Greg Laurie’s Harvest Christian Fellowship church was hit with a 201-page federal lawsuit last Friday, according to a story by The Roys Report.
The lawsuit consolidates 23 lawsuits filed by victims of former Harvest pastor and missionary Paul Havsgaard, who some have described as perhaps one of the most prolific pedophiles alive in America today, and reveals new allegations of a cover-up of sexual misconduct by Harvest church pastors.
Along with details of the Havsgaard allegations, the lawsuit accuses the church of failing to properly investigate two incidents in which former volunteers were accused (and in one case later sentenced to prison) for sexually abusing minors.
“In the late 1990s, William Walrath (“Walrath”) served as a volunteer in Harvest Riverside’s “Rock the World” children’s ministry. In approximately 2000, he was arrested and subsequently convicted of multiple felony sexual offenses involving minors and sentenced to twelve years in prison.
Harvest Riverside removed Walrath from his volunteer position but did not make any public announcement or conduct an internal investigation to determine if he had abused children at Harvest Riverside.
Harvest Riverside similarly mishandled accusations of child sex abuse against Jose Cruz Martinez, who was a volunteer at Harvest Riverside between 2016 and 2023.”
They then failed to report to parents an incident involving a pornographic image:
At a 2018 Harvest Riverside youth event for children in grades six to twelve, someone transmitted a pornographic image via AirDrop to all the iPhones at the event, including those belonging to underage children, causing a stir in the room. Harvest Riverside did not investigate this serious incident and did not notify parents to avoid public embarrassment and scrutiny.
Crucially, however, the filing addresses the fate of two popular pastors at Harvest Christian Fellowship: Jeff Lasseigne and Brad Ormonde.
The lawsuit states that the former’s affairs/clergy sexual misconduct were just about an open secret at Harvest, who did not confront him or investigate him for years.
Finally, Lasseigne was removed from his position of preaching at the church’s Wednesday night services in 2021, and all promotional material featuring him was removed, including any pictures on the church’s Facebook page. Details of his departure were not shared with the church at large, and he was reportedly given a $4,000,000 severance to sign an NDA. (Non-Disclosure Agreement)
The payment has prompted the claimants to ask whether or not Harvest church members know their tithes and offerings are being used to cover up sexual misconduct.
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Lasseigne’s wife died in 2019 and remarried a woman from the church in 2021. Now 70, he hosts a weekly bible study, his Instagram feed is full of quotes from Charles Spurgeon and Voddie Baucham, and he teaches classes at The Gathering at 840, an SBC church in Tennessee.
Ormonde was a pastor at Harvest for nearly 20 years and led the Men of Valor group, which involved his counseling men who were caught in sexual sin and cheated on their wives.
He was having an affair with a church secretary for more than five years, and was exposed after the secretary’s husband caught them in bed together. Ormonde’s wife of 42 years divorced him in 2022, and he has since left the ministry.
