Almost. There’s a line you can cross that will finally get the FBI on your case, but you have to push it to an extreme. Pastor Apollo Carreon Quiboloy went a little too far.
The FBI’s Most Wanted poster for Pastor Apollo Quiboloy refers to his aliases — including “The Appointed Son of God” and “Sir” — and lists the U.S. charges against him, including conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, and sex trafficking of children; and bulk cash smuggling.
He had a familiar strategy. He followed the American/European model, dispatching missionaries to countries around the world, where they lived in desperate poverty, panhandling and thieving and conning people out of money that they then sent back to Quiboloy, who lived high off the hog and kept the pretty girls around himself.
From 2002 to at least 2018, the U.S. indictment states, leaders of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ selected girls and young women between the ages of 12 and 25 to be “pastorals” — personal assistants to Quiboloy who were also coerced into sex, U.S. prosecutors say.
The pastorals’ duties included preparing the pastor’s meals and cleaning his homes. According to a superseding indictment from a federal grand jury in California, the girls also “gave him massages using lotion, and traveled with him on trips throughout the world,” including the U.S.
“Pastorals engaged in sex with defendant Quiboloy on a schedule” that assigned them “night duty,” the indictment states.
Some pastorals were minors, the indictment states. It accuses Quiboloy and church administrators of telling the girls and young women that sex with the pastor was God’s will, threatening them with physical and verbal abuse “and eternal damnation” if they didn’t comply.
Note the dates: he was doing this crap starting in 2002, and the Philippines government just now arrested him. Mobs of followers are protesting his arrest. The FBI wants him extradited because his “church”, the Kingdom of Jesus Christ The Name Above Every Name, has been actively operating in the US as well.
The Kingdom of Jesus Christ sent workers to Los Angeles and other parts of the U.S. to solicit money on the streets for what U.S. prosecutors call a “bogus charity,” the Children’s Joy Foundation, based in Glendale, Calif. Officials at the foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
The workers told the public that donated money would go to help children in poverty, “when in fact the money directly financed KOJC operations and the lavish lifestyle of KOJC leaders, including defendants,” the federal indictment alleges. It adds that his church controls properties in Hawaii, Las Vegas and California, with Quiboloy also maintaining large residences in those areas.
Many of the workers arrived on student visas, with the church paying their tuitions, the indictment states. Some were allegedly placed in sham marriages with fellow church workers to help them stay in the U.S., according to the indictment. It accuses leaders of confiscating workers’ passports and immigration papers.
Every church is a scam, but most of them have learned to maintain certain standards of decorum in order to avoid the wrath of secular interests. Pastor Quiboloy shows us that those standards are terribly low…but then, we know that, because the Catholic Church and the various Protestant megachurches have been getting away with so much for so long.
How very Catholic of him..
Of course, that is a bit unfair to single out just the most infamous one given all, okay, almost all religious cults – and religions are just overgrown cults – have a tendency to enable even encourage this sort of sexual abuse and exploitation by the “leader(s)” of their “flocks.”
Disgusting if not surprising that tiits been going on so long and, I guess, good that its finally being exposed and some accountability is occurring.
/Cap’n Obvs.
And another example why we absolutely need religion to get people to behave morally! /s
Why is it always sexual abuse? Does anybody have any recommendations they can throw my way that might answer that question. I know I’m not the only one who is baffled by authoritarian obsession with sexual exploitation.
@ ^ lakitha tolbert : Um, its not? A lot of the time its also physical abuse and economic abuse and exploitation too. Pretty much every form of abuse really. Often all at once and combined.
Power is a drug, and extreme power combined with sexual gratification is an even more potent drug. I don’t think the explanation needs be much more complicated than that.
But his name is Apollo. He is literally named after a pagan Greek god.
Here as in other phenomena, The Simpsons provides a lesson. Cults are scams.
South Park goes a step further. Not only do they take on Scientology, the local catholic priest travels to Rome and discovers the cardinals are really into (CENSORED). And the pope is some kind of spider-like alien.
In some islamic countries like Mauretania a person who has learned to memorise the entire koran recruits boys as ‘students’. They are then sent to beg at the streets, because obviously a holy man is worthy of gifts. Few of the kids learn enough to make a living this way, obviously.
@6 Reginald Selkirk
So what? Several Catholic saints bear the names of pagan gods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_of_Paris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Apollonia
BTW never mind extradition. This is what the T-800 was designed for.
Still waiting for our current Supreme Court to exempt all clergy from the sex crime laws as they are taking up to much of the court docket.
That Quiboloy has now been arrested in the Philippines is the result of a fallout betwen two vile, corrupt, fascistic political dynasties – the Marcoses and the Dutertes. The current president is Ferdinand Marcos Jr. (“Bongbong”), son of the one-time dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and the well-known and respected shoe-collector, Imelda Marcos. The vice-president is Sara Duterte, daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, the previous president, best known for the large number of extra-judicial executions (aka murders) of alleged drug trafficers during his rule. Quiboloy is an associate of the Dutertes, and the mobs protesting his arrest are being supported by the vice-president (whose title seems particularly appropriate).
She was great in Purple Rain.
Careful. You’re bound to get an earful from the COEXIST bumper-sticker crowd with an army of No-True-Scotsmen backing them up. I certainly have.
I am willing to be though that if you created a fake church that promoted a Star Trek like future, was sex positive, but not with all the weird cultish forced sex stuff these weirdos do, extremely exclusive, pro-science, etc., it would be investigated, charges drummed up, and everyone jailed so fast they paperwork to be officially recognized as one wouldn’t be dry before authorities where breaking down the door. But.. any insane cult, especially Christian, which promotes hate, fear, dystopian future with itself in charge of everything, in which everyone is basically a slave, but is being told they finally won “real freedom”, etc… that, if you are lucky, merely gets put on a watch list as a, “possible threat, if they ever actually do anything dangerous”. Never mind the dangerous crap they are already doing, the money they are conning people out of, the lives they are ruining, or threatening, and the violence they are promoting among membe.. sorry, need to be the right wing version of PC and use the phrase, “Random person, with no clear political affiliation or source for their ideas.”, otherwise I might be accused of being “unfair” to cults.
I wonder if Quiboloy has ever crossed paths with the “Queen of Canada” Romana Didulo. There have been no reports yet of her sexually abusing followers, and they mainly seem to be white people who are interested in QAnon. But she has definitely manipulated them like he manipulated his.