A Lawyer Explains The Ravi Zacharias Scandals In Under 10 Minutes (Feat: Steve Baughman)

you've so you've already briefly kind of talked about some of the stuff where he lied about his credentials um do you want to briefly lay out all the issues like so that's one of the issues but there's so many more you want to kind of sketch an outline of that for people so people might watch this that have no idea of anything that's right i'm sorry go ahead just for those people just briefly sketch out all the issues that are good so so the book is called cover up in the kingdom so that tells you a lot about what i was upset about when i wrote it because the evidence is absolutely clear i don't think ravi's ministry will even dispute this anymore ravi lied about his academic credentials he claimed to be a professor at oxford this is one of the most bold and blatantly false claims he ever made to call yourself a professor at oxford that means you are at the pinnacle of your academic field he was never a professor at oxford he was never on had he never had any uh paid teaching position or any formal teaching position at oxford um but even though he he claimed this for himself and you can see me tells audiences it's at his website for several years um nobody called him on it uh same thing for him saying that he studied quantum physics at cambridge or that he's cambridge educated absolutely false and none of his christian colleagues not a single person ever spoke out publicly against him and i think that's really one of the most important things that ravi zechariah the ravi zacharias experience should be teaching us there was a code of silence and there is a code of silence amongst highly placed evangelicals they don't want to expose each other's dirt so people get away with the most brazen deceptions uh and uh and that's really got to change and ravi's helping us see that i just so i discussed the the credential stuff in the book in in great detail uh there's over 250 footnotes in the book and uh my emails to cambridge and oxford people who are nerdy about the details will like that stuff but there's also a sexual grooming scandal that ravi got himself into um in uh in 2016 uh 2015 and 2016 he had been involved with a uh married canadian woman uh but by in in an online relationship where it seems pretty clear that he was grooming her building trust with her and uh and then turning the relationship sexual uh to where ravi admits that he got he received um sexual and nude photos from this woman and in october of 2016 she'd had enough she felt guilty about it and she emailed ravi um from her therapist's office actually and said i'm going to tell my husband tonight and ravi wrote back with what's now the well-known suicide threat uh he told her that if she told uh if she told her husband uh that she he would he would uh bid this world goodbye um ravi has privately admitted sending this suicide note but he won't he refused he refused to talk about it uh in public uh so we've got this prominent evangelist who mike pence said is the greatest apologist of our century um actually getting involved online with a married woman uh in a what was a power imbalance of a relationship an abusive kind of thing they never were physically together alone but you've got this powerful minister threatening suicide to keep that woman from taking necessary steps to repair her marriage this is really really scandalous and uh despite that that that came to light in 2017 ravi went to the the rest of his life signing new book contracts maintaining a busy speaking career traveling all over the world uh winning apologetics and missionary missions awards um and this really says something truly disturbing about the evangelical business empire oh so there was also um i guess it was more recent the massage parlor stuff do you want to talk about because that we got to the suicide note and and then there's even more stuff you want to yeah explain yeah if there's one thing i would encourage your viewers to to do um just go to google and type in ravi zacharias spa and it's really encouraging because for the first time in the five and a half years that i've been doing this we're seeing christian journalists step up to the plate and start printing the difficult stuff the difficult stories so there's just been a whole slew of of good christian investigative journalism and other publications coming forward and sharing the story even though it's ugly um and it's disturbing so that's really encouraging google ravi zachariah spa but in a nutshell um in may of this year right around the time ravi died i got an email from a woman telling me very disturbing stuff about what ravi had done to her in the massage spas and she told me that he was an owner of the spas and i just i looked into it and she seemed credible but i decided i can't go anywhere with this story because nobody's going to believe that ravi zacharias was involved in the massage business um and i as an atheist i've been the main one exposing ravi i have zero credibility in the christian world and if i come out with a story that i can't back up saying he was in the massage spas it's just gonna make me look really bad and no one's gonna believe it so i just sat on it i didn't do anything about it then on july 14th i got a call at my office from a guy named anurag sharma i'd never heard of the guy and uh so i called him back i was at home that day and we uh spoke for a long time and he'd called me told me he was a good friend of robbie's that he traveled with robbie for a few decades um and had been in business with ravi and but this gentleman wanted to speak to me about spiritual matters he didn't want to talk to me about ravi he didn't want to answer my questions about ravi it was about spiritual matters at the end of the phone call just out of the blue i said mr sharma before you go let me ask you one last question do you know anything about ravi being in the massage business mr sharma's answer was i remember it very well i was in the massage business with ravi oh wow provided me proof and from there i was able to go find another victim of robbie who i spoke to and ravi had repeatedly exposed himself to her during treatments at the spa and i then shared this information there was another a christian scholar who was working on this with me all three of the witnesses i spoke to i or i interviewed um after that spoke to this christian leader so that i would have backup it wouldn't just be me the crazy banjo atheist maker and so they spoke to this this christian scholar and then they spoke to christianity today and christianity today did a really thorough job of investigating this so there's now some really first-rate uh investigative journalism coming out about ravi zacharias and his ownership in the spas and his out of control sexual predator practices i i would never have believed five years ago when i first began looking into his relatively innocuous credential silliness about whether he's a doctor or just an honorary doctor i never would have thought i'd be publicly calling him a sexual predator it would never have crossed my mind and it's absolutely shocking but that's what he was and the evidence is now really clear

Channel: The Non-Alchemist

Views: 54,205

Keywords: ravi zacharias is a fraud, ravi zacharias scandal, ravi zacharias, a lawyer explains why ravi zacharias is a fraud, steve baughman

Id: Jq2X42i9iBE

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020