Pentecostal Preacher Sherman Allen Turns Out to Be Reverend Spanky

His black tasseled loafers. His thick glasses. The long wooden objects draped in a red towel he set on the floor.

The way he crept up behind her in her bedroom and touched her on the side, startling her just before he shoved her facedown onto the bed. The excruciating pain as he jammed a 3-foot club into her rectum and asked repeatedly, "Does it feel good? Does it feel good?"

And the stench—that sickening sweet smell that hung around him.

The powder, she suspected, was tied to a voodoo rite.

When Joy saw it on her porch last year she immediately tracked back to a surprise visitor who'd come just a few days earlier. The visit was odd: Joy hadn't seen or heard from this woman in a long time. All of a sudden, she popped up unannounced, not long after Unfair Park, the Dallas Observer blog, reported that Joy—not her real name—claimed she'd been raped by a Fort Worth preacher in 1983. Turns out this woman was dating the preacher's first cousin.

The visitor came with nosy questions. Was Joy going to testify about the attack? No, the visitor reasoned aloud: If you'd wanted to testify, you would have done that a long time ago. Joy just nodded her head.

The preacher was a nobody in May 1983, when Joy told Fort Worth police that he'd drugged or hypnotized her, beaten her with a paddle and raped her anally with a wooden club. Then, she claims, he sodomized her, slapping his hand over her mouth and cursing at her when she tried to cry out to God. When he was finished, Joy says, the preacher propped her up in front of a bathroom mirror, pried her eyes open so she was forced to look at herself and called her a bitch, a whore, a prostitute, a cokehead.

"God told me to do this to you," she recalled him saying.

And there was more. He knew people in high places, he allegedly told her, so no one would ever believe her. But if she was stupid enough to tell, he'd come back and do the same thing to her 4-year-old daughter.

As she hunched naked on a love seat in her apartment after the attack, numb with pain, hating this God he invoked and hoping she would die, the preacher handed her two rolls of toilet tissue.

He kissed her on the forehead and walked out the door.

Now the preacher was somebody.

The year was 2007, and Sherman Clifton Allen was a man of stature in the black Pentecostal church. Allen, senior pastor of Shiloh Institutional Church of God in Christ in Fort Worth, had become known across the country for his bold, eloquent preaching. He spoke in clipped sentences, with an abundance of big words, but he also knew how to stir a Pentecostal congregation, effortlessly weaving ghetto slang with theology. When the spirit was high, he could let loose from the pulpit with a sanctified scream: Ahhhhhhhh!

He seemed to embody the ideal of the neo-Pentecostal preacher: sophisticated, smart and successful, but true to his roots in the humble but impassioned spirituality of black Pentecostalism.

Observers in his denomination, the Church of God in Christ, assumed he was on the fast track to making bishop. He hung out with top-ranking church leaders, such as Charles E. Blake, now the presiding bishop of COGIC, the biggest Pentecostal denomination in the United States. He personally knew Pentecostal luminaries such as T.D. Jakes and Juanita Bynum. When Allen's first wife died, Jakes, perhaps the biggest name in Pentecostalism, delivered the eulogy.

Allen and his followers saw no contradiction between worldly and spiritual success, and the preacher drove a late-model Mercedes and lived in a $1.6 million parsonage in Mansfield. A retinue of bodyguards and "armor-bearers" attended to his needs—often for little or no pay—and members of Shiloh literally raced each other to the altar to present offerings and demonstrate their devotion to this anointed man of God. They hung on his every utterance—especially when he dropped a word of personal prophecy, pronouncing blessings of homes, cars, financial abundance and fame. At his annual Prophetic Summit, he pulled in big-name speakers such as Bynum and Jakes and sent them away with five-figure checks. It was the event that got people in the local black Pentecostal scene buzzing about his ministry in the first place.

But in early 2007, even as Allen, now 46, was increasing his profile in the Church of God in Christ, his past was about to burst into his present.

A former church member, Davina Kelly, had mailed a letter to the 12 bishops of COGIC's ruling body alleging that Allen had beaten her repeatedly with a wooden paddle and ultimately raped her in a relationship that began as marriage counseling. When Kelly got no response from the bishops, she filed suit against Allen, Shiloh and the Church of God in Christ. The suit became public in early February 2007, and a strange thing began to happen. Women started contacting Howie, Broome & Bobo (now just Broome Bobo), the law firm handling Kelly's case, with similar allegations spanning more than 20 years. Kelly's lawyers, in fact, had landed on one of the worst-kept secrets of the local black Pentecostal scene: Allen had a predilection for paddling young women on the rear end as a bizarre form of discipline—a practice that had earned him the nickname "Spanky."

Three months ago, another alleged victim and former Shiloh member, Carrie Drake, filed suit against Allen, accusing him of "severely beating her with a paddle and physically assaulting her." The beatings began with her mother's permission when she was 13, Drake told the Observer, and she was frequently forced to undress. Drake says she miscarried after one such attack. Allen has denied all of the allegations in a response to the lawsuit; he has not responded to the Observer's requests for interviews. His lawyer in the Kelly and Drake suits, Frank Hill, has declined comment.

Matthew Bobo, one of Kelly's lawyers, says he and his partner, Stan Broome, have talked to more than 20 women who say they were paddled by Allen. "We've heard from several of the women that there were corresponding threats," Broome says. "That's the remarkable thing about almost every woman we've talked to: The story is exactly the same. The setup, the punishment, the beatings, the threats."

Allen, Bobo says, "holds himself out as being a deliverer of punishment from God"—a spiritual father. "It's always someone that he develops some sort of authority relationship with."

In a three-hour deposition in December, Allen "pleaded the Fifth to everything we asked" and declined to answer, Bobo says. What most churchgoers didn't realize, however, was that the talk of adult whuppings represented the milder side of the accusations against Allen. The Observer spoke with three other alleged victims, including Joy, as well as several ministers and former church members who worked alongside Allen. They claim Allen pulled off an incredible charade. While pastor of a morally strict Pentecostal church, he:

• Lived "in sin" with a young female church member for years.

• Engaged in voodoo, which is abhorrent to Pentecostals, but managed to launder his past in the voodoo-influenced "Spiritualist" church when he joined the Church of God in Christ in the early 1980s.

• Solicited permission slips from parents to paddle minor girls and young female members of his church. Some of the paddlings caused severe bruising and even broken bones.

• Paddled dozens of girls and young women—and even some men—under the guise of spiritual counseling.

• Threatened several of the women he paddled and sexually abused, including Joy, who stopped cooperating with prosecutors.

• Punched in the face a woman who'd questioned him.

• Threatened to expose misdeeds among his leaders in the Church of God in Christ if they disciplined him.

The allegations cover more than two decades. During that time, numerous women and men informed local leaders in the Church of God in Christ about Allen's behavior. These complaints—which many local COGIC pastors heard firsthand from the women in secret meetings—accomplished nothing. Allen's bishop in the Church of God in Christ, J. Neaul Haynes of Dallas, knew about the paddling allegations for at least 17 years but did little or nothing to stop it. He implored two alleged victims simply to "forgive" Allen, according to a former Shiloh member who was present at one of the meetings with Haynes.

Why did the paddlings, beatings and alleged sexual abuse go on unchecked for so many years when so many people knew about it? To answer that question, one has to delve into the black Pentecostal subculture, where churchgoers are continually warned to "keep your mouth off the man of God," regardless of what kind of life he lives. God will rebuke him, the teaching goes; all you should do is pray.

Nonetheless, over the years, quite a few people—from pastors to lay members—have tried to stop Allen. Their attempts screeched to a halt at Bishop Haynes.

Haynes, like all COGIC jurisdictional bishops, was saddled with a heavy financial responsibility to his denomination. (Haynes did not respond to several requests for interviews.) Allen, one of Haynes' prized spiritual "sons," was a proven fund-raiser. "In the Church of God in Christ, if you can preach and raise money, basically everything else is erased," says one former Shiloh member.

This woman—"Veronica"—lived with Allen for years and studied him closely: how he pitted women against each other, bought off his critics with big offerings and charmed his members with a prosperous image, an affable manner and smooth talk. "I'll never forget what he said to me one day: 'I'm smarter than everybody else,'" Veronica says. "And I really believe him. But one person said it best: 'He ain't fooling everybody.'

"At the end of the day," she says, "the truth always prevails. People do not really understand the psyche of Sherman Allen. When all is said and done, it will be every psychologist's case study. He's methodical. He knows what he's doing."

When Veronica first saw him in 1982, he didn't seem like much, just the friendly neighborhood warlock. Sherman Allen was tiny and round-faced, "no bigger than a coffee cup," as one minister put it, with thick glasses that gave him a nerdy vibe. He held court from behind a beaded curtain in a South Fort Worth candle shop, surrounded by incense, crystal balls, tarot cards and candles. All manner of candles.

Veronica—not her real name—remembers one that particularly creeped her out: It bore a picture of a dancing marionette and the ominous word "Control." Others were labeled "Prosperity" and "Money." They burned 24/7 in the home Allen shared with his mother and in the little church he inherited from his stepfather.

Though Allen, in his early 20s, carried the title bishop, an honored position in the black church, his business cards revealed the more profitable enterprise: voodoo. "We don't do the do, we undo the do," his cards read. 'Do, as in voodoo. His was the modern-day warlock's creed: to employ the black arts, but only in the service of good.

Allen was steeped in the stuff. His stepfather was a bishop in the Spiritualist church, an amalgam of Roman Catholicism and voodoo and Protestant Christianity, with saints and hexes and root powders and worship services that rocked with the exuberance and intensity of the Pentecostal faith. Ask the people in Stop Six, a black working-class neighborhood in Fort Worth, and they'd describe Allen's little wood-frame church, Allen Memorial Spiritual Pentecostal Temple, as the voodoo church.

Allen's parents were seen as peculiar people. Their home was cold—"like a mausoleum" or something out of The Addams Family, Veronica says, with the ever-burning candles and statues of saints. It got even spookier. Allen's mother, Clarice Warren Allen, talked about "passing" a long black snake through her bowels, the apparent result of a hex. When Bishop E.E. Allen and Clarice had sex, Clarice told Veronica, they got down on their knees afterward and begged God to forgive them.

By the time Veronica met Sherman Allen, Bishop E.E. Allen was dead. But, as Sherman Allen notes in the acknowledgements in one of his self-published books, E.E. Allen had passed on a spiritual legacy: He "trained me in the prophetic and taught me to be sensitive to the voice of God."

Allen, a bright student, attended Davidson College in North Carolina and TCU. When his stepfather died, he took over the Spiritualist congregation. Back then, there were only a handful of members—maybe 15, Veronica says. They would embark on road trips to Louisiana, E.E. Allen's home state and a stronghold of the "Spiritual" church—as it was usually called in black communities—that led them to the lavish homes of spiritual readers, including one in a flowing Egyptian gown. "We open this door," Veronica says, "and this was the most palatial thing I've seen in my life. I'm talking about pure gold fixtures, marble floors—it's like when you watch fantasy movies." Here, both Sherman Allen and his mother would consult seers.

Though she met him in a strange place for a supposed man of God—a candle shop, where he sat at a table giving spiritual readings with a crystal ball in front of him—she rationalized that attending his church was OK, even though her mother cautioned her that Spiritualists engaged in all kinds of forbidden practices. Veronica drew a line at seeking spiritual readings from Allen herself, but she had a pressing matter in her life: She was pregnant, and she desperately needed a place to stay. Allen opened his door to her.

But she wasn't beyond questioning. She asked Allen's mother why they burned candles and incense and displayed statues of Mary at the church. Clarice Allen insisted that these were biblical practices—though the next time Veronica visited the church, every single candle had disappeared. Allen, however, would still advise his members to buy voodoo paraphernalia to tackle the problems in their lives, Veronica says.