Part Two: Bishop David E. Taylor: Jesus Christ's Best Friend

Speaker 1 Coolzone Media.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 welcome back to Behind the Bastards. That's the podcast that this is right now.
And yeah, we're talking about the kingdom of God. Not the

Speaker 1 kingdom of God is in the thing that people believe exists, but the kingdom of God is in the cult that the FBI just raided.

Speaker 1 Back with me as my guest, Jake Hanrahan, the host of Popular Front, and a podcast on our our network, Sad Oligarch. Jake,

Speaker 1 how are you doing?

Speaker 2 Good. I'm good.
I'm ready to learn again about Jesus and his pretend best mate.

Speaker 1 And his pretend best friend, David E. Taylor.
Yes.

Speaker 1 That is, I've never heard anyone claim to be Jesus's best friend. So he's at least, he's at least, you know, creative, you know, a thinker.

Speaker 2 Yeah, not since like the Bible, you know. Right.

Speaker 1 I don't even think anyone of the Bible had the balls to be like, no, he's my best friend. No, that is true.
Like, that is true.

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Speaker 1 So.

Speaker 1 By 2019, David E.

Speaker 1 Taylor's ministry had found and thoroughly explored its sweet spot, finding desperate people who were either sick themselves or who had ailing loved ones and promising to convince God to solve their problems for a price.

Speaker 1 He had a different courses of lectures in which he would walk.

Speaker 1 And these are like, you know, one of his big money-making things is he'll have these huge, he'll fill out like a stadium or whatever, or one of these, like, almost like an MLM, right?

Speaker 1 Well, where they'll, they'll rent out these huge public speaking spaces. And he'll, he and like his top, he has a couple of pastors that work under him, will, will teach you, right?

Speaker 1 For like, they'll do like a three-day lecture series, you know, on how to make personal contact with Jesus and then how to use your newfound friendship with Jesus to get stuff, primarily to cure

Speaker 1 and save your sick or dying or dead loved ones, right?

Speaker 1 Like that is the entire grift here is that I will teach you how to meet Jesus so you can get favors from him and specifically like saving your loved one favors.

Speaker 1 David's marketing people, who are again, all unpaid cult members working and living together in these giant warehouse spaces that he's bought across the country, managed his social media and they would draw people to the call-in line with posts like this.

Speaker 1 And this is a July 2019 Twitter post from David E. Taylor's account.
Thousands are being healed of cancer through the life and ministry of David E. Taylor.
Call 1-877-843-4567 for more information.

Speaker 1 You'd think, I don't know, this is the part that I have trouble getting my head into is somebody who's like, well, yeah, this must be how getting cured works.

Speaker 1 Like, this must be how God works is like, I have to call a call in line to get in good with this one dude who has like the connection to the on high.

Speaker 1 That's the part where I'm like, man, I just don't, I just don't get that. I don't get believing that.
That's, that's such a stretch.

Speaker 2 He doesn't even really come across as particularly charismatic.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, there's other than his like, I mean, let's be honest pretty dapper outfit there doesn't seem to be like that much new to what they're doing other than maybe the aesthetics of it but yeah no it's it's i guess it's just preying on you know very

Speaker 1 people at a very loose end but still plenty of cults do that but i guess this one took off yeah i mean that that's really what it comes down to is that like this is and it's just it's just so blatant yeah um to an extent that is is sometimes funny It's usually more sad than funny.

Speaker 1 But when you go through kind of the post that this dedicated PR team is putting together, they're throwing together advertisements for like big in-person events, one of which was called Miracles for the Maimed.

Speaker 1 And I'm just going to show you the ad image that they had here because it's a special one.

Speaker 1 Look at that. It's a photo of David E.
Taylor holding like 30 different like walking canes and crutches. Like he's just got dozens of them in his hands.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 2 he's inventive, if nothing else, you know.

Speaker 1 He's, yeah, he's got like a white suit that's chased with gold filigree. And yeah, it's miracles for the maimed with David E.
Taylor. For with God, nothing shall be impossible.

Speaker 1 I think what we're meant to take from this is that, like, well, all these people who came in needing crutches and walkers and canes don't need him anymore. He cured the maimed.
So David E.

Speaker 1 Taylor's just got to take care of all this trash now.

Speaker 2 I mean, the thing is, though, like, maimed is pretty heavy like if you're like oh i can't walk very well like to be maimed you've been pretty fucking badly hurt

Speaker 2 you've been maimed yeah yeah it's like he went in really heavy with that man yeah very funny well not funny for the people but the image is fucking incredible i'm not gonna lie

Speaker 2 i really really liked like the aesthetic of it it's it's very like 2000s era but just with the added caveat of being like a weird god cult it's great right yeah it's it's it's it's a special picture and when I saw that beautiful image, I had to know more.

Speaker 1 So I found one of David's YouTube channels that still hosted the Miracles for the Maimed video. A lot of his stuff's been taken offline since the FBI raid.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 I found this is like a stream of one of his like.

Speaker 1 like speeches, right? Like or one of his like events, you know, I told you that he goes up on stage and he'll do these like multi-hour long talks.

Speaker 1 And this, like, you can find this whole video online on YouTube. It's called Miracles for the Maimed with David E.
Taylor from his Miracles, David E. Taylor Miracles in America stream.

Speaker 1 This one has 741 views. It was streamed eight months ago.

Speaker 1 So we're not talking about a massive channel, but clearly, I think he's filling these in-person rooms because he's got, he's got, like, what I, the image I just showed you of him with all the crutches, that was like a billboard advertising this thing for weeks.

Speaker 1 And so people who just didn't know much about David E. Taylor showed up to see him speak and give his, like, because this is part of his Global Miracles in America Crusade Against Cancer.

Speaker 1 So it's, yeah, he's, he's, this is appealing to some number of people who are like desperate as a result of their fucking horrible cancer. Um, and they show up in person.

Speaker 1 And this is how I think this is a like in the YouTube video, this is just like what starts the stream off is there's this weird AI generated intro video.

Speaker 1 I'm guessing it was also the intro video that played at the symposium or whatever it was, like before David got on stage and started talking.

Speaker 1 But let's just watch this piece of AI-generated Koltschlock together, Jake.

Speaker 2 America,

Speaker 2 a nation formed by God, destined to be a light to the world.

Speaker 2 But for centuries, darkness has fought to claim its soul.

Speaker 1 I've kept them bound, chasing wealth, power, and

Speaker 1 pleasure. The guy talking just looks like a ring race.

Speaker 1 It's like Assassin's Creed, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yet, in the hour of her greatest peril, heaven.

Speaker 1 Not sure what president that's supposed to be.

Speaker 2 From the throne of eternity,

Speaker 2 the King of Kings beheld the plight.

Speaker 1 Now, I'm going to stop us right here. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 this is, I mean, it's just weird AI schlock, but what's interesting to me is Jesus's room, because at the point at which we stopped it, Jesus is like walking around in this like gold chased room.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And there's like 30 beds in it that are just empty. Yeah.
Like Jesus, the dozens of beds is weird to me. Like, why does Jesus need that many beds in his room?

Speaker 1 What is Jesus doing that requires all of those bits? Does Jesus keep a harem? Yeah. Because I don't know why else you'd have that many beds.

Speaker 2 Also, like everything is gold plated, gold gilded.

Speaker 1 I mean, like. It does all look like Donald Donald Trump's living room, yes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like, think what you want about religion. Like, I mean, if you go by the book or whatever, if you believe it or you like the story or whatever, Jesus was a pretty fucking cool guy.

Speaker 2 Like, he did some pretty cool shit.

Speaker 1 He wasn't into gold.

Speaker 2 Right. He was not into like loads of gold.
He was into, like, looking after lepers and, like, you know, like, helping people.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 He wasn't like, get me gold everywhere. Like, it's so silly, man.
Fuck.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it definitely. One of the, I think, unargued things of the text of the Bible is Jesus was not a huge fan of fucking palaces.
Not a big palace guy. Yeah, it's not

Speaker 2 anyway. Yeah, Jesus, not known to be a palace guy.
Definitely not.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, and what's fun here is obviously that's all AI generated, right? Like that's, it's very obviously AI generated.

Speaker 1 So what you've got here is unpaid human trafficking victims using the plagiarism machine to make Hollywood style trailers in order to scam sick people out of their money.

Speaker 2 It's pretty cool. It's, yeah, it's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 It's like, I mean, I always say the reason that, well, in my opinion, that I feel like Black Mirrors is terrible now is because real life, and I know it's such a hack thing to say, but it is so true.

Speaker 2 Like these real life scenarios are just pure Black Mirror episodes, really, you know? And here we are.

Speaker 1 I've had the same problem where like when I first started watching the show 10 years ago or whatever, it was like, oh, wow, this seems like something that could happen.

Speaker 1 And now it's like, well, this is, I mean, yeah, we're here. And it's actually slightly less upsetting than the real thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, what I wouldn't give for a San Juna Pero. That's not what we're getting at all.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right. Instead, we have like Jesus' gold-plated harem room to

Speaker 1 consecrate.

Speaker 1 Fuck palace. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it sucks.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Now, again, I also think it's kind of interesting.
And there's part of me that's like, should I analyze Jesus having all those beds more? Because David E.

Speaker 1 Taylor also owns a mansion with a lot of beds in it and was definitely running a sex cult. But also, there's no way they prompted it to look.
That's just what the AI thing came up with, I'm guessing.

Speaker 1 I'm sure they didn't specify he should have dozens of weird beds in his mansion. They were just like Jesus in a palace looking out a window or something.
That would be my assumption.

Speaker 1 But I don't know. It's weird how directly, again, it graphs to the actual cult that David E.
Taylor is running, which has a bunch of mansions with dozens of beds in them.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And sometimes they do do this thing where they kind of, you know, hide in plain sight, like, oh yeah, put that in there.

Speaker 2 Or maybe it's to make people, when they watch that, they're not so shocked when they actually find not the real thing because he's obviously not in heaven and he's not Jesus, but, you know, something similar, maybe make them not so shocked.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I can't tell you for certain.

Speaker 1 What I can show you is what the actual living spaces in his cult facility looked like, what the actual beds that his cult members are in, these giant warehouses where dozens of them are living at a time.

Speaker 1 And it looks like a homeless shelter, right? Like they're not, it's, you can see here, they're not living well.

Speaker 2 That is horrible. What is that? Yeah, so for anyone listening, it's just like tents inside, like people sleeping on it.
Oh, that's horrible. That tent looks like a horrible shelter.

Speaker 1 If it were a homeless shelter, I'd say like that looks like maybe an okay homeless shelter or like, yeah, like a FEMA shelter.

Speaker 2 People just got forced out of their homes and you're quickly making space for them it's that white tent though like that's creeping me up that was like some kind of weird medical i don't know yeah it looks weird yeah it's like For a homeless shelter, like it wouldn't be bad at all, but like that medical tent is creeping me the fuck out.

Speaker 2 But yeah, right. The AI is definitely

Speaker 2 a lot different.

Speaker 1 And these people are, again, they're bringing in millions of dollars a year for him. Like tens of millions over the course of the time they're doing this.

Speaker 1 The cult had the money to give them at least separate little rooms, right? Like, even if you're not wanting to pay these people because you're an evil cult leader, they didn't have to live like this.

Speaker 1 But this is part of the point.

Speaker 1 Keeping them in a situation that is like a homeless shelter is part of the point, because one of the threats he has against them as leverage is: I will make you fully homeless if you don't do what I say, right?

Speaker 1 Like, we're building to that, but that is kind of what's going on here. Um,

Speaker 1 so thanks to the federal indictment, uh, we also have full records of several years' worth of text messages from Taylor to his followers and to his top lieutenants who are helping to run the cult.

Speaker 1 So we do actually know directly how he incentivized and managed his PR team, the guys who created that crutch image in the video we just watched, when they fell behind on producing stuff like that.

Speaker 1 For example, on October 6th of 2020, Taylor's second in command sent a text message to the media team, which warned, media team, no going to sleep until the mosaic video was done.

Speaker 1 That was another ad for like one of these events that they were doing. And I

Speaker 2 sleep.

Speaker 1 No going to sleep. The grammar's not great.

Speaker 2 That's so dark. No, no, it's just like the whenever like people are restricting sleep, it's like always

Speaker 2 the lowest rung of like just nightmare shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because like that is the, I mean, the things that I have been willing to do because I've been exhausted and willing to

Speaker 1 have the energy to fight you anymore. I feel like it's, that's why sleep deprivation is like

Speaker 1 probably like top of the cult leader tactics out there, or at least tied with cutting off your family and shit for number one. Like, it's really big.

Speaker 2 It's why like, you know, the CIA were doing it when they were torturing people and Abu Braid and all that.

Speaker 1 Of course, same diff.

Speaker 2 Same thing, like, because it's just, if you're that exhausted, you'll be like, yeah, whatever. Like, sure, I did this, whatever.
Please let me sleep. It's just so harsh.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And that does explain a lot of the, God, why are people putting up with this? Well, because they're exhausted and starving.

Speaker 1 And like they, that you've gotten them to a point where they're not making anything that can be even like sort of described as a rational choice.

Speaker 1 Now, I have not found the mosaic video that he was talking about in that text message, but the indictment gives a very clear idea of how the cult was organized.

Speaker 1 At the top of the slave hierarchy were Taylor's so-called armor bearers. This is the title he gave to his like top slaves.

Speaker 1 These are not the loot, because he also has some people who are getting money, who are sharing in the top of the cult, right?

Speaker 1 Including like his, his romantic partner and a couple of these pastors working for him. And they're at the top top of the hierarchy, but kind of the top of the slave hierarchy are the armor bearers.

Speaker 1 And here's how the FBI describes them in their indictment. Armor bearers were Taylor's personal servants who fulfilled Taylor's demands around the clock.

Speaker 1 Taylor and Brannon, Brannon being his like number one, controlled every aspect of the daily living of their victims.

Speaker 1 They are not allowed to go anywhere without permission, and they sleep in the facilities where they work or in a ministry house.

Speaker 1 Armor bearers handled everything from the standard waiting on hand and foot of Taylor and Brannon and the other couple of people leading it to the actual nuts and bolts sex trafficking work that David E.

Speaker 1 Taylor required of them.

Speaker 1 Per the DOJ, Taylor demanded that his armor bearers transport women from ministry houses, airports, and other locations to Taylor's location and ensured the women transported to Taylor took Plan B emergency contraceptives.

Speaker 1 So.

Speaker 1 Not only are these armor bearers trafficking women for him from different cult compounds or like bringing them in when he manages to ensnare a young woman online or something, because he has these people, it looks like they're flirting for him sometimes.

Speaker 1 Some of it he must be doing himself. And these are women maybe who are more prominent in the evangelical community, like Christian female musicians and stuff who have like a degree of solid.

Speaker 1 That's a big target. But also just a lot of when a female cult member fancies his eye, he'll bring them in.
And these guys are trafficking them and giving them morning afterpills, right?

Speaker 1 Which seems to be the standard: is that anytime you sleep with him, you take a morning afterpill, just to be sure, right?

Speaker 1 I'm guessing both because he refuses to wear condoms and because the cult just didn't want to take any chances.

Speaker 2 It always gets so disgusting, doesn't it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, and I don't even feel like it's worth bringing up. I'm sure these people, this cult had a hypocritical attitude on whether or not morning after pills should be legal.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 it almost feels like pointless to bring that up when we're talking about crimes of this magnitude. Like, of course, they're hypocrites, right? You know, of course.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The women brought to Taylor seem to have mostly been female cult members, but again, he flirted heavily with these female, like, Christian pop musicians and recording artists.

Speaker 1 We'll talk more about that later.

Speaker 1 But in order to keep any of these ladies from speaking up and doing damage to his ministry, Taylor and his top lieutenants also operated what can be accurately described as a revenge porn ring, right?

Speaker 1 That's how they like kept these women from coming out. And I'm going to quote now from an article on Detroit Local Four News.

Speaker 1 Court documents claim that Taylor frequently solicited and received sexually explicit photos and videos from multiple female workers for the organization.

Speaker 1 There were thousands of sexually explicit photos and videos, officials said.

Speaker 1 One of set of photos found on the phone of Taylor's second-in-command were sent by a female worker, an unpaid worker, mind you, who cried when she handed them over and apologized for having been late in completing the assignment, which she said she understands that she needed to do and can't delay.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 This is your assignment: you need to take like naked photos of yourself or whatever and send them to me so that like I have, yeah, the ability to, yeah, I have revenge porn on you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Um, that's so dark to

Speaker 2 frame it as the assignment. Like, you're gonna basically get yourself in a position that's gonna be,

Speaker 2 you know, you're gonna be even more malleable, and it's your assignment, like, from God. Like, oh, it's just, yeah, right, evil.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, evil's the right word for it. And you know what's not evil, though? I mean, they might be.

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Speaker 1 Okay, so

Speaker 1 we're talking about the sex trafficking.

Speaker 1 David's most prominent alleged victim, and the woman who's given us the most details about how this process worked, was a gospel singer named Vicki Yohi.

Speaker 1 And prior, this is like, she was, she was, she was, is fairly prominent within like the world of Christian pop music. Prior to meeting Taylor, Yohi was a Dove Award-nominated musician.

Speaker 1 And you probably haven't heard of the Dove Award because it's not like... It's not a big deal in like

Speaker 1 the real world, but within this kind of community of like Christian, like musicians and stuff like that, who like specifically make like worship music and stuff, it's a pretty big deal.

Speaker 1 It's like they're Grammy, right?

Speaker 1 So she's not like a celebrity in normal world terms, but she's famous within like the evangelical, like the Pentecostal and the charismatic chunks of the evangelical community. Right.

Speaker 1 So she had a lot going on before she got caught up with this maniac, which is important because it means that when she decides to leave, when she realizes what he's doing, she has the resources and clout to actually escape.

Speaker 1 And that's why she's able to, she gives us a lot of details about this guy because she's able to.

Speaker 1 Like, she is not leaving the cult and having absolutely nothing, being completely broke, basically homeless. So, she has some ability to actually fight back openly.

Speaker 1 And she, she has been for years, by the way. She came out a while ago and has was one of the people who was first kind of detailing the actual extent of his abuse beyond just like tax fraud.
Right.

Speaker 1 So, he and Yohei met at a church event in 2017, and Taylor immediately, this appears to be part of his flirtation technique. He starts calling her his spiritual daughter.

Speaker 1 That

Speaker 1 isn't appealing. Doesn't seem like it should be appealing, right?

Speaker 1 That's pretty upsetting fundamentally, but she feels drawn to him.

Speaker 1 And she does consent to starting a sexual relationship with him, which lasts about 16 months. So this does start consensually.
They're both adults. She has the ability to say yes or no.

Speaker 1 She's not in the cult.

Speaker 1 And since coming out against Taylor, Yohe has repeatedly told reporters that this was a thing, like describing women he wanted to fuck as his spiritual daughters was a tactic Taylor used.

Speaker 1 He used it repeatedly on the women that he went after. She claimed he preys on women.
He does not honor women. Women are just a vagina.
And

Speaker 1 that seems true, sure. Like, that's, I don't, I don't doubt her at all.

Speaker 2 No, she's just a

Speaker 1 horrible, right no just disgusting like and i i just don't get how calling someone a spiritual your spiritual daughter works as a flirtation method uh well no unless you're like as depraved as he is is depraved or again you're you've you've drank so much of the kool-aid of this like weird extreme trunk of the religion that that's appealing to you like i don't know if we can fully get it not being part of this community like you have to almost have had right they uh have you seen dog dog tooth like uh it's been a long time but there's a there's like kind of a i mean i guess kind of a cult vibe amongst the family there but they they recontextualize words it's it's a little absurd to the point where like words mean completely different things there but like

Speaker 2 a lot of cults do that right like you know in their world it's like no it doesn't mean daughter like that it means daughter like this and it's like look no matter what way you look at it it's fucked up but in their world like you say it's just everything is on a different planet by that stage Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I, yeah, I think that that's exactly it, right? And what you're talking about, that is another common cult tactic is the, the reframing of words in part because it creates a bond.

Speaker 1 It's the same, I've brought this up a lot, but it's the same way, like if you and your friends are really into MMA or really into something like like Warhammer or some video game, there's like different terms that like are used within the community or like you're part of an online forum or something.

Speaker 1 And that creates a sense of bonding that like, I know what this means when I say it and so do you. That's not unhealthy inherently.

Speaker 1 But the extreme version of that is an effective cult tactic, both because it makes people bond and it also cuts people off from the action.

Speaker 1 When you do it extremely enough, and you're fundamentally, you can't understand what other people are saying, and they can't understand you. That creates this kind of

Speaker 1 furthers this sense of isolation that's necessary for cults to work the way they work, you know?

Speaker 2 In-group thinking and all that.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Now, we've talked about the spiritual daughter flirtation method. His other way of appealing to the women that he wanted to go after was much simpler.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to quote again from the News Herald.

Speaker 1 According to Yohi, Taylor made a habit of buying her expensive gifts, including Lobatine red-bottom shoes, a fur coat, and a Jaguar sedan during their relationship.

Speaker 1 She said some of the money for gifts came from JMMI, that's the church accounts. He said God just spoke to him to bless me with a car, she said.

Speaker 1 So that money for my car actually came from Joshua Media Ministries. Absolutely.
He says that. He doesn't deny that.
He says, yes, our ministry blesses other ministries with vehicles sometimes.

Speaker 1 Now, if you're wondering, is that tax fraud? To give your mistress a card using church money? The answer is yes. Yes.

Speaker 1 Although in a way that isn't easy necessarily to prove or get.

Speaker 1 Right. This isn't a thing that gets caught easily.
And in fact, most of the shit like this happens all the time with a bunch of different churches in the U.S.

Speaker 1 And it usually does not get caught, right?

Speaker 1 Churches are tax exempt, so they don't have to pay taxes on donations for the church to use to conduct its normal business of existing as a church.

Speaker 1 But that doesn't mean that churches and church pastors or other kinds of church leaders just don't ever have to pay taxes.

Speaker 1 For example, if your church pays a salary to the pastor or priest or whatever,

Speaker 1 they still have to pay payroll taxes, right? It's the same if they pay taxes to their workers. They still pay payroll taxes, right? Churches are not exempt from that sort of thing.
Interest.

Speaker 1 Like that's just the way, right? Like it's, it's, it's one thing the church should, the church, for example, shouldn't have to pay, this is the way the law works.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying I agree with this or disagree with this, but the church does not have to pay like a property tax. for their church to continue to exist as a church.

Speaker 1 But once the money is going into people's accounts as like a salary, that you pay money on as normal, right?

Speaker 1 And so if you're paying the pastor millions of dollars to buy luxury cars and a private jet and live in mansions, that money is supposed to be taxed.

Speaker 1 But if the church just buys luxury cars and a private jet that are the church's property, then they can get away without paying taxes.

Speaker 1 It just so happens that the cult leader is then the only one who gets to use them, right? And this is, it works usually.

Speaker 1 I think there's a degree to which, and this is Taylor has probably crossed the line because the IRS is after him, but you can get away with a lot in this regard, right?

Speaker 1 Like churches often do get away with a lot. No, that's not my private jet.
It's the ministry's private jet, right?

Speaker 1 But once you're buying your mistress a car, well, that's not the same. That's not a church expense.
And so she is expected to pay, you should be paying taxes on that, right?

Speaker 1 Someone should be paying taxes on these gifts, right? Because

Speaker 1 you can't give gifts over a certain amount and not have them be taxed, you know?

Speaker 1 So there is a bunch of tax fraud going on here, right? I'm both pointing out that there's a lot you can get away with as a church in terms of tax exempt stuff.

Speaker 1 And Taylor is constantly exceeding that remit. Like he is absolutely committing tax crimes.

Speaker 1 It's just, it takes a while for this to get caught because for one thing, the IRS is kind of scared of going after churches in the U.S., right?

Speaker 2 Because why is that?

Speaker 1 Well, for one thing, it's really bad PR.

Speaker 1 Whenever a Republican is in office, it becomes a lot easier for them to get away with this.

Speaker 1 But the Democrat, Democrat-like administrations don't really want that kind of fight either because the church will always say, oh, this is discrimination. This is anti-Christian discrimination.

Speaker 1 They're coming after me because of my faith, right?

Speaker 1 And it's just easier to ignore it. And that is usually what happens, right? And this is a part of the massive problem we have because these churches often, I mean, there's a lot that they often do.

Speaker 1 Like it's incredibly common for churches to

Speaker 1 basically like

Speaker 1 expressly give political orders or tell the congregation, this is how you should vote. This is who you should support politically.

Speaker 1 And churches aren't supposed to be able to do that and keep their tax exempt status, but they do all the time because everyone's scared of pissing these people off.

Speaker 2 Not to go too off track, but it just obviously you know about this. So would that be something that like, for example, the evangelicals are doing with Trump?

Speaker 2 Obviously, they, you know, they're very pro-genocide in Gaza. And I was just the whole time, I was like, why the, what the fuck is like, how do they have this much power?

Speaker 2 It's something like that, is it?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because these, these churches have huge amounts of money and they put that money towards different, like, that is a lot of like the right, a lot of the money that comes from the right does come from these, these mega churches and these mega church leaders who have just buckets of cash.

Speaker 1 And it's, it's also just,

Speaker 1 that's why it's such a fertile grifting ground is like creating a quote unquote church or calling yourself a pastor is you can get away with a lot and they're usually scared to come after you.

Speaker 1 You know, this is not what the episode is about, but this, this happens constantly. Like Taylor, Taylor is weird because he crossed the line enough that he gets in trouble for tax fraud, right?

Speaker 1 Which very rarely happens to these guys.

Speaker 1 Now, for his part, like a certain president, Taylor claimed to have refused any salary at all, right? That he's not getting any money for what he's doing.

Speaker 1 And this is the kind of thing that sounds good when you say it on stage to an adoring audience who aren't going to question you.

Speaker 1 But it's also the kind of thing that looks like tax fraud because it is. There's an organization called the Trinity Foundation, which monitors religious fraud and actually looks for stuff like this.

Speaker 1 And they published an investigation into tax fraud by David E. Taylor and the Joshua Media Ministries International in 2018, right? So this, there has been evidence, and this is extremely detailed.

Speaker 1 I would call this like a

Speaker 1 smoking gun inarguable report, what they put out. I've read through the entire thing.
It is excellent. work.

Speaker 1 It's very, it's kind of wonkish because it's more focused. We're focusing on all of the fucked up abuse of human beings.
They are focused on here is something he said.

Speaker 1 Here's an expense we know that was made. Here are the exact tax laws it violates, right? So it's kind of dry reading.

Speaker 2 But like how they get, like, I sorry, sorry, button there, Robert, but like, I guess it's kind of in the way of like,

Speaker 2 I guess it's a not a bad idea. Like, you know, like Al Capone, they went after his tax.
It's like, yeah, it's easier to get him on this, right?

Speaker 1 Right. And it's provable too.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 Without anyone, you don't need.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's black and white, and you don't need someone who is like an abuse victim and traumatized to be willing to testify, which is hard to do, right?

Speaker 1 I'm not making it a moral judgment. It's just difficult to get people to talk when they've been through something like this for a variety of reasons.
And you don't need that with tax fraud, right?

Speaker 1 And in that report, the Trinity Foundation says that like they consider whenever you hear that the head of a church is going without salary, that is a huge red flag.

Speaker 1 That's like one of their big warnings that fraud is going on. Quote, Taylor lives an apparent lavish lifestyle and appears to use the church account as his personal piggy bank.

Speaker 1 In his deposition, he says that he lives off gifts that are personally donated to him, which do not count as a salary.

Speaker 1 And that deposition was from a 2014, he gets charged with tax fraud in 2014, and his church loses its tax exempt status for like a year and then gets it back almost immediately.

Speaker 1 But this part has been going on for a while. The tax fraud has been known for about a decade before he actually gets in any serious trouble, which shows you how hard it is,

Speaker 1 even when they know tax fraud to the extent that the irs comes after you for it and takes away your tax exempt status you can get it back the next year and nothing will happen right because we just don't take these kind of crimes seriously in the united states

Speaker 2 it's like legal crime

Speaker 1 yeah exactly if you do it with a church it's not a crime yeah um now that report also goes into one of david taylor's grifts from november of 2018 a praiseathon where he asked his followers to donate to sponsor 300 new students who would be trained and brought into his ministry as volunteers.

Speaker 1 And I think the idea was that he would personally instruct these people in the art of talking to Jesus so that they could learn how to heal people with prayer.

Speaker 1 The Trinity Foundation notes, quote, students, and this is them describing the pitch that Taylor was making, students will be taught to do things even medical doctors and surgeons can't do.

Speaker 2 Oh dear.

Speaker 1 They go on, oh dear.

Speaker 1 They want to summarize, he claims he provided housing, meals, clothing, hygiene, and training for them at a cost of about $150K for each student's first year, more if their entire family relocated with them.

Speaker 1 That comes to a total of $45 million requested for that project alone.

Speaker 1 Taylor claims that they will be provided more than even an accredited Bible college would, and that many would receive a salary after completing their training.

Speaker 1 Now, this doesn't ever seem to have happened. No money was actually devoted to this program.

Speaker 1 I have found zero evidence that any of his followers were ever paid a salary after finishing their training. This was a grift at both ends.

Speaker 1 The donated money was not being used for the promised purpose, and the people that he did sign up as students weren't being given degrees, and they weren't being given salaries and jobs.

Speaker 1 They were made to work at a call center and abused, right? Right. Now,

Speaker 1 I know some of you may be wondering at this point. Robert, you said none of the donated money went to feeding or sheltering these unpaid volunteer students, but that can't be true, right?

Speaker 1 They had to have been, we saw where they were living.

Speaker 1 It can't be expensive, but clearly the cult was paying for beds and paying for food because these people weren't allowed to have jobs or money on their own.

Speaker 1 They would have starved if none of the donation money went to supporting them, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 all I have to say to that is, my dear friends, you've forgotten the sublime joy of welfare fraud because that's how he's feeding these people.

Speaker 1 One of the main whistleblowers against JMMI is a former follower of Taylor's named Chris Sorensen.

Speaker 1 And we'll talk about Chris's journey a little later, but he's one of three former members who have alleged to the Tennessee News Herald that Taylor's cult fed its worker followers, not using the tens of millions in donations, but via EBT fraud, right?

Speaker 1 That's our, the car, if you're poor enough, you get these electronic benefits transfer cards that allow you to buy certain kinds of food and drink, right?

Speaker 1 It's for people who will starve otherwise, you know? That's what EBT is for.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wondered for a long time what that was, actually. So it's like essentially like benefits so you can live if you lose your job or whatever.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Right, right. Exactly.
It's supposed to be, it's, and, you know, the program doesn't work nearly as well as it should. It's gotten much worse in the last year because of cuts to it.

Speaker 1 But what it is supposed to be is that if you are, if you can't, basically you can't feed yourself otherwise, this gets you the benefits you need to keep you and your family from starving.

Speaker 1 And this is how the cult made sure that they didn't have to pay even a dime of their money to keep their

Speaker 1 people making the money, working the call center alive.

Speaker 1 Quote, from the News Herald, JMMI instructed church members to claim homelessness with the state of Michigan in order, sorry, not I said Tennessee earlier, it's Michigan, in order to get electronic benefits transfer cards.

Speaker 1 Members then allegedly pooled the cards to an appointed designee who would shop for everyone at nearby stores. Every person had to have an EBT card, a food stamp card, Sorensen said.

Speaker 1 They said, if you don't get one, you're not going to eat. So you have 50 people to feed, and one card will last one day.

Speaker 1 You'll totally empty one card on the whole entire staff, and it's not for you personally. It's to spend on the whole entire group.
So you're not using your own card. I was in charge of it.

Speaker 1 I had to make an Excel spreadsheet of the status of everyone's card, and we kept them all in this little trapper keeper plastic box

Speaker 1 it's just and again this cult he brings in 50 million dollars in less than a decade just from donations to the you can feed people what i sketch is like you're already so

Speaker 2 rich why even risk getting into this trouble for this kind of thing you know it's just like beyond me i get do they think they're untouchable

Speaker 1 I mean, they were for a very long time. Yeah, true.
It gets away with this for closing it on 20 years.

Speaker 1 And I think it's also with people like this, I think they almost feel a sense of disgust at the idea that they might spend any of their money on other people.

Speaker 1 You know, I really, I think that there's something pathological going on. Yeah,

Speaker 1 I may be, maybe I'm kind of reading into it a little bit, but like, I just, I don't know what else it could be, you know?

Speaker 1 And it's probably worth talking about here how food and shelter were both used as weapons by David E. Taylor to keep his workforce functioning without complaint.

Speaker 1 His first line of defense was, of course, threatening to damn people to hell or even have God harm them or their loved ones.

Speaker 1 But when the power of those threats started to wane, his reliable backup was promising to make people homeless if they resisted or failed to hit quotas.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to quote directly from the federal indictment here.

Speaker 1 On or about May 5th, 2021, at 12:26 a.m., Taylor texted to DG, his current armor bearer, tasked with communicating his orders to staff, whose identity is known to the grand jury, you'll have to raise $164,000 today.

Speaker 1 Each hour you fall behind, consequences will start. We will mess with the food.
You will fast from the regular food or abstain for a while normally.

Speaker 1 As of now, there's a 21-day peanut butter and jelly regiment like before.

Speaker 1 Those who do not push their calls individually and as a team with the right amount of people and closing numbers at 6 p.m., they don't eat dinner at all.

Speaker 1 If they do good afterward this time, then at the end of the night, they may get a snack before bed, but not much, and this regiment will go on every day for 21 days until they obey.

Speaker 1 Take away the food. There will be other consequences.
We must make them fast and and pray. He uses two exclamation points at the end of each of those sentences.
I don't know why.

Speaker 2 You can clearly, I think,

Speaker 2 if you are in the mindset where you'll, you'll abuse people so much to the point where you're saying, yeah, like I can make your mother with cancer get better or your dad with AIDS or whatever.

Speaker 2 And then you get really, really rich anyway. It's like, I think the whole psychotic element just gets compounded.
And that's what it sounds like there. It's like he thinks he's God.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Or the devil, maybe. I don't know.
Yeah, well, that.

Speaker 1 On other occasions, he enforced multi-day fasts when call center workers couldn't make his impossible quotas.

Speaker 1 Sleep was also commonly withheld as a punishment, although it might be more accurate to say that Taylor structured his quotas in such a way that no one could make them, which was automatically punished by being made to work until 4 a.m.

Speaker 1 In addition, whenever the cult had trouble making its numbers, which was always, he'd schedule mandatory meetings, which ran from three to six hours long.

Speaker 1 So if you're keeping track, this meant that anytime the money wasn't as much as he wanted, and it was never as much as he wanted, the staff was basically banned from sleeping almost entirely, right?

Speaker 1 This is presented as a mix of punishment and strategy, but the overall goal is to make sure none of his full-time workers ever get sleep because that keeps them in the state where they'll do whatever he says.

Speaker 2 Like zombies.

Speaker 1 Like zombies. Here's the indictment again.
On or about September 19th at 10.21 p.m., Taylor texted to victim DG, Michelle and Kia, make them all stand and tell them if the punishment to 4 a.m.

Speaker 1 don't work, I'm going to make it worse and worser. They are going to get their beds out of my house and sleep in the garage.
Everyone piled in there.

Speaker 1 This ruthless boot camp is going to get worse and worse until they do what we are telling them. There will only be soup, bread, and water for all the degenerates every day.

Speaker 2 Oh, the degenerates. Is that what he called them?

Speaker 1 The degenerates. Yes, yes, because they're not, they couldn't make $164,000 in a day like God demanded.
Wow. You know?

Speaker 2 It's what Jesus would want.

Speaker 1 It's what Jesus would want.

Speaker 1 About a month after this, he sent another message complaining, I can't be kind to you, letting you start later and sleep in, because members of the team had fallen behind again on his impossible quotas.

Speaker 1 All caps, now I don't care if you are tired. You've crossed the line.
You're going to work all night and get up in the morning.

Speaker 1 I want the names of those who are not helping with this push or doing their work or showing change. All caps, they are going to the homeless shelter.
Right?

Speaker 1 So again, this is directly the threat is i have already reduced you to near homelessness if you cross the line you're out on your ass right yeah after taking everything you had anyway you can't even get ebt because we have your ebt card right like you're already on it you're out because you don't get that forever right that's the other thing is that like these people are so comprehensively

Speaker 2 I know, like, obviously, this is a cult and that's how it is, but it's also,

Speaker 2 I guess the two go hand in hand, but it's also like turning into a pretty evident kind of human trafficking ring if they're like moving people around just to kind of be in what is essentially slave labor, taking all their identity, their rights, making money off them.

Speaker 2 Like it's a serious criminal enterprise at this stage.

Speaker 1 Yep. Yep.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Now, in the federal indictment, former cult members alleged that Taylor would often threaten his victims by explaining the power God gave him, rebuking them for disobedience, and cursing those who stopped working for him or spoke negatively about him.

Speaker 1 In addition, quote, the defendants required the victims to request permission to leave their housing or the call centers and controlled their access to transportation.

Speaker 1 The defendants rarely permitted victims to seek outside medical attention. The defendants often denied victims medical attention altogether.

Speaker 1 In some instances, the defendants physically abused victims when Taylor was displeased with the actions or behavior of victims.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 I noted at the top of these episodes that this cult was one of the ones that I have some trouble really understanding.

Speaker 1 So we should look into a couple of case studies studies of former members who found themselves wrapped up in Taylor's group and ultimately escaped.

Speaker 1 One local Houston news station, KPRC2, interviewed a friend of a woman who joined the cult because she was groomed as a bride for Taylor.

Speaker 1 Quote, from the beginning, it was great, exciting as they usually are, the woman said, but I kept warning her that something sounded like a cult.

Speaker 1 Her friend eventually cut off all communication, but returned a year later, revealing the mental and psychological abuse she endured.

Speaker 1 She said they starved her, mentally and psychologically abused her, and used scripture and hell to condemn her, the woman said. It was almost like a loyalty program.

Speaker 1 They had to defend the top person and their ministry. And when her friend ultimately escaped, quote, she didn't know what to believe, who to trust, what churches to trust.

Speaker 1 And this is where, like, she says that her friend restored her faith despite her trauma and found another church, which is depicted as a positive end in the article.

Speaker 1 I can't help feeling maybe you needed a break from religion for a while.

Speaker 1 Maybe, maybe, like, maybe a little while out there, you know?

Speaker 2 Maybe for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1 Months off of a religion.

Speaker 1 And it's, you know, outside of, because we're talking again about how crazy all of this seems on the inside, I need to emphasize, unless you are paying attention to like the Trinity Foundation's reporting on their tax fraud and stuff, none of this is super obvious.

Speaker 1 There's not any mainstream news articles for a while.

Speaker 1 You get, starting like a year, a couple of years ago, you do get some local press about some of the allegations, but there's very little to find on these people.

Speaker 1 And they also seem to have some like fairly high-profile backers.

Speaker 1 From July 31st to August 4th of 2019, David Taylor held a miracle crusade against cancer in Taylor, Michigan.

Speaker 1 And it featured like one of the people who spoke at the event was Andre Geslerowski, who's the chairman of an Israeli nonprofit called the Helping Hand Coalition that supports Holocaust survivors, right?

Speaker 1 And I'm going to quote from the Trinity Foundation's right up here. Gasierowski co-founded the conglomerate Art B, which looted the Polish banking system.
Then Gasierowski fled the country.

Speaker 1 He moved to Israel to avoid extradition in 1991. The Washington Post explained the criminal enterprise.

Speaker 1 The company's founders discovered that a helicopter could move cash around Poland faster than the antiquated banking system could clear checks.

Speaker 1 Art B shuffled about 18 billion through the banking system, picking up an estimated $360 million million on interest on money that was in several accounts at the same time.

Speaker 1 A Polish court convicted Gasiarowski's business partner, Bogoslaw Bogsik.

Speaker 1 Radio Free Europe reported Bogsik was found guilty of cheating the Polish banking system out of 424 million zlodis, 94 million US dollars, defrauding a bank, bribing bank clerks, and carrying out financial misdeeds connected with his company, Art B.

Speaker 1 As of the year 2000, Polish investigators estimated that Bagsik may still have some 40 million abroad, and Gasierowski twice that amount.

Speaker 1 After moving to Israel, Gasierowski reinvented himself as a philanthropist, but failed to pay back the people he defrauded.

Speaker 1 JMMI is raising money for a partnership with Gasiarowski's Helping Hand Coalition, claiming to bring aid to thousands of impoverished Holocaust survivor Jews in desperate need, but it is impossible to know how much money is actually going to the Helping Hand Coalition.

Speaker 1 So on paper, this guy is working with a foundation that helps, an Israeli nonprofit that helps Holocaust survivors.

Speaker 1 Then you look into it and it's like, no, this guy defrauded the Polish banking system to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Speaker 1 And whatever he's doing now, this coalition, now that he's fled to Israel to avoid prosecution, is some kind of con, right?

Speaker 1 It's a Holocaust survivor con. Like he is stealing money from a Holocaust survivor.

Speaker 2 It doesn't get much.

Speaker 1 And David Taylor's helping. Yeah, that's about as bad as it gets.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's really bad. It's like the worst side hustle ever after already doing all the worst things he ever did.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I'd love to know how that conversation started. I was like, hey, I hear you're in some really fucked up shit, David E.
Taylor.

Speaker 1 You know, you're trafficking people, committing all sorts of sex crimes. How would you like to defraud some Holocaust survivors?

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know, and he was like, fuck you.

Speaker 1 And it's weird. This fucking Gassierowski, this weirdo, is at least, I mean, he's in good enough odor with the Israeli government that they're not extraditing him.

Speaker 1 And also, I think it's through him, David E. Taylor gets commissioned as an official ambassador for Israel to America.
It's not like a, like, the legally an ambassador, it's like

Speaker 1 an honorary thing, right?

Speaker 1 But like he's he gets stuff like this, you know?

Speaker 1 And he's he's working.

Speaker 1 He has this, all these different on paper humanitarian enterprises, the Refuge Homes Project, which is supposed to rescue and find homes for children who have been sold into human sex trafficking.

Speaker 1 And there's all these different, you know, feeding the poor charities. He's supposed to be, the money that gets donated to him is supposed to go to like dig water wells and poor places overseas,

Speaker 1 providing Thanksgiving and Christmas gifts to thousands of families.

Speaker 1 There's this disaster aid charity that's real called the Convoy of Miracles that he just like lied and pretended to be donating money to.

Speaker 1 They eventually like went to court because they were like, he's not, he's just using our name to steal from people.

Speaker 1 It's cool stuff.

Speaker 1 So yeah, let's talk about. Well, actually, let's throw to ads first because that's probably time for that.
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Speaker 1 And we're back. So, the most detailed account we have from a former member is a guy named Chris Sorensen, who I chatted about a little earlier.

Speaker 1 Chris talked to the News Herald in 2019 after escaping, and he found the cult. He got involved with David E.

Speaker 1 Taylor's JMMI as a direct result of reading Taylor's 2009 book, Face-to-Face Appearances from Jesus the Ultimate Intimacy. Sorensen claims, I got associated with Taylor.
I know, right?

Speaker 1 That's such a fucking talent.

Speaker 1 Sorensen claims, I got associated with Taylor's ministry in January of 2015. That's when I very first heard of the guy.

Speaker 1 And I saw ads for his book saying, if you buy this book and you read it, you'll see Jesus. So I took the gamble.
I bought it and I read it.

Speaker 1 And Chris's story is valuable because it illustrates the technical means by which Taylor utilized his followers to reach out and entrap new worker drones.

Speaker 1 Within days of finishing reading the book, Sorensen wakes up.

Speaker 1 He's just finished this, and there's a Facebook message from JMMI, from Taylor's Col written by someone, and he doesn't know this at the time.

Speaker 1 It's written by someone living in a warehouse owned by the Colt in Michigan.

Speaker 1 And the message said, Jesus told me to reach out to you. I was in prayer last night and I was drawn to your page to contact you.

Speaker 1 And Sorensen is like, oh, wow, I just read your book and now you're reaching out to me. I was so honored.
You see why this would be effective, right? Right.

Speaker 1 Someone has just, and it feels like, well, how could they have known unless God told them, right?

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 Sorensen, on the strength of this, because he's so overwhelmed by what's happened and I was in a vulnerable point in his life, he joins the cult, gives himself up entirely, starts working on their Michigan property full-time.

Speaker 1 And in short order, he's the one sending spam messages to people on Facebook. And so he realizes, oh,

Speaker 1 God didn't tell them to reach out to me, right?

Speaker 1 What's actually happening here is that these call center workers who are expected to reach out to hundreds of people a day, they're just going through the Facebook pages of David Taylor and a bunch of other prominent televangelists like Billy Graham or Joel Olstein, and they're seeing who is liking each of the posts.

Speaker 1 And then they're just messaging people who have recently liked posts. So Sorensen must have liked the post about the book that he bought and read.
And they see that and they reach out to him directly.

Speaker 1 That's the actual way in which they're kind of like picking people to cold call is like, whoever's liking these posts from other evangelists, there's a better chance that they're going to be vulnerable to our shtick.

Speaker 1 And they're just messaging these people. Each individual like call center worker is expected to send something like a thousand messages a day, most of which are copy-pasted from a script.

Speaker 1 And even though these people are more likely to respond, most recipients of these messages ignore what they're being being sent.

Speaker 1 But every now and then, someone like Sorensen would get a message at just the right time that it feels like something's happening.

Speaker 2 Like

Speaker 2 cold calling for Jesus, basically.

Speaker 1 Right. It's like a cold reading kind of technique, but applied to like using social media and kind of some of these other dynamics.

Speaker 1 Sorensen told the News Herald, quote, during his six months with Joshua Media Ministries, Sorensen also said that he was repeatedly told to leave his wife, who was skeptical of Taylor and JMMI.

Speaker 1 He said he also witnessed Taylor physically assault other JMMI members at their building. He recalled Taylor coming in late at night and yelling and screaming at seven men.

Speaker 1 He just started going off on one guy and just started slapping him, Sorensen said. He slapped him two or three times, knocked him to the ground, and then just grabbed him by the collar and shook him.

Speaker 1 He went after another, slapped them across the face, pushed them to the ground, sit over them.

Speaker 1 Sorensen said that four of the men were being corrected for smoking weed and two of them for interactions with females. The seventh happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Speaker 1 So, you know, this is just a guy who feels secure just physically abusing at random members of the cult.

Speaker 1 This is probably another part of like what keeps people in line is just like this fear of being beaten, of being targeted like this.

Speaker 1 Now, as is usually the case with cults, there were, as I've said, numerous red flags and signs that shit was wrong well before the raids. In 2014, they were audited for massive tax fraud.

Speaker 1 They lost their tax exempt status at least twice over the years, and in both instances got it back after less than a year.

Speaker 1 Groups like Trinity published and directly mailed detailed reports about suspected fraud to the IRS, but this did not create any kind of public outrage or knowledge of what was going on, in spite of the fact that by 2016, local police in Taylor, Michigan had received at least 30 calls about JMMI.

Speaker 1 Some of these were non-issues, but others were complaints from friends and family of cult members. And in one case, there was a bomb threat made made by a former member against the organization.

Speaker 1 According to the police report, the man was, quote, angry that God created him, but he couldn't kill God, so he would kill the pastor of JMMI.

Speaker 2 I mean, go for it.

Speaker 1 Go for it.

Speaker 1 Fine, man. In this case, you picked the right guy.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But there was no, like, he, there was no evidence that he actually did anything.

Speaker 1 And when the police responded, they're like, do you want us to search the church for anything suspicious or bring in a dog, a bomb dog?

Speaker 1 And church officials are like, No, you don't need to come inside. We're good.
Don't worry about it. Um, don't worry about it.

Speaker 1 Um, in June of 2018, a former JMI member reported an assault at the church. Uh, this woman said that she had been there five days earlier to see her father and sister, who were both members.

Speaker 1 And once she was entered, she was confronted by church members about her bad attitude and told to leave the church, and then was forcibly pushed and pulled from the property.

Speaker 1 A few months after that, a father requested help from the police in getting his son out of the building. He told them that his son worked at the church, but he wasn't sure in what capacity.

Speaker 1 And police agreed to help and call, they classified it as a mental health commitment. So several officers like showed up and waited for the son to come to his father's vehicle.

Speaker 1 And when they did, the officers like handcuffed him and put him in the back of a patrol car. While this happened, several men in suits were filming outside of the buildings.

Speaker 1 Like there's stuff like this going on for years. In 2017, a guy in in his late 50s dies of natural causes during a prayer group at JMMI.

Speaker 1 And when police and firefighters arrived at like 2.15 a.m., they quote, observed a group of people chanting and singing, touching and pressing down on the body.

Speaker 1 One witness told the police that when people prayed at the church, all of them faint under the light of God. She told police officers that the dead man was sleeping and God will wake him up soon.

Speaker 1 Police took the body, obviously. They found a stack of credit cards and ID and turned them over to his wife.

Speaker 1 And the cause of death was, you know, just heart disease.

Speaker 1 But like, yeah, it's just one of these like, oh, weird that instead of calling an ambulance, they're just like standing around this guy and trying to bring him back to life through prayer, right?

Speaker 1 That's a little bit sketchy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like first responders, but they're just praying.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 So anyway, that kind of stuff is around for a while until a little bit earlier this year, just really a couple of weeks ago, an FBI raid cracks down on multiple properties, including the mansion in Tampa, where one of the leaders lived, his second in command lived.

Speaker 1 That was carried out in August. And then later, there's raids on their Taylor, Michigan facility and a bunch of other different call centers, like five or six all around the country.

Speaker 1 The FBI raid revealed 57 victims of forced labor living in the Florida mansion. So that's just one of the buildings.

Speaker 1 I don't think we know entirely how many victims have been found yet, and I don't think they're fully done with the raids.

Speaker 1 At this moment, right now, David Taylor and Michelle Brannon, his second, are accused of running a forced labor and money laundering scheme through their church.

Speaker 1 They are being charged with quite a few different felonies right now.

Speaker 1 So we'll see what actually happens. Like, I don't know how much it's worth kind of going into the details of

Speaker 1 the legal case against them.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 they're looking at some pretty serious charges, right?

Speaker 1 And hopefully they won't be free again, I guess. It's one of those things that it does seem like

Speaker 1 they flew too close to the sun, and the FBI has them kind of dead to rights here. Like, I'm not optimistic about their chances of getting out of any of this.

Speaker 2 Jesus is definitely not his friend anymore, for fucking sure.

Speaker 1 No, not his friend anymore.

Speaker 1 So at least we've got kind of a happy ending, right?

Speaker 2 It's crazy, though, when you look at this, like, okay, this is obviously huge, making loads of money, just horrible levels of abuse, but it's not even one of the like big ones, you know, like how many more of these are going on right now?

Speaker 2 That is what worries me, man. And I will say as well, I do,

Speaker 2 I'm not religious, like I'm not an atheist, but I'm not religious, but I do hate how these cults use religion always to like ride it into the wall and just do the most crazy stuff because there are loads of people who are very religious who are doing the nicest stuff ever you know not because they're religious but they just they do nice stuff and they're religious and yeah it's like well done guys you've just completely fucking purposely misinterpreted and ruined something for your own gains i mean they all do it i mean whether it's you know some kind of horrible sex scandal in whichever religion or whatever it's like there's always someone that is cynically just going yeah let's just use this what should be a good thing and then just absolutely do evil with it it's uh yeah it's very, it's not exactly, there's very few

Speaker 2 redeeming qualities to come out of this story other than eventually they got caught.

Speaker 1 Eventually, they got caught, right? And they got caught. I mean, the level of success these people saw, the primary church banking account had over $41 million in it, right?

Speaker 1 So, like, these people are doing really well. And, like, the indictment has reported a bunch of transactions.
These are just between 2018 and 2025 from Taylor and Brannon

Speaker 1 That included 125 pounds of super colossal Red King crab legs, six seafood shears, and 30 crab cutters, $10,353.44.

Speaker 1 A Mercedes-Benz for $63,000. A Bentley Continental, $70,000 down payment, a Crown Line boat, $105,000.

Speaker 1 Two jet skis and one jet ski trailer, $24,000. Five ATVs, $31,000.
Rolls-Royce Cullinan, $123,000 lease signing payment.

Speaker 1 And then at least four bulletproof automobiles um or at least bulletproofing on automobiles it's a little unclear which to me based on how they're the indictments written but yeah do you ever

Speaker 2 great stuff like i look i hear all that and i'm like wow like you know i'm breaking my ass to do all these projects and you know be an independent journalist and it's like just start a cult i could just be an evil cult guy and i'll literally be able to buy that i think it every day i think it every day i get like bulletproof cars and crabs legs and yeah oh my gosh Shit, that's the grift.

Speaker 1 Fuck. That is the grift.
What am I doing?

Speaker 2 If only we were completely evil, you know?

Speaker 1 Right. If only I gave up my soul entirely, the amount of money I could be making.
Holy shit.

Speaker 1 Well, that's a good retirement plan, at least. Jake.

Speaker 2 Yeah, thanks for that.

Speaker 1 Well, all right. You got any pluggables to plug before we roll out here? That is part two.

Speaker 2 Honestly, mostly

Speaker 2 Sad Oligarch 2. As I said in the last episode,

Speaker 2 really, really happy with this.

Speaker 2 We've had to really scrape at the uh research on this even people we've reached out to are just like it's like brick wall you know and it's very hard to get right uh information but we've we've really made it work in a way that i think is

Speaker 2 it's kind of come out even better the limitations actually because you kind of have to go around the houses to get there and on the way you find a lot of interesting stuff so yeah sad oligarch 2 um definitely check that out and popular front is always booming but also i've got a new documentary series uh if i can plug that, Away Days, that is, it's gonna, it's, we've got the first episode is out, but it's, you know, it's a very, very

Speaker 2 big, big project, which, you know, we haven't bit enough more that we can chew, but almost. It's like we almost did.

Speaker 2 But yeah, if people go to, you know, youtube.com slash at away days TV, obviously it's the video version of a lot of the stuff they would have heard in the docker, in the, in the podcast that we did.

Speaker 1 Excellent. Well, fucking check that out.
Sad oligarch, away days, and popular front,

Speaker 1 all of Jake Hanrahan's vast media empire. And yeah, join this cult when he finally starts one.
You know, soon. Unless I've started a cult by then, in which case, we can just collapse.

Speaker 1 We have a cult fight.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 There we go. All right, everybody.
This has been Behind the Bastards. Next week, we'll be back with maybe a slightly different cult.

Speaker 1 Brilliant.

Speaker 4 Behind the Bastards is a a production of CoolZone Media.

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Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/slash at behind the bastards.

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