Note: This is the third article in a multipart series. Read Part 1 and Part 2, which detail how Anne Edward came to the Lord, found freedom from same-sex attraction, and married John Paulk. While red flags dotted their dating period and evidence of Paulk’s enslavement to homosexual desires surfaced early on in their marriage, the couple began rising to prominence within the movement of ministries seeking to help people facing same-sex attraction.

As John Paulk started his new role overseeing the ex-gay ministry at Focus on the Family, Anne cared for their blossoming young family, which eventually grew to include three boys. During this time she also spoke at conferences and spoke with media.

Shortly after the family moved to Colorado Springs for Paulk’s new job in 1998, a full-page ad in The New York Times showed Edward’s face, larger than life, with the words, “Anne Paulk — wife, mother, former lesbian.” 

As a result, within a month, Edward had done 400 interviews telling her story of life transformation — all while caring for her first child at home. “I was doing this for Jesus,” she says now.

Paulk also spoke with the media often for his job as the head of homosexuality and gender issues detail in Focus’s Government and Public Policy Department during that period. He started the Love Won Out conferences, which focused on helping people with same-sex attraction and their families to understand that change is possible. Between 1998 and 2003, Paulk traveled the nation speaking at Love Won Out conferences about his own journey away from homosexuality, sometimes with Edward joining him as a fellow speaker.

But there was another reality underneath Paulk’s rhetoric.

“His experience was not matching up with his words,” Edward says.

Scandal Rocks the Marriage

After a conference near the District of Columbia in September 2000, Paulk visited a well-known gay bar in the very gay DuPont Circle area of the capital: Mr. P’s. After all the publicity he’d garnered — through Newsweek, Oprah, and his own book — another customer recognized him.

Unfortunately for Paulk, that man was an employee of the Human Rights Campaign — one of the leading gay-rights organizations in the country and a sworn enemy of the work Paulk was doing. The man contacted his colleague Wayne Besen, Human Rights Campaign’s associate director of communications and a former investigative journalist. Besen arrived minutes later with a camera in hand.

The news would soon go viral.

The next day, Paulk called Edward as she was driving their infant and three-year-old sons to McDonalds. There, her oldest could play in the ball pit as Edward met with a woman who needed support in her struggle with homosexuality. Paulk told Edward he had been photographed in a gay bar, and gave a partial report of what had happened. He cried.

“Just come home and we’ll figure it out,” Edward told him.

“I knew it was very serious,” she recalls now. “My life was devastated, and [still] I was going to go meet with this gal.”

Edward set aside her grief long enough to give the woman some hope — sharing her own experience of freedom from homosexuality. Then she went home and cried and waited for her husband to arrive, wondering what exactly Paulk had done.

“My focus at that point was really on, ‘How do I provide him the best opportunity to turn his life over to God authentically and really look after his needs?'” she says. “I wasn’t thinking about my needs, but it hurt.”

Journalists soon found and besieged the Paulk home. The couple packed up and flew to another state to stay with relatives as they sorted through what was going on.

Paulk publicly claimed he did not know that Mr. P’s was a gay bar and he had only gone inside to use the restroom — but that didn’t seem plausible, given that he was there more than half an hour, and (according to newspaper accounts published at the time) had been buying drinks for other men there. Paulk later added that he hadn’t gone there for a sexual encounter and that he loved his wife.

Paulk’s Employer Responds with Grace

Focus on the Family didn’t fire Paulk. Instead, Dr. James Dobson, the ministry’s founder, had the couple on his daily half-hour radio program, which reached two million people at that time. Dobson said that Paulk should be forgiven even though he had “hurt the cause of Christ.”

“Dr. Dobson was so gracious,” Edward recalls.

Focus on the Family paid for Paulk to get counseling. “They invested in him,” Edward says. “We were all fighting for John. But was he fighting for himself?”

People noted to Edward that she must have been hurting. “I was, but I was more focused on John succeeding in his walk with Jesus than on myself,” she says. “Everybody rallied around John.”

After the radio show with Dobson, Paulk received thousands of letters of support through Focus on the Family’s correspondence department, encouraging him to walk with Jesus.

“He was very proud of that, actually, that all these people had written to him,” Edward says. “Dr. Dobson didn’t want to fire John. He wanted John to recover and succeed.”

For the rest of his employment at Focus on the Family, the ministry required Paulk to take any interview request about the Mr. P’s incident, and to answer questions without holding back. 

“It was very humbling for him, very difficult,” Edward says of that time. “He was paid to go to counseling. He was provided with good counselors. He had anxiety. He had depression. He was being supported in all sorts of ways. On the other hand, he had to answer for his mistakes, which I think is a very mature thing to be asked of him.

“After two years of doing those interviews, he was desperate to change what he was doing for a living.”

Paulk also wanted to be closer to family. In May 2003, the Paulk family moved back to Oregon. 

Leadership Changes at Exodus International

At the time of the scandal, Paulk also was serving as chairman of Exodus International, the group from which both he and Edward had graduated years earlier. His fellow board members, as well as the leaders of member organizations, wanted to know why he’d gone to Mr. P’s — to understand the situation and how he would prevent a similar failure in the future.

Paulk wanted Edward at his side during those meetings as he endured their anger — and she went. She now regrets that she softened the blow of the natural consequences of his behavior.

Paulk’s six-year term as board chairman was soon over, and he was not reelected to the position. 

In 2002, Alan Chambers, a board member and ex-gay man himself, became president of Exodus International. Edward, now in Oregon, was voted onto the board a few days later.

Before joining it, she was asked to interview Chambers and other candidates for the president’s job. She remembers him as being young — about 30 — and “immature.” Shortly after he was hired, Edward saw some inconsistencies in his words and behavior that struck her as red flags — but when she brought them up to the other members of the hiring committee, her concerns fell on deaf ears.

Look for Part 4 of this series, coming out later this week.

 

Aliya Kuykendall is a staff writer and proofreader for The Stream. You can follow her on X @AliyaKuykendall and follow The Stream @Streamdotorg.