Hovind was arrested earlier this week. He’s now out on bail.
In case you didn’t follow the personal lives of creationists, there has been growing drama in Kent Hovind’s ministry. It’s all about manipulating women and domestic abuse, so you may not want to read further.
Kent Hovind was first married to Jo Hovind in 1973. She was badly burned by his criminal activities that landed him in jail; she was his dupe and accomplice, and was also convicted on 45 counts of tax evasion, and served a year in prison. She divorced him in 2016, after he got out of prison. His own son, Eric Hovind, kicked him out of the house. You’d think people would learn their lesson from that, that Kent Hovind is a manipulative con artist.
But no, he turned right around and married Mary Tocco in 2016. That lasted about a year; she noticed that Kent was once again playing shady games with the law and taxes, and excluding her from any discussions about managing the ministry, and I imagine she saw what happened to Jo and decided to bail out before she was dragged into criminality with him. She is a creationist and a Christian, but there’s no hiding the fact that Kent Hovind is a creepy cult leader.
Kent Hovind renounced his marriage to Mary unilaterally, a thing you can do if you are a cult leader, I guess. They are not officially divorced.
In 2018, Kent Hovind found another woman who was attracted to his creationist ministry, Cindi Lincoln, and “married” her, despite being still legally married Mary.
Hey, anyone else hear the warning sirens?
It gets worse.
Recently, Cindi filed a request for protection with the Alabama court system. She fears for her life, and thinks Kent Hovind might kill her to protect his reputation as a god-fearing man. She claims he “body-slammed” her in an argument…an argument which, weirdly, Kent Hovind insisted on recording and posting on the web (TW! Don’t listen if you have a history of dealing with domestic abuse). It’s a disturbing audio recording in which Kent wheedles and whines and insists he’s recording against her wishes because he has to “protect his ministry” while she cries and screams in frustration. It sounds like gaslighting to me. It’s not what someone who sincerely cares about the happiness and welfare of his wife would do. It is what someone who wants to silence a threat to the flow of money into his cult would do.
To add to the disgusting odor from this whole event, Hovind is now trying to argue that Cindi does not have grounds to request a protection order, because she’s not married to him.
So let’s add up Kent Hovind’s flaws: 1) he’s an ignorant, dishonest creationist. 2) He’s a convicted tax fraud. 3) He is alienated from his first wife and son, so there’s some personality problems there. 4) His second wife left him because he was a sneaky shit with money schemes. 5) He “married” his third “wife” on false pretenses. 6) He’s a domestic abuser.
Do I need to bring up his callous disregard for a child who died at his cheap-ass creationist park?
Kent Hovind is the poster child for corrupt Christian grifters everywhere.
As if I needed more reasons to hate the Hovinds. People this messed up don’t deserve freedom.
He isn’t very good at playing those shady games with taxes.
He put himself in prison for 8 years by going the Sovereign Citizen route.
The IRS just wants their taxes. They don’t want to put people in prison because prison is expensive. It costs a lot of money.
If he had paid up, it would have been a civil offense and that would have been the end of it.
Most creationists I know in real life are fine folks, otherwise, and we get along fine. Hovind, though, strikes me as the type of guy where if you sat down and had dinner with him, you’d want to take a shower afterwards. Even years ago before hearing about his tax fraud and now domestic abuse, he just oozed sleaziness.
Apparently marriage isn’t sufficient to make an honest man out of this grifter.
One wonders if his second wife has gone to the Feds to report on what he was up to.
He got arrested. Out on $1,000 bail.
https://www.monroejournal.com/
Smarmy voice has toxic personality to match , figures that he’d be abusive.
Maybe he just hasn’t found the right Christian woman yet.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jun/10/floredelis-did-brazil-evangelical-superstar-have-her-husband-killed
From the linked article:
Come on, Kent, we all know that what you really want is a crown of thorns. And then when you rise from the dead you can charge the rubes a grand apiece to view its bloody barbs.
I have NO REMORSE for any of these people that are directly involved with Kent Hovind and/or his so called “ministry.”
Wait, I thought those people didn’t believe in divorce?
“Lord, build a hedge of protection around us as we’re being attacked,” he prayed.
That’s a level 2 cleric spell. What you need is the magic user’s level 6 wall of fire. Or the bag of spiders. Stupid christians.
@12, Perhaps not so much a cleric’s spell as a novice ranter’s summoning, seemingly either of a demon(? elemental?) called “lord”, or teh authoritarian overseer of such beasties. The mildly deranged penguin suspects the summoning won’t work at all, albeit there is chance a scroll might appear, entitled Moat Digging for Eejits (shovels not included), with little text and large easy-to-color pictures (crayons not included). And, she also points out, the demon’s alleged name is probably misspelled, perhaps the one nicknamed “lograde” is meant?
I have a friend, a decent and kind person who works with the elderly, who creationism contaminated to the point that he thinks that Hovind has been the victim of people betraying him and dislikes Eric and others who speak out against Hovind within creationism as a result.
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.” (S. Weinberg)