Thread by @CandiceBenbow

Many folks don’t know that they pulled these same stunts in the church world. He started an entire church and then just left it. When folks wanted accountability, she wrote an entire post about how Christians were attacking her family because his ideas were forward thinking.

She went on and on that she doesn’t step into the fray but he was being persecuted for trying to do church differently and she couldn’t let him be persecuted alone. She said all the right churchy things. Technically, she’s making the same argument now. She made them martyrs.

And be clear: he started that church after getting fired and coming on here and naming his prominent former boss a pedophile. He claimed to have had proof for years and never produced it. Some of the young men he said told them this came on here and said he was lying.

When that blew up, they took to their spaces to say he was being persecuted because he was standing against sexual abuse against children in the church and that he would not stop until his former boss was held accountable. Chile...that fight vanished when he started his church.

And here’s the thing-many of us were still rocking with him at the time and still tried to call him in over this. I know because I was one of them and we did it here. We supported him but we knew he was using sexual abuse as a platform to get back at his boss. It was gross.

This isn’t to say his former boss is innocent. I don’t know. What I know is he got fired, took to Twitter to say his former boss was a pedophile and the young men he said told them this took to Twitter to say he was lying and, though he said, he’d take up the fight- he didn’t.

Many progressive Black Christians have been tired of Shaun [and Rai] King long before they ventured into social justice because they basically tried to catch a wave on all the things that frustrated us with church only for us to realize they were trying to hit a lick.

We believed him. We supported him. We defended him...only to look stupid. When he started moving to every part of the country every other month and asked us to fund it, we did because we believed he was breaking new ground.

And, when he told us about his new social justice efforts, he grounded them in the revolutionary, freedom fighting Jesus that many of us were just fully coming to know. In short, he saw our church trauma, used it as a come up and, when that failed, he moved on to the next thing.

So be clear: yes, Black women have been talking about how trifling Shaun is in social justice spaces for some time but progressive Black Christians told y’all about him BEFORE that. Him starting and stopping a church ain’t a footnote in his SJ career. It was more calculated.

That Shaun was even able to become an activist and organizer is because folks ignored people who said, “this dude ain’t right” before he was able to reinvent himself.

This is what makes it even more ugly. Shaun [and Rai] have exploited two of the most sacred parts of Black life: our faith and our fight for freedom. They treated both as a means to live in delusion and escape accountability. They knew/know what they’re doing.

At this point, I have no faith that Shaun will ever be held accountable because men can always escape accountability. And, though she repeatedly does this to herself, I hate when a sister is made to look like a complete idiot behind the foolishness of the man she loves.

I do worry and have always worried about those children. And, if their childhoods have been marred by the trauma of any of this- as Rai often says in her rants, that fault lies with her and Shaun alone. I hope they have some well folks in their lives. I really, really do.