Dustin Pennington wants you to learn from his example.

He hopes you never find yourself in his situation. But if you do, he strongly, strongly advises you not to make the choices he made.

Pennington, a former Assemblies of God minister in metro Atlanta, ignored a warning about sexual abuse. He chose not to believe the person telling him horrible things about a man he knew — an active member of his church, a good Christian and a friend.

He trusted his friend. So, he dismissed the allegations without even thinking about looking into them.

Now he regrets it.

“I’m complicit because I wouldn’t shake a bush and holler,” Pennington told Roys Report (RR). “Why did I try to handle stuff so privately?”

Pennington looked the other way in 2011 when someone told him that his worship minister, Kevin Binette, had sexually molested teenage boys.

Binette went on to molest at least three other teenagers, according to Pennington, family members and a self-identified victim.

Binette, writing an email to RR earlier this week, denied the allegations. He questioned whether RR would report the whole truth and declined to answer specific questions.

Pennington, though, has come to believe his former friend is a serial predator. And he thinks if he had just listened in 2011, he could have stopped him.

“That lack of judgment, I have to own that to the highest level,” said Pennington, who resigned from GateCity Church in April. “If there’s a way anyone else can learn from that, I’d really like them to learn from my mistakes.”

‘I wish I’d thought more’

As best Pennington can recall, Binette joined Cornerstone Fellowship Assemblies of God around 2006, arriving with a group of people whose church in nearby Duluth had closed.

The two men clicked.

Binette, who worked for CNN, had just been through a messy divorce. Two of his children had chosen to live with him, making him the single father of high school students. He had a lot going on, Pennington said, and yet he got very involved in the church. He also opened up about his life and personal struggles.

Binette told Pennington he struggled with same-sex attraction. He was involved in recovery groups, discipleship ministries and deliverance ministries to help him with what he called “identity issues.”

“I really admire vulnerability,” Pennington said. “He was sharing from what seemed like a really vulnerable place and from there, we just really became super, super close friends.”

Binette did not suggest that he was sexually attracted to children or that he had a pattern, over decades, of molesting teenage boys in their sleep — not that Pennington can recall. The friends talked frequently about Binette’s sexuality. Binette would ask for prayer for help resisting the temptations of pornography and same-sex attraction, Pennington said.

The former minister never thought that Binette could be using that openness to hide something else.

Before long, Binette was leading worship at Cornerstone, as well as a youth group there. By 2008, just two years after he started attending, Binette was so integrated into the pastor’s life that he went on vacation with the Penningtons.

“I wish I’d thought more about that and had more discernment,” Pennington told RR. “After church one night, we were eating at Waffle House. We had a Hawaii vacation planned, this big trip, and we were talking about it, and one of my sons says to Kevin, ‘Hey, why don’t you come with us?’ I said, ‘Hey, yeah, that’d be fun.’ That was it.”

Close relationship with teenage boy 

Pennington remembers he had some concerns the following year, 2009. Binette had developed an unusually close relationship with a 15-year-old boy in the church, a close friend of Pennington’s sons.

It did not feel right.

Binette reassured his pastor everything was fine. Pennington chose to believe him.

The teenager, Harrison Funk, told RR that now, as an adult, he does not understand why there was not more concern. He said sirens should have been going off. They should have been blaring.

But he also knows Binette had an incredible ability to charm people.

“He has one of the most magnetic personalities of anybody I’ve ever met,” said Funk, now 32. “He always has a kind of air of success. Very magnetic. Very funny. He can quickly create a feeling of, like, you’re in his inner circle with inside jokes, insider language that just the two of you share.”

Funk, at 15, knew nothing about how sexual predators cultivate victims. Law enforcement experts only started to use the word “grooming” a few years before Funk was born. As a teenager growing up in church, Funk did not look at his youth pastor and worship leader and see a threat, but a potential mentor.

Maybe even a business partner.

Around 2010, Funk asked Binette if he would help him buy a franchise of ZAGG, a company that sells cellphone cases. Binette, who had risen to project management director at Turner Broadcasting System, agreed to invest, and they opened a kiosk together in the Sugarloaf Mills mall, in Duluth.

The 16-year-old and 47-year-old business partners started spending a lot of time together.

Binette’s son Michael remembers thinking, “What the hell is going on?”

When he watched his father with the teenager, it seemed inappropriate, “like something is going on,” the younger Binette said. “It made me feel gross and I didn’t want to be a witness to it.”

Warning ignored

Another family member did try to intervene. William Pitts, Binette’s son-in-law, knew the family secret. He knew Binette wrote a letter in the early 2000s, confessing, “I still have these unhealthy desires, and I don’t want anyone to know about them.”

In 2011, Pitt asked Pennington to meet with him at a Starbucks.

“Dustin’s a total fool,” Pitt told RR. “He came to that meeting armed with Bible verses and nonsense: forgiveness, redemption, blah, blah, blah. He’s an utter fool. I don’t know what else it could be.”

Pennington, today, accepts that judgment. He told RR that he does not know that anything would have jarred his trust in Binette. He believed his friend.

Besides, Binette had warned him that Pitt was stirring up family drama, repeating crazy allegations made in the messy divorce. Pennington says he never seriously considered that Pitt might be right.

Pennington did not ask other family members any questions. He did not ask other ministers what they thought or what they would do. He thinks, today, that was probably his biggest mistake.

“I was blinded by my affection for Kevin as a person, a brother, and he was like family, too,” Pennington said. “Everyone has blind spots. But I didn’t ask another minister to help me with my blind spots.”

After he left Starbucks, Pennington completely put the allegations out of his mind.

“There are a lot of reasons, but there are no excuses,” he told RR. “I don’t have a good excuse for this, but the meeting fell into my sea of oblivion of meetings.”

Did not think of word ‘crime’

No one recalls any big family discussion about inviting Binette along on vacation in 2012. It was just a given. Binette joined the Penningtons on their Caribbean cruise.

Funk, 18 at the time, went too.

The group got two adjoining rooms on the ship. Funk, Binette and one of the Pennington children were in one room, with Funk and Binette in beds next to each other.

Funk told RR he remembers waking up around 3:30 a.m. The door between the adjoining rooms was open when he went to sleep and now it was closed. And Binette, he said, was touching him.

“His hand was on top of my underwear,” Funk said. “As soon as I woke up, he snapped his hand back. But then I almost thought — I was in, like, kind of a dream state. I pulled the sheets and comforter back over me.”

He woke up after what felt like just a few minutes, Funk said, and the sheets were back off and Binette was touching him again.

The teenager jumped up, left the room and slept the rest of the night on a lounge chair on the cruise ship deck. As the sun came up over the Caribbean, Funk saw Pennington having coffee. He went and told him what had happened “immediately,” Funk said.

Funk did not use the word “molestation,” that he remembers. He did not call it “sexual battery” either. He did not have a word for what happened, only these raw and upsetting details.

Pennington said he wishes now that he had contacted security on the boat.

“I didn’t entertain the word ‘crime’ at the time,” Pennington said. “Because again, I’m thinking Kevin’s a good guy. He struggles with same-sex attraction. He had a very weak moment and maybe he thought it was reciprocated. I didn’t even have a rubric for ‘criminal activity.’”

Funk slept in the other room for the rest of the cruise. Back in Atlanta, he dissolved the business partnership and stayed away from church to avoid Binette. Pennington never said what happened to him was his fault, Funk told RR, but he seemed to think the situation was unhealthy and too tempting for Binette.

“The response should have been so much more decisive,” Funk told RR. “There should have been sirens blaring. But nobody acted like that.”

Pennington said he approached Binette at the time as someone who had relapsed. He also helped Binette find a new church — a fresh start.

He did not think at all about the warning he had ignored a year before.

“I wish I had. I wish I made that connection,” Pennington told RR. “Hopefully this can be helpful to other people.”

Not ‘walking in the light’

Lindsey Lugo, Binette’s younger daughter, noticed toys at her father’s house in 2017. Binette had talked to his children many times about “walking in the light” and Lugo thought he was in recovery, with accountability partners and strict boundaries.

A new mother at the time, she was shaken by the sight of the toys. She learned that Binette was babysitting one of his grandchildren.

She could not accept that, she said. She decided to act.

Lugo took a confession letter that Binette wrote in the early 2000s and gave it to Pennington.

“My mother gave it to me, to, like, explain their divorce,” Lugo told RR. “But I thought Kevin got help and I never read the letter. I still haven’t read the letter. I can’t do it. But I told Dustin, ‘I think you need to read this.’”

Pennington opened the sealed envelope and suddenly he saw his friend — the man he had trusted so much — confessing in his own words to decades of predatory behavior.

“It was the most unclear-clear thing,” he told RR. “It’s like a personal testimony, a confession. You’re horrified and your mind goes into a thousand spots.”

Pennington discovered two more teenagers in his church who said that Binette molested them. Neither of them was willing to go to police. Neither has wanted to come forward since. Pennington, committed to protecting their privacy, declined to say anything else.

‘A fuzzy recollection’

For years, Pennington told RR, he tried to keep up with Binette, warning area ministers about him as Binette hopscotched from church job to church job.

Then early in 2026, one minister of another area church asked Pennington a question.

“Out of the blue,” Pennington told RR, “he says, ‘Tell me again, when did you first hear anything might have been up with Kevin?’ Right at that moment, you know, just, I had a fuzzy recollection. It was really vague: Will tried to tell me something.”

He had been warned in that 2011 meeting in Starbucks. But he had not listened.

Pennington decided to resign from ministry the next day. He told RR that he believes that was the only appropriate response to his own lack of judgment.

“Honestly, you know, I felt like a price needed to be paid,” he said. “There should be some consequences. For my integrity, for my family, for all of this, I needed to fall on my sword.”

He has no plans to return to full-time ministry. He does not know what he will do for work. In the meantime, he has taken a college course on how to recognize signs of abuse and the requirements for mandatory reporters.

He thinks every minister should take a class like that.

And maybe, Pennington said, one good thing can come out of this. Maybe someone will learn from his example.

Daniel Silliman is senior reporter/editor at The Roys Report. He began his two decades in journalism covering crime in Atlanta and has since led major investigations into abuse and misconduct in Christian contexts. Daniel and his wife live in Johnson City, Tennessee