Woman: I was abused as teen by pastor at Modesto's First Baptist | The Modesto Bee

While the SOL has passed for Graves' case, it’s important to share her story and learn from it. It’s all too common for churches to conceal abuse like this in order to preserve their reputation, and it’s unacceptable.

The 27-year-old married youth pastor in Modesto consoled the troubled girl, whose father had just died. Eventually, he kissed her. Then he fondled her.

She was 14.

Over the next 2 1/2 years, Brad Tebbutt sexually abused Jennifer Graves in his office at First Baptist Church, a prominent Modesto congregation, and in his car. After school, before his wife returned from work, he would have sex with her in his home, she said.

At the end of her junior year at Beyer High School, in 1988, Tebbutt and his wife moved away. A recent publication boasts of his 30-year career as a youth pastor, and he now works in a seniors ministry for the International House of Prayer of Kansas City.
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Church leaders never informed her mother. They never went to police. They termed it an affair, she said.
 
“They gave me specific directions to never speak of the events to anyone, because it would damage the reputation of the church, and of Jesus himself,” she said. “The abuse was swept under the rug.”
 
Two friends from those days who also attended First Baptist, Deborah Jules Vilmur and Jennifer Vanderpol Tracz, recently confirmed that she had confided in them about the abuse not long after it happened.

Woman: I was abused as teen by pastor at Modesto's First Baptist | The Modesto Bee