He asked the women about their professional aspirations and got them to talk about their personal background—including past relations, traumas, and abuse. The three women who spoke to CT each said that Zacharias gained their trust, and then the sexual harassment started.
“He would touch my leg, which was kind of by his hand, but then he would run his hand up to the middle of my thighs and then to the private area,” one woman said.
Another woman recalled Zacharias touching her lower back. It seemed friendly, almost comforting. Then he moved his hand down and inside of her pants. Several other times, he moved his hand up her side and touched her breast.
The women said they pulled away and pretended nothing had happened. Each worried they had done something wrong—maybe there was a misunderstanding or maybe they had done something to cause the famous Christian leader to “stumble into sin.” They hoped that their body language would communicate that the sexual advances were unwelcome.
“I felt ashamed. I felt embarrassed,” one said. “You have this world-renowned evangelist who is being inappropriate, and I had no idea what to do. He wasn’t just the head of the company. He wasn’t just a CEO. He was a Christian leader.”
When the women didn’t say anything, the sexual harassment escalated. The three separately allege Zacharias began pulling off the covering sheet during treatments and exposing himself. One woman said Zacharias showed her his erection at least 15 times in a few months.
“In school they taught us proper draping,” she said. “There’s a way you pull the sheet up so you can get to certain areas like the lower back. You wrap the sheet around almost like it’s a baby diaper. Nobody’s easily exposed. It was made to look like an accident. But it was on purpose.”
One woman said Zacharias was completely silent when he exposed himself. Another said he made “inappropriate noises.”
The third woman said that after Zacharias exposed himself several times, he asked her to massage his groin area and moved her hand there. It is possible that his back injury caused pain in that area, she said, so she complied with his request even though it made her uncomfortable.
By that point, they had talked for hours in the private massage rooms, the woman said. He had asked about her life, and she had told him everything from her career aspirations and her struggles as a single mother to her childhood relationship with Jesus and how she had been sexually abused.
The woman felt that Zacharias was ministering to her and “there was a holiness around him.” She thought she was, in turn, helping him and felt compelled to go along to an extent.
Then Zacharias tried to move her hand to his penis, the woman told CT. She refused and turned away as he masturbated. The next time she gave him a massage he exposed himself again and masturbated again. By her account, this happened more than 50 times over the next three years.
“He would say, ‘I need it. I need it. I need it,’” the woman recalled. “He would say he needed it so much and it was good therapy.”
