The Church Sued the Mom Who Warned People About Pastor Tommy Pinkerton. Then Pinkerton Pleaded Guilty.

A Grand Rapids-area church and its pastor sued the single mother who warned members about a traveling evangelist, plus the TV station that put her on the air. Six weeks later, the evangelist pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a minor. The church says he preached six Sundays in five years. Its own sermon catalog credits him with 19 sermons, and its state filings list him as secretary and director. A Kent County judge’s ruling on whether the case gets thrown out under Michigan’s new anti-SLAPP law is due by about November 10.

A Mother, a Phone Call, and a Website That Changed

I want to start with the part of this story nobody disputes, because it gets lost fast once a lawsuit enters the room. A man who preached at a West Michigan church, whose name appeared on that church’s website, was charged with sexually abusing teenage boys. According to Andreozzi + Foote’s case summary, six victims were connected to the Maryland charges, and a seventh man reported abuse in Georgia. Pinkerton pleaded guilty to one count. One count in a plea deal is not one victim.

A mother in New Chapel’s congregation found out about the investigation before most of her fellow members did, and she wanted them to know. Everything after that is the fight.

Torey Grunwell started attending New Chapel in 2020 and told WZZM she was close with lead pastor Joe Bevelacqua. In March 2025, she reached out to the station. She said church leaders confirmed the Maryland allegations to her by phone, then asked how she had found out. She said she asked the church to put out a statement so parents could talk to their kids, and got silence instead. She said she was cut off from the church, and that church members she cleaned houses for fired her. She also said Pinkerton had paid unusual attention to her teenage son during services.

WZZM obtained a screenshot of New Chapel’s website from that same month. It listed Pinkerton as treasurer, evangelist, and a pastor. By the time the station’s story ran, his name was gone, and so were the sermons he had given there.

A screenshot of the page itself, titled “New Chapel’s Corporate Governance,” shows how much weight that listing carried. It names Pinkerton twice. He is the treasurer of New Chapel’s Corporate Board of Trustees, identified as “Rev. Thomas G. Pinkerton, Evangelist, A. Pastor, Truth Chapel, Winder, GA.” He is also one of three members of the church’s Board of Advisors, which the page says is, in another context, called “Overseers.”

WZZM’s report aired August 8, 2025, two days after Pinkerton was extradited from Georgia to face 20 felony counts in Baltimore County. That same weekend, New Chapel posted a statement saying it had cut ties with him before his arrest. In its statement to WZZM, the church said it had “communicated the situation to our church family after severing all ties,” without saying when.

What the Church Says Pinkerton Was

New Chapel’s lawsuit tells a very different story. According to the complaint, as reported by The Roys Report, Pinkerton appeared at six Sunday services over five years. He was never employed by the church, never a pastor, never a youth leader, and never had unsupervised access to children. The church says Bevelacqua removed him from his trustee position in October 2024, after learning of the Maryland investigation, and that an internal review turned up no reports of misconduct at New Chapel.

The church says it then held a congregational meeting on March 23, 2025 to tell members Pinkerton had been removed and to walk through its child-safety policies. That is roughly five months after it says it learned of the investigation. Its explanation for the wait, as The Roys Report describes the lawsuit, is that Bevelacqua contacted Baltimore County police in October 2024, and Detective Andrew Carns would not confirm an investigation but advised a quiet internal review. The church says police advised silence so Pinkerton would not be tipped off.

That raises its own questions. A detective advising a quiet internal review is not the same thing as a detective telling a church not to warn parents. What exactly did investigators ask New Chapel to keep quiet, and for how long? Did that advice cover the families in the pews, or is the church reading it more broadly than it was given? Those are the questions my Maryland records request is built to answer.

The State Filings Name Him as Secretary and Director

Churches incorporated in Michigan file reports with the state that list their officers and directors. New Chapel’s filings list Thomas Pinkerton as both secretary and director in reports for 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2020. The 2020 report was filed in December 2022 and signed by Joseph A. Bevelacqua as president. The same filings list Joshua Reece as treasurer, so the state paperwork and the website’s “treasurer” title describe two different things. The filings document a governance role: secretary and director.

The July 2025 filing also certifies that no required information had changed since the previous report, while its officer-and-director section shows a removal and two additions. Its signature block names Joseph Bevelacqua and Associate Pastor Brian Cappiello. Cappiello signed the 2026 report.

None of this makes Pinkerton an employee, a youth leader, or a pastor on paper, and none of it shows what any director knew about abuse allegations. It does show that New Chapel reported him to the state as one of its officers and directors, year after year. “Occasional visitor” does not cover that.

Six Sunday Services. Nineteen Sermons.

The lawsuit puts Pinkerton at six Sunday services over five years. But the internet never forgets. New Chapel’s own Mixcloud account, which holds 287 recordings dated January 2016 through February 2022, credits Pinkerton on 15 of them, one with his surname misspelled “Pickerton.” Archived pages of New Chapel’s website credit him with four more. That is 19 distinct sermons so far, most of them credited to “Pastor Tommy Pinkerton.”

Mixcloud dates are catalog dates and archive dates are capture dates, so neither pins down the exact day a sermon was preached. The archived pages also describe him as “Pastor Tommy Pinkerton,” a “special guest pastor,” and a “Special Guest Preacher.” Eleven archived New Chapel pages mention him in all; repeat mentions of the same sermon are counted once.

Nineteen is 13 more than six, and more than three times as many. Some of those sermons were midweek events, like First Wednesday and the three-night “3 Hot Nights” revival, and the lawsuit’s five-year window has not been made public. So the church can still argue its narrow number. What it cannot do is describe a man it credited with 19 sermons, called “Pastor,” and listed as an officer and director for years as someone who barely came around. The church should say which five years it counted and which of these sermons it left out.

A Bond Going Back to 2009

The church’s account of Pinkerton is of an outside evangelist who came around a handful of times. Its lead pastor described him very differently. A Facebook post dated December 15, 2009, from an account belonging to Bevelacqua, thanks Pinkerton for his generosity and calls him “the single most encouraging leader God has placed in my life.”

That post is almost 15 years older than the October 2024 phone call the church says first alerted it to the Maryland investigation. December 2009 also falls inside the 2006 to 2010 period covered by the Maryland charges, when Pinkerton was youth pastor in Rossville. Nothing in the post suggests Bevelacqua knew of any abuse, and Clutch Justice is not suggesting he did. What it shows is the length and closeness of the relationship. By 2014, Pinkerton was listed as an officer of Bevelacqua’s church.

That matters for the question at the center of this story. A congregation deciding how much to trust its leaders’ handling of Pinkerton is entitled to know that the man making the call had once called Pinkerton the most encouraging leader in his life.

Billed to the Students

One more post belongs next to the sermon list. A social media post from an account located in Grand Rapids, using New Chapel’s name and its hashtags, advertises a youth night called Student Culture: snacks, games, and “a great word from THE Pastor Tommy Pinkerton,” with an invitation to bring a friend. The capitalized “THE” is in the original.

The post doesn’t show who supervised the night or how often he spoke at student events. It does show the church presenting him to its teenagers as a pastor, at a youth event, after years of listing him as a corporate officer. The lawsuit says he was never a youth leader. Speaking at the youth ministry’s own night is a separate question the church has not addressed.

New Chapel’s website now posts a set of child-safety rules, including a strict two-adult rule that bars leaders from being alone with a minor who is not their own child. The rule is written for leaders. Whether a visiting preacher at a youth night counted as one, the page doesn’t say.

Preaching Elsewhere

Pinkerton also turns up at two other churches. Truth Chapel in Loganville, Georgia, has two recordings credited to “Bro. Tommy Pinkerton,” Accessing the Presence of God and The Bible is Right and Someone is Wrong, the second cataloged August 22, 2022. And Cathedral of Life in North Ridgeville, Ohio advertised “A Weekend of Awakening” with Pastor Tommy Pinkerton for October 19 and 20, 2024, with three services.

That Ohio weekend lands in the same month New Chapel says it learned of the Maryland investigation and removed him. Court documents put the official start of that investigation in late October 2024, which means the Ohio services were advertised for the days just before police opened the case. Which came first in Michigan is exactly the kind of question the Maryland records will help answer.

Where He Was: A Map for Families

This section is for parents, grandparents, youth workers, and anyone who was a kid in one of these rooms. Court filings, news reports, and church archives put Pinkerton in at least four states over roughly two decades. If your child, or you, were around him in any of these places, this is a reason to have a calm, open conversation. It is not a reason to assume anything happened. No Michigan charges and no Michigan victims have been reported.

The Crux: What New Chapel Knew, and When

Strip away the counts, the motions, and the threats, and this case comes down to one question: what did New Chapel know, and when did it know it?

The church’s whole position rests on timing. It says it learned of the Maryland investigation and removed Pinkerton in October 2024, stayed quiet on police advice, and told its congregation on March 23, 2025. If that sequence holds, the church has a real argument that the cover-up accusation is unfair. If it does not, the defamation claim at the center of the lawsuit has a problem, because a statement that is substantially true is not defamation.

One outside date now anchors the timeline. According to court documents reported by WMAR-2, the official investigation began in late October 2024, when a man in West Virginia called police. New Chapel says its pastor reached Baltimore County police that same month. If both are right, the church’s call came within days of the case opening. How the church learned there was something to call about, and from whom, is the question my records request is built to answer.

Right now, the other key dates in the church’s version come from the church. Here is how they line up against everything else.

The Voicemail

One date in that table never made it into the church’s lawsuit. On March 17, 2025, the same day Bevelacqua reported one of Grunwell’s messages to police, a Kent County Sheriff’s Office deputy left her a voicemail at 3:01 p.m. Grunwell later posted the recording publicly. The deputy thanks her for returning an earlier call, then passes along a message from a man the deputy calls Justin, who appears to be connected to the church. New Chapel is looking into it, the deputy says, it does not have answers for anyone yet, and it is searching for information itself. In the deputy’s words: “This is new to them.” The deputy adds that the church has to be careful what it says, because someone could sue.

Set that next to the lawsuit. The church’s verified complaint says New Chapel learned of the Maryland investigation in October 2024, called Baltimore County police, and removed Pinkerton as a trustee that month. Five months later, the message carried on its behalf was that the matter was new and the church was still looking for answers. Six days after that call, it told its congregation.

“New” could mean the Maryland investigation, or it could mean Grunwell’s complaints. The church knows which, and Clutch Justice is asking it to say, along with who Justin is.

The call raises a question for the sheriff’s office, too. Whatever prompted it, the day ended with a deputy delivering the church’s message about Pinkerton to the person raising the alarm about him. Did anyone at the sheriff’s office write down her concern about a man under investigation for abusing children? Did anyone contact Baltimore County? Those answers will be in the sheriff’s office’s own reports and call logs, and Clutch Justice is requesting them. One more detail belongs in that request. New Chapel’s website says a Kent County Sheriff’s deputy is stationed in its children’s lobby during services. Clutch Justice is asking the sheriff’s office how that assignment works, and whether the deputy who called Grunwell had any role at the church.

The bottom row is the one that matters most, and nobody has produced it. If Bevelacqua called Baltimore County police in October 2024, that call happened on a specific day, and police departments document contact in an active investigation. The same goes for any instruction to keep things quiet. Those are not matters of opinion, memory, or competing affidavits. They are government documents.

I have filed a public records request with Maryland law enforcement for exactly that: when investigators first had contact with New Chapel, and what was communicated. When the response comes back, it will either line up with the church’s sworn version or it won’t. Either way, it will be very hard to argue with.

The Threats Are Real, Too

Grunwell is not a clean protagonist, and she has never claimed to be one. According to the lawsuit, she sent Bevelacqua messages in March 2025, including a threat to “hang you by a millstone,” a reference to the Gospel passage about those who harm children. The suit says she shared church staff members’ home addresses and demanded her tithes back under threat of exposure, which the church calls extortion. On her GoFundMe page, Grunwell acknowledges that she threatened the pastor and says she was ostracized and removed from the church after confronting him.

She was charged in the 63rd District Court with malicious use of technology and pleaded guilty. She is on probation. That case is closed.

Her explanation has stayed the same throughout. She told WZZM the whole thing could have been avoided if the church had simply released a statement saying it was looking into it. She describes herself as a housekeeper and single mother trying to protect her son. Her GoFundMe, opened May 7, 2026, had raised a few hundred dollars toward a $10,000 goal for a civil attorney.

Both things can be true at once. A person can make threats she should not have made, answer for them in criminal court, and also have been right that families deserved to know. The lawsuit asks a civil court to treat her speech about Pinkerton and her threats against the pastor as one campaign. The law treats them very differently.

The Law Was One Month Old

For decades, Michigan was one of the few states with no anti-SLAPP law at all. That changed on December 23, 2025, when the governor signed House Bill 4045, Michigan’s version of the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. It took effect March 24, 2026, and applies to civil actions filed on or after that date. New Chapel filed on April 24.

The statute, codified at MCL 691.1851 through 691.1863, covers lawsuits based on speech, press, or association “on a matter of public concern.” A defendant has 60 days to file a special motion to dismiss. Filing it freezes the case, including discovery. If the court grants the motion, it must award the defendant attorney fees and costs. A plaintiff who drops the case after the motion is filed still pays. A denial can be appealed immediately.

That split is where this case will turn. A TV station reporting that a man charged with child sexual abuse held a title at a local church is close to the center of what “public concern” means. Threats against a pastor and sharing staff home addresses are not protected speech, and the anti-SLAPP law was never meant to shield them. A court applying the statute has to sort each count into one bucket or the other. The table follows The Roys Report’s description of the original complaint; the July 10 amended complaint may have changed the counts.

Grunwell paired her anti-SLAPP motion with a motion for partial summary disposition under MCR 2.116(C)(7), (8), and (10), the court rule grounds for claims barred by law (statutes of limitations included), claims that fail to state a legal claim, and claims with no genuine factual dispute. “Partial” fits the split in the table: some counts are about what she said, and some are about what she did.

The calendar matters too. Michigan gives defamation plaintiffs one year to sue, under MCL 600.5805. Statements made before April 24, 2025, including the March 2025 messages, fall outside that window for defamation, and Michigan courts apply the same limit to tortious interference claims when the real complaint is defamation. WZZM’s August 2025 broadcast falls inside the year.

The church is represented by attorney Jean M. Howard. WZZM is represented by Andrew M. Pauwels and Lauren E. Babbage. Grunwell is represented by Charissa Chaiyiang Huang. The church filed a supplemental affidavit from a James St. John in support of its push for discovery; its contents have not been made public.

The ARC Factor

New Chapel’s website footer says it is a proud part of the ARC. The Association of Related Churches, based in Birmingham, Alabama, is one of the largest church-planting networks in North America, and The Roys Report has spent years documenting scandals involving its pastors. That history does not tell anyone what happened at New Chapel. It does tell you how the network is built, and what happens when something goes wrong inside it.

ARC’s own description is blunt. It says the churches it plants are legally autonomous, independently led, and accountable only to their own leadership. It says it has no input on who serves as a church’s overseers. And it says ARC “has no authority to address any situation in a local church.” When a leadership failure happens, ARC says, the church’s overseers handle it with the pastor, the board, and legal counsel.

Those overseers are often out-of-town pastors from other ARC churches. At Thrive City Church in Syracuse, The Roys Report found none of the overseers attended the church, and described that as standard ARC practice. Thrive City’s overseers eventually fired its pastor after learning he had put two registered sex offenders in leadership, including over background checks, without telling them.

That is the role New Chapel’s own website gave Pinkerton. In the ARC model, overseers are the people a church turns to when something goes wrong with its leadership. One of the three people New Chapel named to that board was the man at the center of this story. The website does not show when he was added or whether he ever acted in the role, and the church has not said who replaced him.

Money is part of the structure too. Two ARC launch contracts obtained by The Roys Report, from 2013 and 2019, required new churches to pay ARC 10 percent of tithes and offerings until a startup loan was repaid, then 2 percent going forward. ARC has said the ongoing 2 percent became strictly voluntary in 2021. New Chapel’s 2023 giving report names ARC as a church-planting partner without saying how much the church sends.

The closest parallel inside the network is Micahn Carter, a former ARC megachurch pastor in Yakima, Washington, who resigned in 2019 and later entered Church of the Highlands’ ministerial restoration program. When his former assistant accused him of rape, Carter sued her for defamation, first in Alabama and then in Washington. On December 30, 2025, the Washington Court of Appeals ruled for her, found that Carter was a limited-purpose public figure as a pastor, and ordered him to pay her legal fees. Washington’s version of the same uniform anti-SLAPP law was part of that fight.

Two other ARC cases turn on the same question this one does: who knew what, and when. At Newsound Church in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, a former assistant sued in March 2021, alleging that pastor Joshua Mauney, who had served as ARC’s national director of church planting, sexually assaulted her 12 times between December 2019 and March 2020. Her complaint alleges ARC approved his role despite knowing about prior misconduct, and that he was paid $70,000 after he resigned. Newsound denied the abuse allegations and any ARC responsibility, though a letter from the church’s overseers said Mauney had an inappropriate relationship. ARC President Greg Surratt denied that ARC had either the authority or the prior knowledge the suit claimed. The complaint quoted ARC’s own constitution describing member churches’ self-governing privileges as existing “in harmony with the authority and vision of the Leadership of ARC.” Surratt told The Roys Report that was not true. How the case ended has not been publicly reported.

At Vibrant Church in Columbus, Mississippi, a former intern alleged that pastor Jason Delgado sent her sexually explicit messages and propositions in 2020, and that ARC co-founder Dino Rizzo, whom she identified as one of the church’s overseers, failed to act when told. Delgado resigned in April 2021 after apologizing for unspecified inappropriate behavior. ARC said Vibrant alone had authority over its personnel. A federal judge dismissed her sexual harassment claim in September 2022 on a technicality, ruling that an unpaid intern was not an “employee” under federal law, and noted her other claims could go to state court. No court ever ruled on what the overseers knew.

The pattern across these cases is structural. When something goes wrong, the network says it has no authority, the overseers are pastors from somewhere else, and the question of who knew what, and when, ends up in a courtroom, if it gets answered at all.

What Nobody Has Answered Yet

The most important court document in this story is one nobody has published: the complaint, now in its amended, verified form, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. Until its text is public, nobody can say exactly which statements New Chapel and its pastor claim are false, who said them, or what they want a judge to order. The difference matters. An injunction that keeps Grunwell away from church staff is one thing. An injunction that bars her from talking about Pinkerton or the church is a prior restraint on speech about a convicted child abuser, and Michigan courts treat those very differently.

The governance questions are just as concrete. Where is the October 2024 action removing Pinkerton? Who authorized suing a former member? Are church funds or insurance paying for it? Members who give through New Chapel’s Kingdom Legacy program have a reasonable interest in knowing whether litigation is in the budget.

Clutch Justice is requesting the amended complaint, the special motions and briefs, and Judge Rossi’s orders in Case No. 26-20617-NZ from the Kent County Circuit Court, along with the 63rd District Court file and the March 17, 2025 police report. A separate request to the Kent County Sheriff’s Office seeks its March 2025 reports, call logs, and any record of contact with New Chapel or Baltimore County. The Maryland public records request is already filed. Clutch Justice is also sending questions to New Chapel, its attorney, the Kent County Sheriff’s Office, WZZM, and ARC, and will publish their answers.

Why This One Matters

I have spent a lot of time on this site writing about what happens to people who raise concerns about powerful institutions, and what those institutions do next. This case lands right in the middle of that, with one twist: the person who raised the alarm also broke the law doing it, and answered for it.

I’ll be plain about where I stand. I’m in Torey’s corner. I know what it is like to be right about misconduct and be retaliated against for saying so, and I know how long it takes, and how much it costs, to keep standing up when an institution decides you are the problem. That is why every document in this piece is linked. Check my work.

That is exactly why the new anti-SLAPP statute matters, and why passing it is not enough. The law does not ask whether a speaker was polite. It asks whether the speech was about something the public has a right to talk about, and whether the person suing can actually prove a case. Child sexual abuse charges against a man a church credited with 19 sermons, called “Pastor,” and listed as an officer and director are public concern by any measure. Threats are not. A court can separate the two. Judge Rossi has had that question in front of him since September 11, and the statute says he has 60 days to answer it.

The church may have real grievances. It lost about a fifth of its members, by its own count, and its pastor says he was threatened. None of that changes the fact that Pinkerton, the man at the center of all of this, is a convicted child abuser who stood in that church’s pulpit again and again, and that the lawsuit the church filed was against the mother who blew the whistle and the station that put her on the air. Watch who gets dragged into court in these stories, and who doesn’t. And watch the date Maryland gives back. Clutch Justice will follow the docket and will publish the records when they arrive.