Jury: Televangelist shunned rape report

Granddaughter awarded $2M in 2006 Ga. incident.

Carra Crouch was 13 when she boarded a private plane for a trip to Georgia. The few days she would spend there in April 2006 were among the most important of the year for her famous family.

Crouch’s grandparents, Paul and Jan, had amassed a fortune preaching the “gospel of prosperity” to millions of viewers around the world. Their pulpit? A behemoth broadcasting network that the couple had built before Carra was born.

Carra was to be a guest at a telethon for the Trinity Broadcasting Network. But according to a lawsuit she filed against the network, her trip quickly took a dark turn. The teenager was molested and raped in her hotel room by a 30-year-old network employee, according to the suit. And when she later told her grandmother what had happened, Carra Crouch claimed, the congenial co-host of “Praise the Lord” screamed at her and blamed her for the sexual assault.

On Monday, a jury in Orange County, California, found after a monthlong trial that Jan Crouch’s handling of the ordeal amounted to “outrageous” conduct that had caused her granddaughter to suffer “severe emotional distress.”

They awarded Carra Crouch, now 24, $2 million in damages for past and future “mental suffering.”

Jan Crouch died in 2016. But jurors found that the former network vice president had been acting as a top Trinity employee at the time of her conversation with Carra about the assault. As a result, the public charity — known formally as Trinity Christian Center of Santa Ana Inc. — is liable for its co-founder’s share of the damages. Exactly how much the network will have to pay is still being debated.

The jury did not find, however, that the elder Crouch, an ordained minister, was acting as a “Trinity Clergy Member,” at the time of the conversation. Had she been acting in such a capacity, she would have been required by law to tell the authorities if she suspected that a sexual assault had occurred — and been liable for other damages had she failed to do so.

Michael J. King, a lawyer for Trinity Broadcasting Network, said he and his team were “disappointed” that the jury awarded damages “based on a grandmother’s conversation with her granddaughter,” but pleased that the jury did not find that the grandmother had been acting as a minister at the time.

Judge Peter Wilson of Orange County Superior Court is expected to enter a judgment on the jury verdict this week, King said, adding that he and his team will decide at that time whether to appeal.

“Jan is dead. She did not have a chance to go to trial,” King said. “She never wavered in her love for her granddaughter.”

Jan Crouch and her husband, Paul, began their network as a single station in 1973. But soon, Paul Crouch invested in satellite distribution, building the foundation for what is now billed as the world’s largest Christian television network.

Paul Crouch died in 2013; Paul and Jan’s son Matthew now heads the broadcast network, King said.

Jan Crouch