A district attorney has turned over to a special prosecutor the criminal cases accusing members of a secretive North Carolina religious group of holding down and beating a one-time member 13 years ago.
The victim asked a judge to kick District Attorney Ted Bell off the case just days before a retrial — that had been delayed for more than eight years — was about to start in December. Matthew Fenner said Bell sided with the Word of Faith Fellowship. Dozens of former congregants have said the church abused them.
But Superior Court Judge William T. Stetzer sided with an independent investigator who concluded the delays were a combination of a backlog of cases that grew when COVID-19 shut down the courts and attorneys from both sides quitting or having health problems.
Initial case ended in mistrial in 2017
A leader of Word of Faith, Brooke Covington, was first tried in 2017 on second-degree kidnapping and simple assault charges. That case ended in a mistrial after the jury foreman brought his own research into deliberations. Covington has maintained she is innocent.
Fenner joined Word of Faith as a teenager in 2010 with his mother. He was at a service on the church’s compound in Spindale, North Carolina, when members including Covington started what the church called a “blasting” session on him, according to Fenner. Members held him down and choked and beat him for two hours while others prayed to expel “homosexual demons,” Fenner said.
Word of Faith is a nondenominational Protestant church that was founded in 1979 by Sam and Jane Whaley in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains between …