The Indiana woman who bravely and openly accused her former pastor of having sex with her when she was 16 has disclosed that the religious leader allegedly began grooming her when she was 14 years old.
Bobi Gephart told Inside Edition about how Pastor John B. Lowe II of the New Life Christian Church & World Outreach allegedly deceived and sexually abused her.
Lowe acquired her trust by telling her he loved her, according to Gephart, now 43 years old, and things intensified by the time she was 16 years old.
She told Inside Edition that ‘Things just progressed into a full on sexual, I guess you would call it relationship’.
Gephart went on to show photos of Lowe at significant moments in her life, including a shot of him embracing her at her high school graduation and the pastor officiating her 2004 wedding to her current husband, Nate, who was unaware of their relationship until last month.
Lowe was able to keep Gephart quiet about their inappropriate relationship by instilling fear in her about what would happen if people found out, according to Gephart.
‘He told me that this would ruin everybody,’ she said. According to Gephart, he told her to ‘Think of the lives that would be destroyed if you ever said anything’.
Gephart even said that he tried to make her feel bad while also warning her that if anyone found out, he would go to prison.
Gephart was motivated to voice out after her brother, Edgar Wolfe, 45, told her that he had been ‘haunted’ by the memory of seeing ‘his pastor in bed with his younger sister, T-shirt and underwear on’.
‘I opened up to my brother absolutely everything, and he wept with me,’ she said ‘I didn’t know that he knew, I didn’t know he saw that.’
Lowe was immediately challenged by Wolfe through text, who demanded that he resign from being a pastor.
Lowe confessed to ‘adultery’ during a May 22 preaching at the New Life Christian Church & World Outreach in Warsaw, but did not say it was with a teen.
Gephart, who was present in the church with her husband, claimed they were angered by his half-confession.
‘I stood in the back of the sanctuary and we were on fire and just shaking our heads like I just cant believe you’re lying to these people’ and as a result, they made the decision to storm the stage.
She told the church that the ‘adultery’ Lowe had admitted to was actually a rape she had suffered when she was 16 years old, which occurred 27 years earlier. Gephart was called by her maiden name, Bobi Wolfe, at the time.
‘If you love us, please let us talk,’ Nate said, handing the mic to his wife.
It was 27 years, she said, not 20, that she had ‘lived in a prison of lies and shame.’
‘For years, I thought I was a horrible person, having suicidal thoughts, not realizing what had truly been done to me, that I was a victim,’ she told him. ‘I was just 16 when you took my virginity on your office floor. Do you remember that? I know you do.’
She told Lowe ‘you kept me in your prison,’ but ‘I´m a prisoner no longer.’
On Facebook, the video of the incident has been viewed nearly a million times.
‘When you claim and parade yourself as a pastor and you do that to someone, you are a wicked and evil person, and that’s what he is,’ Gephart’s husband Nate told Inside Edition.
After her public confession, Gephart says she received support from her community.
Gephart said, ‘Many, many people came to us and there were just sobs and hugs and love’.
When asked how she currently feels about the situation, she said: ‘It’s almost like I cant even believe everybody knows my secret now’. She added, ‘I hated lying.’
Lowe resigned as pastor the next day, according to a statement from the church. The church said none of the staff was aware of what had occurred and offered to assist Gephart with
Lowe’s son, associate pastor Bryan Lowe, made a statement at the church’s May 29 service, stating that the church would be restructuring and holding meetings with members.
In a statement, Indiana State Police encouraged anybody with “information as a victim or a witness” regarding the incident to contact them.
Although Gephart stated she spoke with police, she conceded that Lowe’s prosecution is improbable due to the passage of time and the fact that Indiana law sets the age of sexual consent at 16. She claims she is aware of other incidents of church abuse in the past.
Wolfe recounted seeing his younger sister in bed with Lowe in an interview with DailyMail.com last week.
He said he walked into the master bedroom of the Lowes’ Warsaw house early one morning while the pastor’s former teenage stripper wife Debbie, 64, was gone, ‘and I discovered him and my sister under covers.’
‘He was shirtless and she was in underwear and a t-shirt,’ said Wolfe, who was 16 years old at that time.
‘I looked puzzled so he said, she just came in to say good morning and it was cold. They were in bed under a duvet and his wife was gone. And it was early,’ he reported.
‘I was trying to think it through. In my innocence I believed what he said. And I thought we’re family, he wouldn’t do anything, he’s our pastor and I’ll trust it.’
‘Bobi is about 18 months younger than me so she would have been either 14 or 15 at the time. In my young mind I thought, it’s a good thing nobody else saw this or they would call the cops, and they wouldn’t even know that it was innocent,’ Wolfe said.
The Lowe and Wolfe families were close friends through the church, according to Edgar, and they looked after each other’s children during both spouses’ regular trips. Karen and her late husband Eddie drove a truck while the pastor and his wife went on Christian missions abroad.
That’s why Gephart, Edgar, and their older sister Stacy, now 47, were at the Lowe house on the fateful day the pastor was busted. Maisie, Stacy’s daughter, was the one who captured Gephart approaching Lowe on tape.
Edgar, now a former Army intelligence warrant officer, said he tried for years to mentally block out the image and didn’t say anything about it, but it still haunted him.
‘It upset me. So as I got older and started to question these things I realized that I probably should have called the cops. And should have done something,’ he added.
While Gephart and Wolfe’s mother told DailyMail.com that she only learned of her daughter’s suffering at the hands of Lowe following after her son made his revelation to the family in early May.
The Gephart’s mother, Karen, said: ‘My kids worshipped this man Lowe. He was their hero. I looked after their kids, they looked after my kids. We were like family’.
‘I considered him a protector of my children, not a predator of my children. But that’s exactly how it went.’
‘For Bobi, I felt mad for her, I was devastated for her when I found out. There were so many emotions at the beginning, because I’m thinking, can this actually have happened? And I felt betrayed by Lowe,’ she added.