Kentucky lawmaker whose legacy was in question found dead
FRANKFORT, Ky. — The Kentucky lawmaker’s resume included enough material for an award-winning memoir: He was a peacekeeper at the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, a White House chaplain to three presidents and a 9/11 first responder who gave last rites to hundreds of people at Ground Zero.
But Republican Dan Johnson’s carefully crafted history crumbled this week following an extensively reported story from the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. The story tore down his claims and portrayed him as a con man whose deceptions propped up his ministry of a church of outcasts in Louisville and hid a sinister secret: a sexual assault allegation from a 17-yearold girl.
Johnson denied it all, declaring his innocence from the pulpit of the church where he was the self-appointed “pope.” By Wednesday night, he was dead, his body found on the side of a secluded road with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Johnson’s wife, Rebecca Johnson, defended her husband Thursday and said she will run for his seat because “these high-tech lynchings based on lies and half-truths can’t be allowed to win the day.”
In a statement a day after her husband’s suicide, Rebecca Johnson said she has been fighting behind him for 30 years and “his fight will go on.”
“Dan is gone but the story of his life is far from over,” she said.
of the 57-year-old jolted Republican leaders, who were already struggling with a sexual harassment scandal that toppled the state’s first GOP House speaker in nearly 100 years plus three other Republican committee chairmen. Most in the party had already turned their back on Johnson, calling for his resignation following the sexual assault allegation and his history of posting racist photos on Facebook that depicted President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.
By Thursday, many were offering messages of sympathy while acknowledging Johnson’s complex life.
“He was passionate about others, I saw it often yet he needed help himself,” GOP state Rep. Jim DuPlessis, who sat beside Johnson on the House floor, posted on Twitter.
Johnson’s wife, Rebecca Johnson, said her husband was the victim of a “high-tech lynching” and announced she would run to replace him in the Legislature.
Elected in 2016, he was part of a wave of Republican victories that gave the GOP a majority in the Kentucky House for the first time in nearly 100 years. But before that, he was the pastor of Heart of Fire Church in Louisville, which prided itself on welcoming “real people.”
“It was a biker church, so there was lots of leather jackets, lots of long hair and people that if you ran into them on the street, you might have a different first impression,” said David Adams, a political operative who worked with Johnson on his campaign.
On the church’s website, Johnson claimed to have healed sick people during a visit to South America in 1991, including the incredible story of raising a woman from the dead. The miracles were detailed in a letter from David Fischer, pastor of a church in California. Fischer told the investigative reporting center that he did not witness those events and could not point the agency to anyone who had.
On his financial disclosure forms, Johnson listed his only source of income as workers compensation from the state of New York. He said that money was from injuries he sustained while working as a chaplain immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City. But the reporting center, after a seven-month effort, could find no evidence that Johnson was in New York that day.
In a Facebook message posted hours before his death, Johnson hinted that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder relating to what he witnessed in New York, details that he shared with friends through the years, including Republican state Sen. Dan Seum.
“He struggled with that. I know he did. The fact it was so horrific that he was involved in praying over these people,” Seum said. “I believed him. I had no reason not to.”