Pastor ‘told sex victim she was crying with joy’
A DIVORCED mother of three told a jury yesterday that when she wept after a married pastor allegedly sexually assaulted her, the churchman told her she was crying ‘tears of joy’. The Zimbabwean woman, who cannot be identified, said she had become involved in a then recently formed church, called Agape For All Nations, in Stirling, in 2007.
Her marriage had broken up and the English Pentecostal church she previously attended in Oxford had decided to merge with the Scottish organisation.
Giving evidence from behind a screen at Stirling Sheriff Court, the woman, now 47, said she had felt down and ‘needed spiritual intervention’.
She said she went to the pastor, Walter Masocha, 51, for ‘surgeries’ – one-to-one meetings – in his then home in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire, and at a flat nearby that they called ‘The Penthouse’.
But in 2009 he started whispering to her in his native language, Shona. She said: ‘He ended up telling me I was his wife. He said, “You were given to me by God”, that God was blessing me, all sorts of things to make me feel like a favoured person.
‘I was confused. Something inside me told me it was not right.’
She said on one occasion he kissed her on the lips, and another time he had kissed her and put his tongue into her mouth, opened her blouse and touched her breasts.
She said: ‘I was crying and he said, “You’re so blessed to be near me, you’re the chosen one”.’ She said in a third incident, in 2010, he called her into a room at The Penthouse.
She said: ‘There was no one else there. He was sitting there, and I knelt down to give him the usual hug. He said to me, “I keep telling you that I love you, why don’t you believe me?” Then he said, “I’ll prove to you that I love you”, and he just exposed himself.’ The woman, who worked on the church magazine, said Masocha was ‘gently pulling her neck down’.
She said she decided she would have to leave the church, adding: ‘I was crying. All the time I cried he’d say to me, “Tears of joy”.’
She said she had not told anyone else in the church because other members looked up to him ‘like he was their saviour’, but eventually stopped attending and later went to the police.
Masocha, of Sauchieburn, near Stirling, denies sexually assaulting the divorcee and another woman at locations including the church, his former home in Bridge of Allan and Edinburgh Airport between January 2007 and May 2011.
The trial continues.