Ravi Zacharias International Ministry has confirmed they have no intention of releasing one of Zacharias’ victims from a non-disclosure/non-disparagement agreement she signed years ago, according to her lawyers, continuing to a long-standing pattern of silencing, victim-blaming, and ignoring her wherever possible.
The world-renown apologist who passed away last year, signed the agreement in 2017, before it was confirmed that he was a long-time sexual molester and deviant. A year before he entered into a friendship/counseling relationship with Lori Anne Thompson, grooming her to the point that he began requesting that she send him nude pictures. Thompson eventually decided to end things and tell her husband, which led Ravi to threaten to kill himself if she revealed his actions. He sued her, filing a RICO lawsuit and they settled out of court, with RZIM pledging to drop the suite and offering her $250,000 if she signed non-disclosure agreement.
Despite the agreement, it didn’t stop Ravi from widely defaming her and spreading malicious lies about her, claiming she was trying to blackmail him and releasing a statement to the rag Christianity Today, saying:
“Subsequently, she began to contact me via the email address I had used to contact her husband after first meeting them. My responses were usually brief. Then, last year, she shockingly sent me extremely inappropriate pictures of herself unsolicited. I clearly instructed her to stop contacting me in any form; I blocked her messages, and I resolved to terminate all contact with her.
That of course is a lie. In the same letter he also wrote this, before news of him groping and propositioning his employees at a spa he owned came to light:
In my 45 years of marriage to Margie, I have never engaged in any inappropriate behavior of any kind. I love my wife with all my heart and have been absolutely faithful to her these more than 16,000 days of marriage, and have exercised extreme caution in my daily life and travels, as everyone who knows me is aware. I have long made it my practice not to be alone with a woman other than Margie and our daughters—not in a car, a restaurant, or anywhere else.“
In a letter sent to Ministry Watch, RZIM likewise reiterated their libelous allegations of false claims, blackmail and harassment.
Since then, Thompson has made many appeals to RZIM to release her of her NDA over the years and they have refused, despite their namesake being a known deceiver. Recently her lawyer Boz Tchivijian again requested that she be released, and again they refused.
What makes this all the more frustrating is that despite RZIM allegedly launching a full investigation into his “spa activities,” they have also confirmed that she is ‘beyond the scope’ of their investigation, setting the stage for a continued cover-up without justice or resolution.
Thompson has reveled to Protestia that none of the investigators have spoken to her, and seemingly have no plans to, despite being the most prominent and visible victim, the catalyst for his exposure, and the one woman they continue to libel.
Ruth Hutchings said it best, writing on Twitter:
RZIM has a special responsibility to Lori Anne because the Board and senior leadership personally choose to slander her and her husband as “greedy extortionists” inside and outside the company. For other situations, they likely can say they didn’t know, they weren’t involved. Perhaps they were deceived, but these are still actions they’re responsible for correcting to the best of their ability. If Margie (his wife) continues to refuse, the least RZIM can do is take her off the Board/staff and make a statement repudiating their earlier remarks.
The fact is that the lawsuit that precipitated the signing of the NDA wasn’t done to prove and assert Ravi’s innocence, but rather to hide and conceal his guilt. RZIM refusing to release her because it “honors his last wishes” needs to be viewed from the perspective of a deeply dishonorable man who wielded the lawsuit as a cudgel to maintain his oppression and silence the victim.
What a wonderful legacy RZIM is hoping to leave.
