Deadly Vows Page 11

  No, this was all Sean. He had found a loophole in the Bible and used it to do something I considered abhorrent—and at the expense of his faithful and dutiful wife. I was furious.

  The unintentional revelation also thrust me into a moral quandary. On one hand I had my longtime best friend, who was lying and keeping a pretty big secret from me. On the other hand, if his secret became known, he was putting a major international ministry at risk for ridicule and exposure. Television journalist Diane Sawyer had just done damning stories on several big ministries—including Sean’s pastor, Larry Lea—that had shut those ministries down almost overnight, and although I was already souring on televangelists, I didn’t think Sean had the right to expose them to unnecessary risks because of his secret marriage.

  I turned to someone whose moral compass I had always trusted—and who I knew loved Sean and would be able to help me navigate the twists of the situation: Sean’s younger brother. I called him at his house in Oklahoma, about twenty minutes from my home, and told him what I had found out and what my dilemma was now.

  He didn’t hesitate.

  “You need to call Sean and confront him,” he said. “Then say to him that he needs to tell Morris Cerullo or you’ll tell him, because Sean has no right to risk another minister’s ministry like that.”

  Sean’s brother was furious and disgusted at what he saw as a technicality being exploited by Sean to satisfy immoral sexual desires. At the time, I agreed with him, to the point that we both decided Sean had gone off the deep end. We had a long conversation about it. Sean’s brother insisted that I forward the e-mail to him so he could show the rest of his family. I did, and when he received it he was appalled. He reiterated that I needed to call Sean and force him to tell the ministry that he was exposing them to possible jeopardy because he was living with two wives.

  Finally, I dialed Sean’s number.

  “I have an e-mail from you that talks about your marriage to Joy,” I said. “You accidentally sent it to me.”

  Sean was shocked. But he barely missed a beat. Almost immediately, he launched into a clearly rehearsed spiel about the patriarchs of the Bible and how polygamy was God’s original plan for marriage.

  “Romantic love is a lie, Leif,” Sean said. “The Catholics invented it. It’s even in the name, ‘Roman’-tic love. It doesn’t exist in the Bible; in the Bible, marriage was arranged and almost no one ever got divorced. Today, people feel this Roman need to fall in love and then get married. That puts unreasonable expectations in people’s minds that the initial feeling they call ‘love’ will always continue, but you and I both know that feeling is a chemical reaction in the brain designed to get us to procreate. So when that ‘roman’-tic feeling goes away, people get divorced and remarry. It’s serial monogamy. How is that different than me marrying two women without forcing one to live with the stigma and problems of divorce first?”

  In Sean’s mind, the Roman Catholic Church had corrupted true Christianity with pagan beliefs, of which monogamy and romance were two of the worst examples. That concept of romance was part of the problem with traditional marriage, he said, and if people would just go back to the unadulterated religion of the patriarchs, most of the world’s problems would be solved.

  “There are more women than men in the world,” he said. “Without polygamy, millions of women will never have a husband.”

  I was in no mood to hear one of Sean’s convoluted explanations.

  “All of that may be true, Sean,” I said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that you’re putting MC’s ministry at risk and you don’t have the right to do that.”

  Sean tried to deflect me from that conclusion, saying his marriage was nobody’s business.

  “That may be true too,” I said, “but it doesn’t change the fact that people dig in other people’s business all the time. This will get out, and when it does, all anyone will say is ‘hey, that guy was on TV for Morris Cerullo, and didn’t he also write all those Bible studies for him?’ You don’t have the right to do that. You need to tell him and let him decide if he wants to take that risk. And if you don’t, I will.”

  Sean sighed.

  “Give me a week,” he said. “You’re forcing my hand here. I don’t want to tell him, but I will because I don’t have a choice.”

  A week later, he called me. He sounded tired.

  “It’s over with Joy. It was the toughest thing I have ever done, but I told MC,” he said. “He thinks I’m crazy, but he said as long as I end it with Joy, it’s okay.”

  That didn’t sound like the Cerullo I knew, so I pressed him.

  “He’s not worried about the exposure to his ministry?”

  Sean laughed.

  “He said he has lawyers that eat other lawyers for lunch, and they can bring it on if they want to.”

  That did sound like the Cerullo I knew, so I told Sean I was glad he got it off his chest.

  “You’re going to break it off with Joy?”

  “I already did,” he said. “I had to.”

  I apologized for putting him through such a mess but I reiterated that I had done it out of the best intentions. The next time I visited San Diego, Joy wasn’t at Sean’s house, and I thought everything had been taken care of.

  About a month after that, however, I was back in San Diego, at the house of a friend who had worked with us at the ministry, who had left to go into full-time ministry himself, teaching Bible prophecy.

  He pulled me aside in his home office.

  “Brother, can I ask you a personal question about Brother Goff?”

  I closed my eyes. I knew what was coming.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Lots of people who know I know him are asking why he’s running around town with this young girl like they’re man and wife,” he said. “One pastor said he saw them kissing. They’re worried, because they don’t want him preaching in their churches if he is immoral.”

  “Is the young girl black?” I asked. My friend nodded. “That’s Joy Risker.”

  I told him the whole story.

  “You need to call Sean’s boss at the ministry and tell him,” my friend said. “People are starting to talk, and this isn’t good. It’s going to cause a lot of problems, and it has to be stopped now.”

  Sean’s boss had recently been promoted to executive vice president at the ministry and Sean had been promoted to vice president of communications. The day after the talk with my friend, I flew home. The minute I got to my home office, I called Sean’s boss.

  “Sean is married to both his first wife and Joy,” I said. “I told him he needed to tell MC or I would, and he lied to me and said he had.”

  Sean’s boss was dumbstruck. Sean’s office was next to his. For a minute, he was completely silent. Then he asked me if I was joking. I assured him I was not.

  “When you first called, I didn’t believe you,” Sean’s boss told me years later. “I thought, ‘Sean is a third-generation preacher’s kid. He knows better than that.’ So I called him in and said, ‘Sean, I have Leif on the line, and he’s making some pretty outlandish claims and you need to tell him he’s crazy.’ At first, I thought you two had had some kind of big fight and you were trying to smear him.”

  Sean’s boss put me on hold to talk to Sean in his office. A few minutes later, hold turned into speakerphone.

  “Leif, I’ve got Sean in my office and he says you’re lying because you want to get him fired so you can take his job,” Sean’s boss said. I was amazed. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was making more money than Sean where I was and I had no interest in being in charge of Morris Cerullo’s communications department. In fact, years later, after Sean’s boss at the ministry had left, they offered me his job and I turned it down. But Sean had been caught by surprise and he grasped at the first branch he could, which meant accusing me of lying. “He says you made all of it up.”

  I was furious. It’s one thing to be lied to by your best friend, another altogeth
er to be accused of making up lies to take his job.

  “Let’s call his brother,” I said. “He has a copy of the e-mail that will verify that I’m telling the truth.”

  “That’s stupid,” I heard Sean say. “Why involve him and just let this craziness get bigger?”

  “If I made it up, you have nothing to fear,” I said. “Call Sean’s brother. I’ll give you his number.”

  I heard a hand being placed over the phone’s microphone, and then I heard mumbles. Sean’s boss came back on the line.

  “I’m going to call your brother, Sean,” he said. “I’ll call you back, Leif.”

  An hour later, Sean’s boss called me.

  “Sean resigned,” he said. “Before I could call his brother, he left me a voicemail saying everything you said was true and he was sorry for lying to me.”

  Sean resigned and then had some time to think about how I was ruining his life after all he had done to help me with mine. It’s easy to see where he was coming from, being angry with me. He had done nothing but help me time and time again, and I had betrayed him and ultimately caused him to lose his family’s sources of income, since Joy was also employed by the ministry and had to leave, too.

  I would have been angry, too. I have regretted my actions many times since then, not because I took a moral stand, but because the stand wasn’t mine to make. Butting into Sean’s business placed his family in a precarious position and it wasn’t my call, I decided much later.

  The bad got worse when the children’s pastor at Sean’s church, who Sean so respected, heard that Sean was polygamous and called me.

  “We should launch a commando raid and rescue her,” he said, laughing. In the beginning, everyone’s concern was for Sean’s first wife, who everyone assumed had been brainwashed into accepting her husband sleeping with another woman. Then, realizing how silly a commando raid sounded, he started to giggle more and expand the scenario. “We could rappel down from a helicopter right into their living room. You hold off Sean and I’ll grab her and we will signal the helicopter and fly away.”

  Somehow the story got back to Sean, who thought the idea had come from me and that I was seriously considering breaking into his house, beating him up and kidnapping his first wife to save her from him. He called and threatened me and said his first wife now hated me for suggesting such a thing and if he ever saw me, he would kick my ass.

  At the time, I found that thought funny; I was always bigger and stronger than Sean, and as far as I knew, I had a lot more experience fighting. The thought that the wispy preacher could beat me up was laughable. At least I thought so. Of course, others had seen pure violence in him that I had forgotten was there.

  Trevor Whitken, an affable British import who was one of Morris Cerullo’s go-to on-stage musicians, once went on a preaching crusade with Sean, where he saw Sean’s dark side manifest itself at a restaurant, in a situation eerily similar to the one where I had first seen Sean’s temper at the University of Oklahoma’s dorms.

  “We were just sitting and eating in the restaurant, me, Sean and his wife,” Trevor said. “And this whole table of kids was sitting behind us, talking loudly. They kept cussing, and Sean got really mad that they were cussing in front of his wife, so he turned around and started screaming at them. I thought he was going to jump up and take the whole table on and at that moment, I was sure he could do it.”

  That violence was always brimming beneath the surface of Sean’s personality and it served him well in his preaching, which certainly fit the bill as “violent,” but then it spilled over into his daily life.

  After all those years, when he finally turned his anger on me, it only exposed how blind I was to the truth that lay just beneath the surface of the friend I had been closer to than anyone else for more than a decade. Instead of being frightened, as I now know I should have been, I laughed at the thought of Sean doing any kind of real, physical violence.

  And then Sean didn’t speak to me for several years.

  Chapter 11

  SULIMON

  I called Sean in late 2002 and apologized for forcing him to quit his job at Morris Cerullo’s ministry, which I had come to see as an overreaction on my part.

  Sure, I was still a bit freaked out by the polygamy, I said, but it hadn’t been my place to put a stop to it. I had over-stepped my bounds by forcing him to tell the ministry what he was doing, and had gone even further by calling them myself and telling them what Sean was up to. It was an honest apology, and I had done it out of an intense feeling of regret over how I had ended our friendship.

  Sean’s forgiveness was immediate. It was another sign of his character that many people overlooked. When Sean was wronged, he didn’t hold a grudge. He saw that as a waste of energy and time. Though I had been his closest friend and had betrayed him by telling both his family and his employer about his polygamy, Sean let bygones be bygones and we picked up our friendship almost from where we left off.

  Sean, as ever, was gracious. He forgave me, he said, though he wasn’t sure his first wife would ever see me the same way after she had heard I was telling people she had been “brainwashed” by Sean. She had been offended that I could think she was so weak-minded that she could be brainwashed. The “brainwashed” statement had actually come from the children’s pastor but I wasn’t going to argue the point as Sean and I worked on repairing our friendship.

  Most people who knew Sean had difficulty believing he had become a polygamist, and those who knew Joy or Sean’s first wife also were dumbfounded—even those who had observed the family together.

  “I heard it,” said Tara Walzel, who was Morris Cerullo’s official photographer at the time, “when we were at a conference in Palm Springs. Somebody asked ‘did you hear?’ and I thought, ‘no way; I’ve been to their house and never seen anything weird.’ I mean, I had been there a few times while they were claiming to be roommates. I had a jazz dance class with Joy and when I would drop her off, it always seemed like what she said: a roommate situation. The apartment had two master bedrooms on opposite sides of the place, and I didn’t notice any pictures with her and Sean or anything weird like that. It just looked like what they said it was: roommates.”

  After Sean and Joy were exposed as polygamists, Tara maintained her friendship with Joy, even after Sean and Joy were forced to leave the ministry.

  “We kept going to the class,” she said. “Joy was a very good dancer. The teacher was the same guy who had taught her in high school and he was really hard on her, but she was just amazing at dancing. After we all found out about the polygamy, I sat with her in the car and said, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ I wanted to maintain our friendship in case she ever decided she wanted out.”

  Work wasn’t the only aspect of the Goffs’ lives that was curtailed by the polygamy.

  The lifestyle kept Sean from regular church attendance for fear that his family structure would be discovered. Where formerly he had preached exhaustively on the need for ministers to submit to a local pastor somewhere, he found himself now without one and, much like the ministries he had derided, he came up with letter-of-the-law excuses to say that he had one.

  Big-time ministries can’t really be tax-exempt unless they’re based in a physical church. To get around that IRS restriction, many of them—including Morris Cerullo’s—declare themselves to be brick-and-mortar churches, enabling them to gain tax-exempt status. To do that, they have to hold regular church services, so Cerullo’s ministry had chapel services on Friday mornings, which the entire staff was required to attend. Cerullo himself didn’t usually minister at the chapel services, which were held in the cafeteria. Instead, he appointed a chaplain to run the services, the chaplain serving as “pastor” of the “church.” When Sean was the chaplain at Cerullo’s ministry, he had often privately bemoaned the fact that Cerullo himself did not submit to a pastor.

  “It’s unbiblical, Leif,” he’d told me years earlier. “Without the covering of a church, he’
s out on his own and he can be tossed about by any wind of doctrine. I believe he’s solid spiritually for the most part, but he’s got some weird ideas, and I think most of that stems from the fact that there is no one to hold him accountable. He can do and say what he wants, and there’s no pastor to call him onto the carpet.”

  By the time Sean, his first wife and Joy were being relatively open about their polygamy, Sean himself had no pastor, no church covering and no accountability and it began to show in his beliefs. He told confidantes that the man he had been corresponding with in Utah—the one whose e-mail I had accidentally been sent—was his pastor.

  Polygamy put Sean doctrinally into the midst of some strange bedfellows. Though he vigorously opposed homosexuality as a fundamentalist holiness minister, he found himself on their side politically, because he wanted the government to get out of marriage altogether.

  “If I want to marry two or three consenting adults, why does the government care?” he asked. “Marriage is God’s jurisdiction. Why is the government involved at all?”

  Sean told me that the same should apply for homosexuals, though he was dead-set against their orientation. Because he believed the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage, he supported the idea that the government shouldn’t oppose any kind of marital union. He opposed homosexuality on religious grounds, but he believed that should be the extent of it; the government, he said, should leave homosexuals alone and let churches do their best to try to “convert” them.

  Sean’s foray into polygamy led him to sympathy for another religion: Islam. Morris Cerullo had spent thousands of pages—many of them written by Sean—talking about how Islam was the enemy of pro-Israel and God-fearing Westerners and how there could never be peace in Israel as long as the Muslims believed that Christians (who believed the same about them) were infidels.