawsuit bankrolled by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. In 2015, just before that verdict was handed down, the irreverent gossip blog ran an article that claimed Conde Nast Chief Financial Officer David Geithner, the brother of President Obama’s Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, was being extorted by a gay porn star and male escort. As the story goes, when Geithner reneged on a deal to meet up with the porn star on a trip to Chicago, the escort went to Gawker’s Jordan Sargent and offered to tell all. He supplied copies of text exchanges between himself and Geithner and a selfie that Geithner supposedly sent him.

Almost as soon as the story went live, the criticism came in hard, fast, and from all directions. Most of the detractors argued that it served no public interest to even imply that Geithner was gay. But there was a more fundamental problem. By any reasonable definition, this porn star was trying to extort Geithner. According to Mother Jones, Gawker published this piece after taking only one working day to research, vet, and fact-check it. It should have only taken a few working hours for somebody at Gawker to realize that they shouldn’t be doing a story, but calling the police.

A mere 18 hours after the story went live, Gawker Media’s six-member managing partnership voted to remove it. A lot of people on Gawker’s staff vehemently objected to this decision. For instance, Jezebel’s Natasha Vargas-Cooper crassly tweeted, “If it’s true, you publish.” They either didn’t know or understand that by running that story, Gawker made itself an accessory to extortion. Granted, CEO Nick Denton’s official announcement of the deletion was a classic non-apology apology. He actually suggested that there was a time where such an article would have been acceptable. But if not for that apology, I would have had no problem with people at Gawker facing criminal charges.

That apology may have been enough to stave off people being arrested, but it wasn’t enough to keep Gawker in business. While its sister sites were sold to Univision at a bankruptcy auction, Gawker itself shut down in August. It was revived by women’s magazine Bustle after six years and at least one false start, only to shut down again in 2023. It is currently in the process of being revived once again, though there has only been a placeholder page since November 2023.

NPR’s David Folkenflik wrote that Univision was unwilling to buy Gawker because it believed the site was “too toxic to touch.” But wait a minute. At its height in 2015, Gawker had 23 million visits per month, making it one of the most visited sites in the world by a city mile. Its Facebook and Twitter followers numbered in the millions. Even with the legal equivalent of a cluster headache hanging over it, surely someone would be willing to buy it on principle, right?

It’s my considered opinion that the Geithner fiasco scared off any potential buyers. After all, even if the Hogan suit hadn’t driven Gawker out of business, any lawsuit by Geithner certainly would have done so. Geithner would have had an infinitely stronger case than Hogan. Not only did it invade his privacy, but more seriously, it made itself complicit in a ham-handed attempt to extort him.

It’s sad, because Gawker indisputably did a lot of good work. It turned the hot lights on Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s substance abuse, and revealed that a Texas Internet programmer was actually a notorious Reddit troll linked to a tranche of racist and obscene posts. According to Folkenflik, Gawker was “rarely in better form” when it revealed Bill O’Reilly used his influence to start an investigation of his ex-wife’s boyfriend. As Folkenflik put it, it was a classic case of Gawker “bird-dogg(ing) the powerful who bullied other people with less stature and fewer resources.”

But all of that got obscured by a culture in which it was acceptable to publish something just because it was true. Granted, Roys hasn’t veered into potentially criminal conduct like Gawker did here. But the mentality was too similar for comfort. And it was such that I cannot unequivocally support her.

It really stings because Roys is undeniably doing good work. She not only did a good measure of the heavy lifting exposing Bickle’s depravity, but is also largely responsible for showing that the rot at Gateway Church extended way beyond Robert Morris. But the way she handled Hatmaker’s divorce still leaves a rancid taste in my mouth.

I first spoke out about this in July 2022 on my Medium blog. But I felt compelled to raise it again because of something that stuck in my craw in the last year. Many of you know that I hit the ceiling when Rick Joyner publicly called for Mike Bickle to be “restored” even after Bickle had been exposed as a sexual predator—one who had also groomed and assaulted a minor.

This really hit a raw nerve with me because my then-apartment in Charlotte was a mere stone’s throw from the headquarters of Joyner’s MorningStar Ministries, in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Said complex is also home to the Comenius School for Creative Leadership, a K-12 Christian school that is under the umbrella of Joyner’s ministry. It goes almost without saying that anyone willing to come to the defense of a pervert like Bickle doesn’t belong within an area code of a private school. Indeed, Joyner’s take looks especially tone-deaf now that an independent investigation found Bickle molested at least 17 women over the years.

One of my biggest regrets is that I wasn’t able to do more to bring Joyner down, since my mother’s recovery from a nasty fall was taking far longer than anyone could have anticipated. But early on, when it looked like my mother was coming home from the hospital soon, I was already thinking about how to put Joyner on blast.

On paper, calling Roys would have been at the top of my list. But I couldn’t do so in good conscience given her disturbing ethical lapse with Hatmaker’s divorce. Some may think it’s purity trolling. But giving Roys a pass for this would be no different from how right-wing evangelicals who are willing to overlook Donald Trump’s depravities. They may be willing to excuse outrageous and unacceptable behavior just because someone does what they like. I am not. And neither are a lot of Christian Dems or right-leaning Christians who are never-Trumpers.

Roys is fulfilling an important niche—calling out waste and fraud in the church. But this episode proves that we need more journalists who are willing to do so—while upholding basic standards of integrity. We’re in a line of work where how you get the story matters as much as getting the story. And that goes quadruple for Christian journalists.