The Cult and Crimes of Tony Alamo

His decades-old crime spree of sex and violence

Tony Alamo’s church is sometimes referred to as a cult, but many others would come to regard it as more of a criminal enterprise. In testimony against the televangelist given in 2009, it was revealed that he had forced multiple marriages between himself and his church members, some of them girls as young as eight years old.

It was only the tip of the iceberg for the man facing up to 175 years in prison for ten counts of transporting young girls across state lines for sex. During the trial, several of the jurors openly wept while the women testifying against him shared their dark secrets about being molested by and forced into sex by a much older pastor.

Some of the allegations weren’t new. Since the 1970s, the pastor had been accused by various individuals of crimes that included kidnapping, brainwashing, child abuse, tax evasion and even threatening a federal judge. Most people had long known what kind of person he truly was, but it took years for anything to be done about it.

Because of his status as a church, much of what he had been doing was overlooked, with authorities being reluctant to get involved in church business for fear of violating someone’s constitutional rights to worship as they see fit, but there are surely…