I never thought I would be defending Pastor Greg Laurie but some of you are getting completely out of hand and somebody needs to say something.

Let me start with the basic facts that a lot of people spreading this story have either not read or are choosing to ignore.

Greg Laurie was not charged with 22 counts of crimes related to sex trafficking of minors in Romania. The person charged is former Pastor Paul Havsgaard. He is the one facing those allegations. Greg Laurie has not been named as a participant in anything that allegedly happened in Romania. The only thing connecting him to this situation is that he had organizational oversight and allegedly failed to notice what was happening. That is a significant distinction that people are deliberately collapsing into something it is not.

Greg Laurie has barely been in Romania. When Paul Havsgaard stepped down in 1998 he went to Romania and started Harvest Homes orphanage — which is the subject of these allegations. Greg Laurie’s involvement with that mission was to write checks to keep it funded. He still pastors his church in California. That is the actual picture.

Here is the other thing people keep glossing over. These are civil lawsuits. Not criminal charges. If the plaintiffs win their case nobody goes to jail. They receive a financial settlement. I am not dismissing the seriousness of the underlying allegations if they are true. But I am pointing out that the path chosen here is telling.

If they had a criminal case they would have filed criminally first. That is how this works. Criminal conviction comes first and then you file civil charges to collect damages. The fact that they went civil from the start tells me that the evidence does not meet the threshold required for criminal charges. To charge someone with trafficking under RICO you need a specific and substantial evidentiary standard. They apparently cannot meet it. So they file civil and chase the settlement.

I call that a money grab. You can disagree but look at the sequencing and tell me what conclusion you reach.

Now let me tell you what I actually think is happening here.

Greg Laurie is a close friend of Donald Trump. Trump loves him. He loves Trump. That friendship is public and documented. And if you have been paying attention to how the opposition operates you already know what that friendship costs.

Look at the pattern. Charlie — I believe he is alive and in witness protection, not dead. Erika. Now Stephen A. Smith who has simply started speaking favorably about Trump and is experiencing the exact backlash that always arrives when someone with real influence starts moving in the wrong direction from the establishment’s perspective. The targets are always people with reach who are either aligned with Trump or moving toward alignment with him.

Greg Laurie fits the profile.

One more thing worth noting. The law firm filing this case is McAllister Olivarius. They are openly feminist in their stated organizational values. They post publicly that they are one of the only feminist-managed law firms in the country with a female staff of over 75 percent. Look at their case history and you will find a consistent ideological throughline in what they choose to pursue and what they do not.

I am not saying every case they have ever taken was frivolous. Some of them were probably legitimate. But I am saying that a law firm with a publicly stated ideological agenda pursuing a conservative Christian pastor who is close to the President of the United States — in a civil case with no criminal charges — is not something you accept at face value without asking some questions about who is behind it and why now.

The people running around repeating these allegations without reading the actual filing or asking basic questions about the legal strategy do not have spiritual eyes for what is happening. They are being used. Not because Greg Laurie is beyond scrutiny. Because the people leveling these charges are counting on the scrutiny stopping at the headline.

Read past the headline.

Stephon Rudd