NEWS ANALYSIS–In November 2022, David Sills, a former professor of missions and cultural anthropology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville, Ken., and his wife Mary filed a defamation lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Mobile, Ala., against the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), its Executive Committee (EC), and several affiliated entities and individuals.
Documents related to that case, released recently to the public, have unleashed a torrent of activity on social media, a lot of it coming from Megan Basham. Basham has been defending Sills against charges of abuse, saying that Sills was guilty of marital infidelity, but not sexual abuse. This is not the first time Basham has defended men who have been accused of sexual misconduct. Her book “Shepherds for Sale” also defended former SBC President Johnny Hunt against similar charges.
Basham claims her defense of these men is simply a journalistic quest for truth, and that those who say otherwise have conflicts of interest or are less concerned for the truth than she is.
But before we get to that, a bit of background is in order.
Sills resigned from SBTS in 2018 after admitting to a “morally inappropriate consensual intimate” relationship with a former student, Jennifer Lyell. He alleges in his lawsuit that SBC leaders conspired with Lyell to portray him as an abuser. Sills maintains that the relationship was not abusive, even though the relationship began when he was a professor and mentor for the then 26-year-old Lyell. He claims to be a “scapegoat” in the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis.
Lyell, who rose through SBC ranks to become vice president of the denomination’s Lifeway Christian Resources, accused him in 2018 of coercive sexual and spiritual abuse, claiming he manipulated her into non-consensual acts during counseling sessions, often in his home while family members were nearby, and enforced silence through twisted biblical interpretations.
The suit expanded in May 2023 to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, naming additional defendants, including SBTS President Albert Mohler, former SBC presidents Bart Barber and Ed Litton, Lifeway, former Lifeway executive Eric Geiger, former EC Interim President Willie McLaurin, former EC Chairman Rolland Slade, Solutionpoint International (doing business as Guidepost Solutions), and Guidepost Solutions LLC.
Sills and his wife claim defamation, conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, and wantonness. They assert that defendants “made an example out of” Sills by mischaracterizing the affair as abuse, leading to his professional shunning and inability to work in Christian ministry. Sills now runs a real estate business in Jackson, Mississippi.
If the story was not tragic enough, it took a more tragic turn when Lyell died on June 7, 2025, at age 47 from strokes shortly before the SBC’s annual meeting in Dallas. At that meeting, messengers (annual meeting delegates) debated funding abuse-related legal fees — including over $13 million already spent by the Executive Committee, prompting a $3-million loan and headquarters sale. EC President Jeff Iorg expressed hope that such “high legal costs” would soon end.
In September, the Sillses voluntarily dismissed claims against Lyell’s estate. The suit continues against the remaining 12 defendants, who filed motions for summary judgment, arguing the plaintiffs lack evidence of tortious conduct. Several motions remain sealed, including those from Guidepost and Mohler/SBTS. This ongoing battle, one of three similar suits by accused SBC figures, underscores tensions over accountability in the denomination, with SBC special counsel Gene Besen vowing a vigorous defense against what he called an attempt to “recast Sills as a victim.” No trial date is set.
Enter the Conflict Entrepreneurs
Megan Basham, a writer for The Daily Wire, has extensively critiqued the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) for what she calls “woke” and “progressive” leadership. For her, the release of these documents has unleashed a feeding frenzy, albeit a selective one.
She has aligned herself with such conservative voices as Tom Ascol and William Wolfe. Basham, Wolfe, and Ascol have suggested (and in some cases asserted) that the sex abuse scandal in the SBC was an effort to purge conservative leaders such as Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler and their allies from the Convention.
These convictions have motivated her to come to the defense of Sills publicly. As the newly released discovery documents show, in one instance she advised Sill privately. She wrote on July 8, 2022, “I had a good conversation with Don Barrett [Sills’ attorney] and put him in touch with some contacts who may be able to help more. I very much hope he’s able to bring you and Mary [Sills’ wife] some justice.”
She argues, among other things, that if this was really a case of abuse, why did the relationship last for more than a decade? Lyell was an adult. Did she not have some agency in the matter?
Basham ignores or downplays the fact that there was a nearly 20-year age difference between Sills and Lyell, and that Sills was her professor and mentor during the first two years of the relationship. Basham instead highlights newly released emails from Lyell to Sills expressing longing — “I cannot go a month without seeing you,” “I miss you” — as evidence of consent. Basham questions why an “abused” woman would initiate contact or travel to meet him. Basham suggests there was no corroboration of Sills’ alleged abuse beyond Lyell’s word.
She further asserts that the Sills case was a manufactured “crisis” driven by political motives, ethical lapses, and conflicts of interest of Sills’ accusers. Basham’s posts, spanning 2022 to December 2025, portray the Guidepost Solutions report — commissioned for $2 million — as part of an ongoing effort to marginalize or purge the SBC’s historically conservative leadership in favor of what she describes as moderate or liberal leadership. She criticized reforms motivated by the sex abuse scandal as an exercise in “taking control of the convention. And they were happy to use lies to do it.”
Basham’s 2024 book “Shepherds for Sale” was an extended critique of SBC leadership. That book also defended another conservative SBC leader who was credibly accused of sexual abuse, Johnny Hunt. (I have written about that book here.) That book was criticized for, among other reasons, revealing the name of Hunt’s accuser.
Basham reserves some of her sharpest criticism for attorney and abuse advocate Rachael Denhollander, accusing her of egregious conflicts of interest. As SBC advisor and hotline volunteer, Denhollander edited the “independent” Guidepost report. Basham says that compromised the independence of the report. She cites ethics expert Amy McDougal’s assessment of “illegal malpractice” under Tennessee law. She says Denhollander is a beneficiary in Lyell’s will, which raises other ethical and conflict-of-interest concerns. Basham demands Denhollander’s disbarment, calling the Guidepost Report a “gripe session,” not an investigation.
Basham also lambasts SBC leaders (Russell Moore, Bart Barber, Ed Litton, J.D. Greear) and media (The Nashville Tennessean, The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle) for suppressing exculpatory evidence like emails, fueling a “moral panic” that harmed real victims.
The Irony Of It All
Over the past week or so, Basham has renewed her fight against the SBC by publishing, on social media, documents from the Sills lawsuit. However, her public exposure of these documents has been highly selective. She has so far failed to disclose emails that Basham herself wrote, though in a case of “live by the sword and die by the sword,” others have now done so.
One of those exhibits features an exchange between Basham, Sills, and Tom Ascol. The exhibit begins with an Ascol email to Sills, encouraging Sills to talk with Basham, assuring Sills that Basham is “the real deal.”
On May 30, 2022, Basham wrote to David Sills that she was skeptical of Lyell’s claim of abuse. “I wanted to assure you that my only aim here is to bring as much truth to this story as I can… [I’d] like to play a part in correcting the record.”
Basham then goes on to explain why she is so passionate about defending men like Sills and Hunt. She continues: “When I was in middle school, my dad was a lay leader of our church’s young adult (college and career) ministry. He had an affair with a woman in that group. She was in her mid-twenties. I have a half-sister from that relationship.”
She then connects the dots between her father’s situation and the journalism she is doing today. “This was in the early nineties,” she wrote to Sills. “So though my father was a leader in the church, it was (I believe rightly) characterized as a consensual adulterous relationship. But my dad and I have often talked in the last few years about how his sin might have been described if he had committed it today. We’ve talked about how he most certainly would be characterized as an abuser today and how that would have impacted my mom, my siblings and I.”
Basham concludes: “I believe that a movement that tells adult women they have been abused when they participate willingly in sexual sins is unbiblical. It keeps them in a state of unrepentance and creates incentives for dishonesty, even in one’s own mind. In short, I believe the ‘believe all women’ narrative of the MeToo movement is godless and the church undermines its power to cleanse souls and change lives by capitulating to it. Perhaps this is not Lyell’s story. Perhaps you’ll tell me you have decided that abuse was a factor. But I have strong doubts.”
Basham’s appeal to Sills partially worked. He responded with an email of his own, writing, “Your family’s situation sounds eerily familiar. I do not want to get into details or make this look like a self-defense campaign, nor do I want to hurt my accuser. I would be willing to talk on background, off-the-record, with the understanding that I won’t be linked to the story in any way and no one will know that I gave the information.”
Basham did end up publishing a lengthy story for The Daily Wire about two weeks after this exchange. You can read that story here. She has not only defended Sills, she has on X suggested that “there is not and never was a systemic abuse crisis [in] the SBC. It was a false narrative manufactured by subversive political operatives and their friends in big media.”
Doubts, especially for a reporter, which Basham claims to be, are not bad things. They can force us to ask tough questions that take us closer to the truth. That’s what Basham claims to be doing. However, another of the key points she makes is that virtually everyone involved in this situation is not honest in one way or another. Rachael Denhollander, Basham maintains, has a conflict of interest, as do Al Mohler, J.D. Greear, and Russell Moore. She has criticized former SBC President Bart Barber. She has also leveled claims of conflict or ethics breaches against journalists Bob Smietana, Robert Downen (who broke the SBC’s sex abuse scandal story for the Houston Chronicle), and Julie Roys.
(Full disclosure: She criticized Roys for publishing articles by Bob Smietana for Religion News Service, articles that MinistryWatch — as well as other religious and secular media outlets — also published.)
In short, to hear only Basham’s story, one might think she is the last truly honest and independent journalist left. However, that illusion is shattered by her own words. It’s an issue about which she seems to have little or no self-awareness.
Basham’s email from the Sills discovery documents also raises some interesting and important questions about how honest journalists go about their work. Basham claims to be in search of nothing but the truth, but it is clear that what reporting she does is done to confirm her own pre-determined conclusions. When I critiqued her book “Shepherds for Sale,” I reached out to more than a half-dozen people she criticized in the book. I asked them if Basham had interviewed them, or had even asked for an interview. The ones I spoke with said, “no.” Honest journalists “report against their biases.” They look for points of view different from their own, and they represent those views honestly, even if they disagree with them.
(For the record, I reached out repeatedly to Basham to ask for either an interview or, at a minimum, for her reaction to some of the facts, ideas, and opinions in this piece and others I have done. She responded once with a refusal, and she has ignored all other requests.)
The David Sills lawsuit against the SBC and related defendants is ongoing. The trove of discovery documents, from which Lyell’s and Basham’s emails came, have likely not revealed all its surprises. There’s one point about which I think Basham and I agree, and that is that this is an important case, and its outcome will be a defining chapter in the MeToo/ChurchToo movement.
I, for one, await its outcome expectantly, and I’m hoping that people on all sides of this important issue will be instructed by it.