Bill Gothard is back. A little over a year ago, amid allegations of sexual abuse, he resigned from the ministry he founded in 1961. Last weekend he re-launched his website. Gothard continues to assert that the more than 60 women who accused him of harassment and abuse are “not telling the truth.”
The most inflammatory of those accusations came from Virginia resident Gretchen Wilkinson. A teenager in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she said the attention Gothard gave her was initially flattering. He was, after all, one of the country’s best-known evangelical leaders. Millions of people came to his seminars. Thousands—including Wilkinson’s family, to whom Gothard was a hero—volunteered at the Institute in Basic Life Principles’ expansive Illinois headquarters or at one of nearly a dozen IBLP training centers scattered across the country....