Atlanta megachurch senior pastor Bryan Meadows revealed during a hard-hitting YouTube interview with Jessica Laine MacDonald four days ago that he had a 12-year “affair” with a co-pastor, sparking rage and condemnation online. Now, Stephanie Prescott, 34, has stated for the first time to The Roys Report (TRR) that she was the object of Meadows’ illicit misconduct. But she’s not calling it an affair; she says it was “abuse.”

“Now I understand it was grooming, abuse of power and clergy sexual abuse,” she told TRR. “I would love to see this article help other women learn from this.”

Meadows, who also uses the title “apostle,” founded Embassy City Church in 2011 with his wife, Patrice, who’s also a senior pastor.

Prescott, who was also there at the founding of the charismatic church, discussed her alleged abuse in a YouTube interview last June with Bishop Demetrius Sinegal, senior pastor of Reformation Culture Church.

But she didn’t name her abuser; she instead talked about how an unidentified man “drew her in.”

Six years her senior, she said, he became her spiritual father. He told her she had a special preaching gift. When he first crossed boundaries with her by inviting her into his office alone to ask her about her “sexuality,” she told Sinegal she was shocked and confused.

She told TRR her purpose in not naming Meadows last June wasn’t to protect him. She just wanted to focus on connecting with women in the broader church with similar stories.

Prescott also didn’t reveal his real name in a book she released a year ago: “95 Theses to The American Church: The Confrontation of Spiritual Abuse, Idolatry, and Mass Deception.”

“Now I don’t mind confirming it was him — Bryan Meadows,” she told TRR today.

Meadows didn’t respond to TRR’s request for comment about Prescott’s revelation.

In his interview with MacDonald, which has 71,000 views to date, Meadows did not tell the name or age of the other woman.

“I had an affair. I stepped out on my wife,” Meadows told a clearly skeptical MacDonald. “It was something I knew was wrong.”

The interview wasn’t the first time Meadows has referred to his adultery publicly. It was part of a live one-man show he performed a year ago called “My Whole Truth.” 

But that show did not have near the impact as MacDonald’s video — a ratings hit for the broadcaster who took over the Christian relationship podcast, Hardly Initiated, from Tysean Jackson and Ryan Catchings last month.

MacDonald chose Meadows for her first interview.

She spared few words in questioning his misconduct and lack of transparency with his church.

“Somebody was saying,” she said while apparently reading a social media post off her cell phone, “why does he want a public position but private contrition?”

He responded, “My contrition was public; they just didn’t stay around long enough to see it.”

But an “apology video” that Meadows said he had posted no longer seems available on his YouTube channel.

In his interview with MacDonald, the preacher said he took a sabbatical two years ago for counseling and marriage repair after his “head prophet” exposed him in 2024. His misconduct had lasted 12 years at that point.

Meadows placed some of the blame for the relationship on the woman, saying he was lonely and leaned on a friend. “That friend created space for us to do something that wasn’t right,” he said.

That excuse didn’t sit well with interviewer MacDonald, a former boxer, experienced journalist and a financial mentor. She also used to attend Meadows’ church, and Meadows did MacDonald’s premarital counseling and officiated her 2024 wedding.

“In our vows, you talking about not committing adultery … and it’ s like, this whole time? Apostle, no, no,” MacDonald said. “It was so hurtful to me.”

When she learned about what he had done, “I specifically felt … how can he lead our marriage when he is not being faithful in his own?

MacDonald’s 88-minute interview provoked an especially immense outpouring of anger from Black Christians on social media. It also spawned multiple companion videos by other YouTube personalities speculating on the woman involved and Meadows’ qualifications as a spiritual leader.

“Bryan Meadows coming out is not the full picture,” said Abednego Lufile, a retired professional basketball player turned YouTube preacher.

“What you are hearing has not even scratched the surface. My wife and I — the messages we have received today: It is satanic, diabolical, unbelievable, Jezebelic, Molech-type stuff … Either you believe the man of God who has been hiding this and lying for 12 years, or you believe the other women and stories that they encounter.” 

‘I am a loyalist’

In the interview, Meadows said he and his wife invited a woman to live with them early in their marriage, when he was in his 20s. He said he spent time home alone with her when his wife was at work, and she was involved in church ministry. After an emotional bond turned into “the breaking of boundaries,” Meadows didn’t disclose who made the first move.

However, in her interview with Sinegal, Prescott pinpoints Meadows’ grooming “to where my guard was let down.” She said she was estranged from her own father, which made her lean on Meadows’ spiritual fathering even more.

Then one day, Meadows kissed her, she said. This was the start of a “13-year long enmeshment.” (Although Meadows said the relationship lasted 12 years, Prescott said the timeline included an extra year.)

Meadows had admitted to MacDonald that, after an “initial infraction,” he didn’t break off relations with the co-pastor. He personally liked her and wanted her serving at his church.

“I am a loyalist, all right?” he said. “If I love you, I love you. I’m fighting for you. I’ll never leave you nor forsake you.”

But Prescott’s version spoke of betrayal, not loyalty.

While she as engaged in this abusive relationship with her pastor, Prescott said she was dating a man but wasn’t sure she wanted to marry him. Confusingly, Meadows convinced her to marry her boyfriend, whom Meadows called a spiritual son. Meadows even officiated their wedding, while continuing his misconduct with Prescott, then 21.

“It was just so many layers of betrayal,” she said. “My betrayal against my husband, his betrayal against his spiritual son, and then, of course, the boundary crossing and leadership.”

Even MacDonald pointed out to Meadows that he betrayed his own wife.

Meadows responded that he compartmentalized the two relationships and was still able to treat his wife well, while pastoring the church competently. Still, the illicit relationship became addictive, he admitted. Other pastors got wind of it, even before his wife did.

“When I first started dealing with this, I didn’t deal with this and try to hide it,” he said.

However, he didn’t clarify who the pastors helping him were, and what, if anything, they did in response. 

But MacDonald said Meadows still led a double life. When MacDonald and her husband were in counseling with Meadows two years ago, MacDonald’s husband asked Meadows about rumors of some sort of scandal. She said Meadows told them not to believe everything they hear.

“I thought you were just overworked and resting and on a sabbatical because of that, not because of what happened,” she said.

Missing from the Meadows interview was any mention of adult clergy sexual abuse (ACSA), the correct term for pastoral “affairs” with someone under their care. ACSA is illegal in 14 states plus the District of Columbia, but not Georgia.

Pastors who term their sexual contact with someone under their care as “affairs,” minimize the power dynamic of spiritual authority, says Kate Roberts. She is an attorney representing survivors of sexual abuse and co-director of Restored Voices Collective, an advocacy group for sexual abuse victims.

Pastors may even use “position-leveling” to make it seem like the victim was their equal, Roberts said.

“The pastor who has violated the congregation’s trust in some way — it’s in their best interest to be able to frame it as an affair because that enables them to escape accountability for the fact that they have actually engaged in abuse,” she said.

“There’s a level of control over the person who’s under your care. In that situation, there can’t be consent. The responsibility to maintain boundaries is with the person who is in a position of spiritual authority.”

Prescott, who first got involved with Meadows when she was 19, said she didn’t have the strength to escape him. His abuse eventually destroyed her marriage, she said.

Even after counseling and an “unraveling process” following the divorce, Prescott still felt powerless to leave Meadows. When she told him she wanted out, Meadows would throw a tantrum, she said. The only thing that stopped the abuse was when someone in authority at Embassy finally stepped in.

‘Exposure is a blessing’

On Father’s Day weekend of 2024, Meadows said the church’s head prophet confronted him about his relationship with Prescott.

A friend of Prescott’s — in whom the co-pastor had confided — left the church and was starting to talk about the situation. Word apparently got to the prophet through the grapevine.

At first, Meadows said he thought he could deny it all, but the prophet pressed him.

“Exposure is a blessing,” he said. “I had no choice but to be honest and to confess in front of my wife, in front of other parties.”

Prescott called the exposure her “deliverance.”

“There was this relief and just feeling of not carrying that because I had been carrying it for so long,” she told Sinegal.

That next Sunday, Meadows said he announced in church that he was “struggling” and needed a sabbatical but didn’t go into details.

It’s unclear how much, if anything, other leaders in the church knew at that point, but they should have hired a third-party investigator, Roberts said.

“The third party should … evaluate not only the abuser’s actions but also the church’s failures in protecting others from that abuse,” she said.

Prescott said church officials did the opposite and forced her to resign. She asked to speak with the board to share the “major damage” that Meadows caused in her life and was promised a meeting. A month passed, but the meeting never happened. Meanwhile, she noticed Meadows met several times with the board.

“They were working out active plans for his restoration,” she told Sinegal.

For a few weeks, the church’s Facebook page showed other speakers providing the Sunday sermons in Meadows’ absence. Then in September, Meadows returned to preach a series on family. In October, he announced in a now-deleted Facebook post that he’d been through counseling, deliverance, forgiveness, healing and learning.

“(I)t’s been rough, but I’ve never felt this healthy, this loved, this supported, this focused, and this free … it’s time to work,” he wrote.

That December, he announced he would be selling tickets for a one-man tell-all show called, “My Whole Truth,” at Atlanta’s 7 Stages Theatre in January 2025.

“From Buddhism, Sexual Abuse, Homelessness, Molestation, Infidelity, Betrayal … this has been the most difficult, gut wrenching, beautiful season… and I almost didn’t survive,” Meadows wrote in a now-deleted Facebook post.

He told MacDonald that he talked about the exposure of his infidelity at that show.

“Wait, wait,” MacDonald said. “After everything with your wife … you made a show about it?”

Had he cleared this show with his church leaders, she asked.

Meadows said he asked his counselor and wife, but not his church leaders because he didn’t do the show in the church.

“I wanted to be able to tell my journey in an uncut, raw, transparent way that would probably not be well received in the church,” he said.

On April 18, he’ll do a second one-man show called, “Good Grief” about “the grief, the pressure, the loss, the laughter, and the sacrifices that come with carrying people, vision, faith, and responsibility.” In-person tickets range from $71 to $241.

Meanwhile, Prescott said she spent the next six months alone, dealing with losing her husband, pastor, job and ministry. She said God then started to restore her life. Three months ago, Sinegal hired her onto his staff as an associate pastor.

She still questions whether Meadows’ church leaders should allow him to preach and pastor when his church never reckoned with how he harmed her.

When asked by Sinegal to identify the attitude in many churches that allow such abuse, “toxic submission,” she responded. “Idolizing the one man instead of the many different parts of the body … we kind of position people in a way where they are more easily abused.”

Reactions

The day MacDonald released her interview, Meadows wrote a two-sentence now-hidden Facebook post.

“Rebuke without relationship has no weight,” he wrote. “If they aren’t invested in your healing, their opinion means nothing.”

At church on Sunday, he didn’t mention the interview about his misconduct. Tonya Alston, Embassy City operations pastor, presented Meadows and his wife with a gift.

“We got your back,” Alston said. “We really appreciate everything you do.”

TRR reached out to Meadows with questions about current accountability and whether he considers his “affair” to be ACSA. He declined to give an on-the-record response.

Meanwhile, influencers have taken to YouTube to post mostly critical responses to Meadows’ explanations in the interviews

Christian YouTuber and cultural commentator Denise Dawidowski said in a video Saturday that she used to follow Meadows and his preaching online. But she stopped when she concluded he was egotistical.

“Sir, you had a side chick. You were over a church. You had a wife. Now, you want to pat yourself on the back as a provider,” said Dawidowski. “The arrogance and the pride is what’s speaking … He’s still prideful.”

YouTuber and relationship mentor Janice Hylton, who previously criticized Meadows for holding a vibrator while preaching, doesn’t think he’s truly repented.

“He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” she said. “All I’m hearing is excuses, excuses, excuses and more excuses.”

Roberts told TRR that well-intentioned elders and other church leaders who desire to hold their pastors accountable can be groomed and deceived into loyalty to the pastor.

This story has been updated to accurately report a quote by attorney Roberts.

Rebecca Hopkins is a journalist based in Colorado.