OHIO
Daily Caller
Betsy Rothstein 10/31/2014
AKRON, OHIO — When you bring down a TV evangelist, chances are high that you’re going to be told you’re going to hell. You’ll get a quasi-death threat or two. You’ll be told you made stuff up and worse, that you exploited people for your own gain.
So it is for Bob Dyer, a longtime columnist and reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal, who recently wrote a series of stories uncovering the weirder and possibly illegal actions of Ernest Angley, the famed 93-year-old evangelist who presides over Grace Cathedral in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. The list of accusations is short but extremely bizarre: He allegedly covered up sexual abuse within the church and personally examined the swelling genitals of his male parishioners who had vasectomies at his urging. Angley readily admitted to Dyer he doesn’t believe the world is a worthy place for children — his wife died in 1970, they had no children and he encouraged his congregants to do the same.
Oh, it gets worse. Women were encouraged to have abortions. There was also a murder in the Church cafeteria — a male employee had an unrequited romantic interest in a colleague. So he murdered her. The eatery was comprised of volunteer employees even though it was operating as a for-profit business. This is a no-no with the IRS. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Labor Department or the IRS didn’t start poking around,” said Dyer. “But I’m not in a position to initiate and it’s not my role.”
Sitting in the newspaper’s dingy, windowless conference room in downtown Akron a few weeks ago was Dyer, a grizzled, old-school journalist who refused to join Facebook until this summer and who has all his tweets automated so he doesn’t have to deal with it. He has worked at the paper for the last 30 years because “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” He explained how he uncovered such a behemoth of a story, what the reaction has been and if he has regrets.
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