AILSA CHANG, HOST:
A prominent whistleblower within the Southern Baptist Convention who brought national attention to sexual abuse in the church has died. NPR religion correspondent Jason DeRose reports that Jennifer Lyell suffered from a series of strokes and died at just 47 years old.
JASON DEROSE, BYLINE: In 2019, Jennifer Lyell said publicly that she'd been sexually abused and assaulted by a professor while studying at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. At the time of her disclosure, she was a senior executive within the Southern Baptist publishing company.
KAREN SWALLOW PRIOR: Jennifer Lyell was just a young, bright, shining star in the SBC.
DEROSE: Karen Swallow Prior is a scholar and writer who worked with Lyell.
PRIOR: I credit Jennifer Lyell with making many of us in the SBC see and face for the first time what had been there in front of us all the time - too much toleration of misogyny and even abuse, and cover-up of abuse.
DEROSE: But Lyell's disclosure of the assault led to a strong backlash within the Southern Baptist Convention. She was bullied online and denounced from pulpits. Still, her friend and lawyer, Rachael Denhollander, says she loved the church and worked for its success.
RACHAEL DENHOLLANDER: It was the place that signified family, where she had come from a very difficult childhood and background, which her alleged abuser was aware of and manipulated and used when he was abusing her and assaulting her.
DEROSE: For a time, Lyell's coming forward did seem to make a difference. The SBC did an internal investigation and voted to create a database of abusers. However, those reforms have stalled. The denomination cites, among other things, insurance reasons, although those are disputed by lawyers, including Denhollander and others who helped draft the framework for abuse protections. Despite the lack of progress, Denhollander doesn't want her friend's legacy to be entirely about sexual assault and misconduct within the church.
DENHOLLANDER: She was brilliant, and yet she was also intensely personal, so deeply compassionate, cared so much about the people around her - the person who could do the highest level of math and would sit down in the backyard and color with my 3-year-old with chalk.
DEROSE: A friend, says Denhollander, who died too young and had so much more to offer the church and the world.
Jason DeRose, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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