Her allegations brought down megachurch pastor Bruxy Cavey. Then the anonymous trolls came for her, too.
This is how it worked out.
In the days leading up to May 10, 2016, a barrage of abuse and threats were lobbed against a young woman who has become known as “Christi.” As she wrote in an online manifesto, she was “a living breathing human being … and I’m alive to tell the story.”
The harassment escalated on May 9, when she wrote in an essay for Jezebel on this website, a former student of Cavey’s and a vocal, and long-winded, critic of his teachings.
Christi, as she is called in the essay, has become the latest victim of a wave of harassment and threats that have rocked Christian churches and individuals — a wave that has hit particularly hard in the last year.
She describes herself as “an out-of-work writer with a wife and kids and a full-time job who has not had to deal with all of this.”
I met Christi in person for the first time in May and was very moved by her story. She is a brave, powerful woman who is speaking out to help others who are dealing with similar kinds of abuse and threats.
And she wants you to know she stands behind her allegations.
“We’ve had a very difficult time with the church here in Kansas,” she said after I interviewed her at the end of May. “Bruxy Cavey has taken the church down for all these years. He’s destroyed this church. … I think we have a lot to do with this. But we don’t like it when it stops at us.”
To get to know Christi, we drove down to her home in the Kansas town of Olathe. It was a cold spring day in the Midwest, and she wore a denim jacket, with her blue hair pulled back in a ponytail.
She opened the door slowly, and then with a slight pause, as if to make sure