Pastor, 73, who ‘spanked naked women to cast out evil spirits’
AN evangelical pastor who ran his church like a cult spanked the bare bottoms of women in his congregation as a form of religious ‘discipline’, a court has heard.
But Reverend Howard Curtis’s real motivation was his ‘desire for power and sexual satisfaction’.
Prosecutor Toby Fitzgerald said: ‘He presented himself as an inspirational man of God. In reality he was nothing of the sort. He deceived his congregation. He said he was going to cast out evil spirits from people and that discipline had to be administered by striking bare flesh with the bare hand.’
Curtis, 73, is accused of sexually or indecently assaulting three women, as well as child cruelty and actual bodily harm against four children between January 1969 and July 2013.
The father- of- three, who denies all charges, allegedly ordered one woman who attended his Coulsdon Christian Fellowship in South London to strip naked before putting her over his knee to slap her, and continued the beating when she collapsed to the floor.
He is said to have given the student nurse ‘Christian domestic discipline’, supposedly following Bible teachings about keeping women in their place.
Mr Fitzgerald said the first of around a dozen assaults – for untidiness – occurred in Curtis’s office at the church.
‘She trusted him completely as a man of God,’ he told Croydon Crown Court. ‘ He hit her hard about 12 times until she ended up on the floor.’
At other sessions she was
‘Her reaction was
to scream’
punished for ‘lacking femininity’ and having a ‘frigid spirit’, the jury heard.
When arrested he did not deny the spankings, insisting they were consensual.
Another woman was told it was ‘God’s will’ she be punished and she agreed to it. Mr Fitzgerald said Curtis spanked her bare bottom 20 to 30 times, until she was crying and ‘black and blue’.
A third woman, a mother-ofthree aged 51, had ‘healing sessions’ in which Curtis allegedly made her relive abuse she had experienced as a child.
‘Her reaction was often to scream and try to fight him off, but the defendant said this told him she needed more healing, allowing him to commit more abuse,’ the prosecutor said.
Curtis, of Wallington, South London, is also alleged to have spanked two girls, aged nine and 13, and a boy of eight, and to have pinched the bottom of a parishioner’s baby.
The trial continues.