Part One: The Throat-Slitting Evangelical Minister of Jamaica

Robert tells the story of Kevin Ontoniel Smith, a Jamaican-Canadian minister who created an apocalyptic Christian sect and slit his follower's throats in a COVID related panic. Sources; “Is Your Blood Clean?”: The Paranoid Pastor Who Turned His Church into a Violent Cult | The Walrus https://thewalrus.ca/is-your-blood-clean-the-paranoid-pastor-who-turned-his-church-into-a-violent-cult/ Ontario college mum on cult pastor's PhD - Jamaica Observer https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/2021/10/27/ontario-college-mum-on-cult-pastors-phd/ The power of religion to abuse, distort and control the realities of susceptible persons | Toronto Caribbean Newspaper https://torontocaribbean.com/the-power-of-religion-to-abuse-distort-and-control-the-realities-of-susceptible-persons/ Preacher Kevin O. Smith, parishioners arrested for alleged human sacrifices https://nypost.com/2021/10/23/preacher-kevin-o-smith-parishioners-arrested-for-alleged-human-sacrifices/ ‘It was like prison’ | Lead Stories | Jamaica Gleaner https://web5.jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20211019/it-was-prison#slideshow-1 Naive Christians slammed for missing Kevin Smith red flags | News | Jamaica Gleaner https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/news/20220107/naive-christians-slammed-missing-kevin-smith-red-flags Kevin Smith’s money trail | Lead Stories | Jamaica Gleaner https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20211107/kevin-smiths-money-trail ‘He left a trail of pain and debt’ | Lead Stories | Jamaica Gleaner https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20211031/he-left-trail-pain-and-debt ‘Kevin Smith will return’ | Lead Stories | Jamaica Gleaner https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20221113/kevin-smith-will-return Kevin O. Smith’s social media footprint | Lead Stories | Jamaica Gleaner https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20211020/kevin-o-smiths-social-media-footprint Kevin Smith had great prophetic powers, says Henley Morgan | Lead Stories | Jamaica Gleaner https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20211031/kevin-smith-had-great-prophetic-powers-says-henley-morgan I’m a scholar of the “prosperity gospel.” It took cancer to show me I was in its grip. | Vox https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/3/12/17109306/prosperity-gospel-good-evil-cancer-fate-theology-theodicy Book Review: Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, by Kate Bowler - 9Marks https://www.9marks.org/review/blessed-history-american-prosperity-gospel/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about bad people who are the people you'll be hearing about most in your daily life if you spend any amount of time on social media or listening to the news. But we're gonna be talking about a fun one today, not not as depressing as the bad people who make up the rest of your day to day life. I don't know, they make up my day to day life, and that's pretty depressing, but not today because we've got Molly Lambert as a guest. Molly, welcome on the show. Are you ready to have your day be worse?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:39Robert Evans?

  Oh, great. I transitioned to the tall boys of Zevia.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  You have. That's some, for some reason, that's very funny to me.

• 0:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. 12 ounces just wasn't enough. Molly, what do you got to plug today at the start of the episode before we introduce our bastard?

• 0:55Speaker 01

  I've got a book that came out called Double Axe and Pop.

• 0:59Robert Evans?

  Holy shit.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Congratulations.

• 1:01Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's out from commercial type. It's about musical duo acts, and everybody check it out. And then later this year, I have a podcast coming out called Jenna World, which is about the history of the porn industry through kind of the Jenna Jameson story.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Oh, awesome.

• 1:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that sounds fascinating. Well, today, we're not talking about Jenna Jameson. We're not talking about anyone who has ever done anything good at all. We are talking about Kevin Smith, not that Kevin Smith, not the one who directed Dogma.

• 1:36Robert Evans?

  Although it is, I don't know, we'll title this The Other Kevin Smith or some shit. We're talking, this guy is a Jamaican pastor who led a charismatic Christian end time sect in Jamaica and lost his mind as a result of COVID lockdowns and wound up trying to have slit dozens of people's throats in moss during a church service.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Sensational.

• 1:55Robert Evans?

  This is a wild story, and the fact that he has just named Kevin Smith the whole time is going to be frustrating. I'm gonna, I'll cop to that right now. If you want to imagine Silent Bob committing the heinous atrocities we're about to discuss, that's your business, although you should probably also talk to a therapist if you feel compelled to do that.

• 2:17Robert Evans?

  Molly, you ever heard of this guy? I'm gonna guess not. I had not until I started doing this digging.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  No, I've never heard of him.

• 2:24Robert Evans?

  Uh huh. Well, welcome to a real fascinating piece of shit, who is also kind of a Canadian bastard, too. So we've got that going for us, like Canadian, Jamaican, real monster solidarity here in this week's episodes. And we'll have all that and more when we come back from the cold open.

• 2:45Speaker 03

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• 2:49Robert Evans?

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• 3:20Speaker 04

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• 3:51Robert Evans?

  We're back. Molly, you ready to get into it?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 3:56Robert Evans?

  Okay, so our bastard for this week's full name was Kevin Ontoniel Smith, O-N-T-O-N-I-E-L, right? That's his, that's his name. We could call him Kevin O'Smith to differentiate him from, again, Silent Bob, but I don't know how necessary that is. He was born in 1982, probably. Although, again, this guy is like a cult leader. You never know with these fuckers. That's the first sign someone's a cult leader is like, the birth date's a real open question.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  So funny.

• 4:29Robert Evans?

  Probably, though. Uh, there's some sources that suggest he might be a little younger than this, born more in the late 80s. And I've just got no idea what day or month he, he came into the world. Um, I guess it doesn't matter all that much. He was definitely born in a town called Glengoff, G-L-N-G-O-F-F-E, in the parish of St. Catherine. Uh, and this is in Jamaica. It's one of the most prosperous parts of the island. It's second only to Kingston as an industrial center. And it's got good access to water and a really good growing climate. So he, he comes up in like a fairly, you know, Jamaica's an island with a lot of poverty, but he comes up in a fairly comfortable part of the island compared to some other parts. We have very little information about his early life, aside from the fact that he would later claim to have been physically abused by his father,

• 5:14Robert Evans?

  who died when he was very young. Um, so his mom's gonna raise him on her own for much of his adolescence, which, again, not a wildly uncommon cult leader backstory. Um, and this statistically, you know, just since the fact that she's a single mom might suggest that he came up in a degree of poverty. But there's not a lot of evidence either way, right? Like, in fact, it kind of seems the evidence suggests more that she managed to like, keep them fairly comfortable. I'm not sure what she did, but they don't seem to have been like, on the edge of poverty or whatever, right? Um, he claims to have been baptized at age nine, and it's unclear which denomination he was from, but some sort of Protestant sect, right? Just based on kind of the demographics of Jamaica and based on his later religious life.

• 5:58Robert Evans?

  It was some kind of evangelical Protestant sect that he's baptized into. We can be pretty, pretty sure of that. Years later, as part of a court case that we will talk about more in the future, Kevin would claim to have again been sexually abused as a child by a male relative. So both physically abused by his dad and sexually abused by a male relative. We don't know how old he would have been when this happened, but he's probably pre adolescent, somewhere around like 10 to 12. We know that he goes on to attend Jamaica College, which confusingly is not a college. This is a high school. I've read enough of the history to tell you, I can't give you a perfect idea of why they called it Jamaica College, other than that word hasn't always meant the same thing. Right? I think the school is initially established by like some, I believe it's a Catholic,

• 6:43Robert Evans?

  a member of the clergy who like leaves a bunch of money behind, but I forget exactly. But it's one of the best secondary schools in all of Jamaica. Right? So this is, and it's not just, I say it's primarily a secondary school. I think you can start going there when you're about 10 years old. Right? So it doesn't exactly map onto what we call a secondary school, but this is a really good school and it's a public school. Right? It's free to attend and it's kind of got like a degree of international fame. So being able to get into Jamaica College suggests that you're like a kid who's done really well in school or has connections or both. Now my sources somewhat disagree here, but it seems like he kind of, he doesn't finish his education at Jamaica College. He goes there, he probably starts when he's around 10 and he probably leaves when he's

• 7:28Robert Evans?

  around 14. The Toronto Caribbean newspaper claims that this is when his mother moves the family to Canada in 1996, but there's disagreement on when the family moves to Canada. The Walrus, which is an award winning Canadian magazine, says they moved when he was 12, which would have been probably around 94, although again, we don't know his birth date, really. So it's unclear how much time he spent at Jamaica College, but a report on his social media history by the Jamaica Gleaner shows a photo of him wearing the school uniform. So we know that he went there at some point. Right? So sometime between two and four years at this fairly prestigious academy and then the family emigrates to Canada. And the fact that they were able to do so legally, again, suggests kind of a degree of financial comfort, because that's just not like a super cheap or easy thing.

• 8:13Robert Evans?

  Right? And it probably also suggests that like, there's a lot of family support. That's usually the case when people are able to make this move from Jamaica to Canada, that like members of their family kind of pool to help make this possible. Right? Whatever the case, he graduates high school in Canada and it's here that he starts preaching for the first time, right? And this is, this is where we start getting like the foreboding music, you know, this, this kid is like one of these teenage preachers, like he gets into being an evangelical pastor at a very early age, which is almost never a good thing, right? Whenever someone's described as a gifted child preacher, which I found references to in the Toronto Caribbean newspaper, it's like a bad thing, right? Like that almost, I've never heard of that ending well.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Hey, what if he's just got the touch? Come on.

• 8:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's got the touch, he's got the power. If you watch, I always recommend the documentary Marjo when we talk about this, which is about a kid who was like used by his parents as a preacher from like age five or six on. It's a really fucked up documentary, won an Oscar, but there's a lot of this in the kind of apostolic community and the, the Pentecostal community, right? That like this attitude that, well, because you're sort of touched by God to become a preacher, the younger you can bring someone in and get them preaching. Number one, it helps establish their career. If you can be like, I've been doing this since I was 16 or 17 or even younger, right? But it also, it's kind of like a, it's

• 9:41Robert Evans?

  a, it's a marketing tool, right? That you've got, we've got a child preacher, you know, God's speaking to this little young man and you know, you need to hear what he's got to say. That's kind of a big deal in the community. We're not entirely certain where he comes up within sort of the evangelical community in Toronto. I've heard references to the apostolic community in the Toronto Caribbean, although the walrus claims he joins the Exodus Deliverance Temple in Mississauga at age 17. And these are slightly in conflict, although he could have done both because that's just sort of the way this community works. If that's the case, the, the Exodus Deliverance Temple is founded in 1999, which

• 10:24Robert Evans?

  meant he would have joined the year it was founded. And I kind of doubt that this is the case, just because I looked at their website and they say that when the church was founded, it was founded with only a few family members. In a quaint and old white village hall. And he's not a member of the family that founded this church. So I think it's more likely that he he comes out of the apostolic community in Toronto. But the walrus may have done, you know, have access to information I don't. I I don't know if I'm getting into the weeds too much on this sort of thing. But if you get started in the apostolic faith church in Toronto, that is kind of a separate thing. And the apostolic faith movement is a strict fundamentalist Pentecostal sect that originates actually in Los Angeles, right? It gets its start kind of in Hollywood.

• 11:09Robert Evans?

  It at the end of the like, right at the start of the 1900s into the 1800s, start of the 1900s. And this is, there's like a wave of different evangelical Christian revivals that sweep. And they often do start in the West Coast for all of its sort of reputation as like a progressive haven. This is a thing that occurs at the start of the 1900s. It occurs like in the mid century. It occurs after the hippie movement, right? Like it's it's this constant place where you get these sort of ecstatic evangelical movements that like rise up and they often will kind of sweep north and then east from Los Angeles.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Okay, but Robert, have you ever considered getting into it?

• 11:49Robert Evans?

  I mean, I kind of was as a kid, right? A little bit, I guess, like I was sort of, I came out of the the sect of the, what you call it? The the fake Catholics.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  The sect of the what you call it?

• 12:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, what the fuck are we, what do we call it? So every everyone's shouting, who knows what I mean by fake Catholics? They're now the part of the the African Anglican church. But we started out as this like, kind of sect that was sort of like Catholicism light. And then my church left because they made a gay guy in California, a minister. And that was or a bishop, and that was not cool with a lot of people.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  I thought you were just like, they made a gay guy and so they had to stop.

• 12:28Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no, they they let a gay guy be a bishop. And that was a real problem for the guy who ran my church. So we had like news cameras and shit at our at our our church in Plano. It was a whole deal. But this is a little bit of like a different thing. It's called the Azusa Street Revival. Uh, that gives a start to the Apostolic Faith movement that is going to wind up probably being the church that Kevin Smith, the other one, gets involved in. Um, it was started by a lady called Florence Crawford, um, and it's part of this wave of evangelical revivals that sweeps LA from 1906 to 1915. And it's characterized like all Pentecostal revivals by these acts of like apparent mass mania. So you'll get these groups of people who attend a preaching session and they'll start

• 13:13Robert Evans?

  babbling in tongues together and like having what looked like seizures where they're like twitching around on the ground and shouting in fake languages. And this kind of mania that spreads contagiously is a big part of, of the movement, right? And so a mission comes out of this, uh, on Azusa Street, which is why it's called the Azusa Street Revival. And they start a newspaper called the Apostolic Faith that begins circulating. And this lady Crawford, Florence Crawford is a part of it. And the guy who'd kind of founded the movement was named William Seymour and he makes Crawford like the director of state level efforts to bring more churches into the fold. And they wind up having a power struggle, right? Because Crawford is kind of looking to steer the ministry in her own direction.

• 13:56Robert Evans?

  And this leads to like a civil war within the, within the movement and she winds up splitting and forming the Apostolic Faith Church in none other than Portland, Oregon. Uh, classic story. If you get kicked out of LA, move, move up to Portland. You know, many such cases, including several people on this podcast.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  I don't know what you're talking about.

• 14:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We get run out of town. You come up here to start your cult, of course.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Who, who, who, whom's among us?

• 14:23Robert Evans?

  Whom's among us?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. When your cult's too crazy for LA.

• 14:27Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Time to go to Portland.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Time to go to Portland.

• 14:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's beautiful in its own way. So shit spreads from there. Uh, once you're in Portland, you're not all that far from Canada and pretty soon the AFC is affiliated with like, I mean, I've been, there's like 2,400 affiliated churches around the world today, but they move up to Canada pretty quickly and they wind up setting up shop in Toronto in like 1943, which is when a, a Canadian named Stanley Hancock founds an Apostolic Faith newsletter in the city. Here's how the organization he established, which Kevin is probably winds up joining, describes its founding. "After reading an Apostolic Faith paper, Stanley Hancock received his baptism and was banned from church. In 1943, he and others started the first Apostolic Faith Church in Canada. Now there are 11."

• 15:15Robert Evans?

  And the apostolic faith church, it falls under this wider umbrella of charismatic Christianity, right? Which is a chunk of Protestantism who believes in brief, number one, the Holy Spirit can and does directly enter people to change them and thus change the world. And number two, through this method, by sending the Holy Spirit into people, God bestows gifts upon them like prophecy and healing. You can like spontaneously heal your injuries by sending the Holy Spirit into you. And number three, and this is the most important part of charismatic Christianity, it's a lot of fun to writhe around on the ground and pretend to speak in a fake language. People love it.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I bet.

• 15:56Robert Evans?

  You could just take acid, you know, at a Cytrance festival or whatever to get the same experience, but they didn't have Cytrance back then. We just didn't have the technology. Nor did they have acid, really. Um, I don't know if my Cytrance jokes are gonna land with anyone less than 37 years old. Your kids are all probably listening to 100 Gex while you take your drugs now.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  No, man, Cytrance is back.

• 16:17Robert Evans?

  Oh, is it back? Did it come back? Thank God, Abitha was really suffering.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  They got Ergot. It'll be fine.

• 16:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, excellent. So Pentecostals are, again, part of this. And when I talk about the Pentecostal church, like, these guys are part of the charismatic movement, but there's divisions within charismatic Christianity based on like, do you believe speaking in tongues is a necessary precursor to being baptized? Do you have to prove the Holy Spirit has entered you, right, or not? So it's kind of like a whiskey bourbon sort of deal. Pentecostals are all, all part of the charismatic movement, but the charismatic movement isn't just Pentecostals, right? Um, now, one thing all these churches have in common is that they're always sort of scouting for young men with what the rest of us might call strong cult leader vibes,

• 17:03Robert Evans?

  you know? We didn't have TikTok or like streaming back then, so someone with those vibes couldn't just start a media career. Like, they had, they pretty much, like, getting, getting involved at a church or like, Dianetics was basically their best option, you know, in the mid-century.

• 17:22Robert Evans?

  And Kevin, though, comes up in this period, right before the internet's gonna really take off, and he gets scouted at around age 17 by this community. Um, on the brief autobiography for one of his now scrubbed social media accounts, he claims, "At the age of 17, he was sent to 33 countries within two years as a prophet to the nations." And this is probably true that like, once they figure out this kid's got the gift to gab, and you can kind of set him up in front of any church you want, and he'll keep them entertained and giving money, donating money for a couple of hours, you fly him all around, right? You put him up, he's like crashing in churches and whatnot around the world, but you fly him around and he's both building his own kind of platform, but he's

• 18:03Robert Evans?

  also raising money for the wider organization and for each of these individual churches. And this is a whole industry, right? This is like the charismatic pastor industrial complex, pretty much, right? Which is what like Marjo documents and why I recommend watching that documentary. So he's good at preaching to crowds and gathering followers. And it would have been a cinch for him to raise money for mission trips and even convince the leaders of his church to pay for him to go and preach the gospel. He claims that he was ordained at age 18 by an organization called the National Evangelists for Canada. And I can't find any evidence that this group exists. People lie about this all the time. But also, the reporting for this comes from a Jamaican news site, and it's based on

• 18:45Robert Evans?

  claims made by Kevin. And based on just the differences in dialect spoken, it's possible that this is a real organization. They just gave kind of a name based on sort of the differences in dialects that made sense to them, but that doesn't directly correspond with what the organization is called in Canada, right? Because there's some organizations with similar names. I'm not sure. I don't doubt that he was ordained in some Pentecostal organization or another. It's not like being a priest in the Catholic Church where you have to like go through school. Somebody just decides to ordain you and you're ordained, and you get maybe a piece of paper or whatever. It's very easy. It's like my experience with becoming a judge.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 19:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there you go. His denomination, again, there's no seminary degree required, no qualifications. The walrus notes that Kevin himself claims, and I'm talking about a news site when I say that, claims that Kevin says that ministers are qualified as ministers when they feel the call of God on their life. And that's pretty consistent in this community. For his part, Kevin would claim that he was around 18 or 19 when his grandfather first saw some of the early preaching he'd done, and during a phone call, informed Kevin that he was a prophet. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna play you a video of His Excellency, Dr. Kevin O. Smith, discussing this conversation with his grandfather, because it's about time you get an idea of how this guy sounds and talks.

• 20:08Speaker 05

  I'm talking about my eighty, ninety, talking to grandpa, and he said, but you are a prophet. I said, grandpa, how do you know I'm a prophet? Who told you? Ah, grandson. I said, grandpa, I'm not coming off the phone until you explain to me how you know I'm a prophet. He said, you're preaching. Your tapes, I have them. I listen to them. I know what a prophet is. And he said, you are an anointed man of God. My grandfather, my father, no God. He said, no, I have got sin. But God opens my understanding to know who come out of my generation. Your mother is to be a goddess, and you are born to be a prophet, and you shall go to her.

• 20:53Speaker 05

  He said, no level of witchcraft shall ever stop you.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  What a fun guy.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  All right, just making some points.

• 21:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, making some points. No level of witchcraft will stop you. This is something I tell our podcasters very regularly.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  He looks a little more like the other Kevin Smith than I expected.

• 21:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, finally a use for AI. Cut him into all the Jay and Silent Bob movies.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, he looks a little like Silent Bob, like I'm surprised.

• 21:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not very silent, though. Distinctly loud Bob.

• 21:28Robert Evans?

  Speaking of things that are distinctly loud.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  But like, sometimes that's super true because the volume of some of the auto ads are crazy loud for no reason. We have no control over it.

• 21:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, anyway, here's some ads.

• 21:47Speaker 04

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• 22:47Robert Evans?

  And we're back.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Back again.

• 22:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we're back again. Let's, let's keep talking about the other Kevin Smith. Legally, I have to really emphasize it's the other one.

• 23:00Robert Evans?

  Now, that write up in the Toronto Caribbean newspaper continues. He boasts of the fact that he was the youngest Jamaican born bishop in Jamaica's church history. Kevin completed a bachelor of theology degree, a doctorate degree from Vision International University in Ramona, California, and a doctor of ministry from Mount Olive Bible Institute and Seminary in Toronto, Canada. He was a licensed counselor and certified psychotherapist, and that all sounds very impressive. I can verify some of this, but the stuff I can verify doesn't matter. I have no idea if he was the youngest Jamaican born bishop in Jamaica's church history. Because again, this is not like the Catholic Church where like a bishop is a real position. You can just call yourself a bishop.

• 23:43Robert Evans?

  Or you can convince a friend to call you a bishop and then you're a bishop, right? Like it's not, it's not difficult.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  That is so true, Bishop Molly.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, come on Bishop Sophie.

• 23:55Robert Evans?

  Yes, Bishop Molly, Bishop Sophie. As, look, the Pope is a Robert. I think that means I get splash over Pope power. I'm making some fucking secret Cardinals.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Just a sprinkle of poping.

• 24:08Robert Evans?

  I watched, I watched fucking Conclave. I know that I have the power to make secret Cardinals that can just pop out at any time. You might be a Cardinal listening right now. You have no way of knowing until you like walk into a Catholic church and demand their secret hidden gold, which I assume every Catholic church has. Not an expert on the religion that I'm Pope of.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna find out where the gold is.

• 24:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, go find out. Get in there.

• 24:34Robert Evans?

  Now, these institutes that he claims to have fancy degrees from are like real, but also not, right? Because this is like, whenever you hear a cult leader be like, "I'm a doctorate in this, I'm a therapist in this," it's always some kind of fake. And there's a whole industry in creating fake churches for like evangelical ministers to claim that they've got fancy and impressive degrees. Reporters from Jamaica Observer called Vision University to see if Kevin had received a bachelor and a doctorate there and quote, "We were told that such information could only be provided in response to a written request and only students are allowed to make that request." Now, these guys had-

• 25:12Speaker 01

  So you enrolled?

• 25:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they can't even verify that, or they won't. But the news reaches out to these guys after he cuts a bunch of people's throats in a church service, right? So Vision International doesn't want to claim him? So I decided to just like, look into the school to see like, is this even a real school? Like, is there a chance anyone has ever earned a real degree from Vision International University? And at the risk of getting sued, I think the answer is no. If you go to their website, they brag that you can quote, "Earn an affordable Christian ministry or business degree on your time," and their motto is, "Taking the whole world to the whole world." Now, I'll have Sophie scroll through the website while we discuss this fine institution in more detail, so you could get a look at,

• 25:57Robert Evans?

  yeah, save time and money on your college degree. That always is the first sign of a real college. Yeah, they've got like, a lot of good stock photos. There's like, a young black lady punching this guy defiantly with her diploma, and the claim that Vision International holds prestigious international accreditation from ASIC, right? Now, you're wondering what that is, right? Prestigious, international accreditation? That must mean it's a real school, right? It says it's prestigious, so that's gotta be legitimately accredited, right? Well, I looked into it, because I thought that was odd. People who are accredited from legitimate organizations never have to tell you that the accrediting organization is legitimate? That's the first sign that someone's not part of a legitimate accrediting

• 26:41Robert Evans?

  organization? Harvard doesn't brag-

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Look, as a graduate of Podcast University-

• 26:45Robert Evans?

  Right, PCU.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  I don't know what you're talking about.

• 26:47Robert Evans?

  Ah, great movie.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, PCU.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  I really, I really enjoy this stock photo of this guy.

• 26:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the guy holding two degrees or two respected degrees in just two years.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  And it looks like he's like floating on a cloud.

• 27:02Robert Evans?

  If you go to like Harvard's website, Harvard, number one, will not give you two degrees in two years, but doesn't have to tell you the degrees respected because it's a real school. And even like you're, you go to U T D, right? Where I briefly went before dropping out, they never had to brag on their website that they were accredited from a real organization because you just know it's a real school. So I Googled Vision International University fake. And the second search result was the Wikipedia page for list of unaccredited institutions of higher learning, which seemed odd because they, they insured us that they were accredited by someone real. Um, now the first result, when I looked into that was someone on the forum for degreeinfo.com back in 2002, asking, is this a good school or a fraud? And someone

• 27:47Robert Evans?

  pointed out that like, well, they offer a master's in creation science, which means they fall under a religious exemption in California, which is not accreditation, right? It means California can't stop them from giving out religious degrees, but they're not approved by the state as like a real college. You just can't stop someone from giving out degrees with titles like master of theology or doctor of ministry, but they're not allowed to give out secular degrees like an M S, a master of science, and they claim to, right? And, and one reason I'm interested in this is because there's an attempt within sort of this chunk of the evangelical movement. One reason this is interesting is that there's an attempt within this chunk of the evangelical movement to create people who can get jobs as science teachers, right? Because they have M S degrees

• 28:30Robert Evans?

  and then teach in Christian secondary schools about stuff like creationism, right? So that's what Vision International is doing, but they're not accredited to give out an M S in the state of California. So then I looked into that ASIC accreditation, right? Which is why they're, how they claim to be a legitimate university. A S I C, ASIC stands for the Accreditation Service for International Colleges. And this is a real organization. It's a private educational agency in the United Kingdom, um, that is literally based out of a semi-detached duplex residential property and stocked it on tees, which doubles as the residential address for its creators. So. Great, very legitimate organization, run out of the home of the people who run it,

• 29:14Robert Evans?

  just like this podcast. And its whole, ASIC's whole business is accrediting private UK colleges for visa purposes. And they are recognized by the UK government in this capacity. But they've been repeatedly criticized for being what's called a runaround accreditor. And another poster from a different thread in Degree Info explains, "The key difference is that accreditation in the UK appears vastly different from accreditation in the US. If your UK university has a royal charter, then that's all it really needs to operate. Accreditation is wholly voluntary and doesn't confer degree granting authority, because that's not how degree granting authority is conferred in the UK. The issue with ASIC seems to be that some of the schools accredited by them lack institutional accreditation or authority to award degrees in their respective country."

• 29:58Robert Evans?

  So, Vision International is accredited through ASIC, but ASIC is not approved in the UK to accredit a school. It means a different thing than it does in the US. They have no ability to grant degrees in the US. And they also don't really have the ability to grant degrees that are recognized by the UK. It just means that if you go here, you can get an educational visa in the UK. They're kind of playing with the fact that the same word means different things in two countries. Does that make sense?

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 30:26Robert Evans?

  I fell down this wormhole for way too long, trying to figure out how this fake college for Christian scam artists works. And so now you're all going to learn about it.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna enroll.

• 30:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, get your degree, for sure. Yes, of course. Get your Master of Science.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  I'm gonna get two degrees.

• 30:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, double fisting them.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  This is very classic you. You're like, "I suffered, you must suffer." That's you. That's very classic you.

• 30:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Just doing, doing with degrees what punk kids in the early 2000s did with tall boys.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  What you're doing with Zevias now.

• 30:59Robert Evans?

  What I'm doing with a Zevia right now, yeah. So, the poster then goes on to discuss Warrenborough College in Ireland, which is not a real college. It's not a recognized institute of higher learning in Ireland, but pretends to be because it has an ASIC accreditation. The US Department of Education does not recognize ASIC accreditation, although they might in the future, given where we're headed.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Every time you say ASIC, I think of shoes.

• 31:23Robert Evans?

  Is that a shoe brand, Sophie?

• 31:25Speaker 02

  It certainly is.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:26Robert Evans?

  That's a more legitimate company than the ASIC in the UK.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  They're like, good shoes, like, good quality, like, for your feet and whatnot.

• 31:34Robert Evans?

  Well, this is not a good quality accreditation organization. In 2009, extensive reporting showed that there's some very shady details about how ASIC got recognized in the UK. A journalist named Andrew Norfolk wrote an article on the matter with the title, "Man-Given Job of Closing Bogus Colleges Was Sacked by University." And the man who's the founder of ASIC is Maurice Dimmock, who, along with his wife, lives in the detached duplex that doubles as ASIC's headquarters. He had been Director of International Operations for a real school, Northumbria University, until 2003, when he was fired for reasons neither he or the school will ever discuss, which I'm sure means good things. Always not shady when your school won't even tell anyone why they fired you. I'm sure no crimes were committed.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 32:19Robert Evans?

  Somehow, the UK Home Office ignored numerous concerns and complaints about this guy and gave his company the job of determining which private colleges were real for visa purposes. And ASIC accredited 180 schools in its first two years. The Times reports, "Among them is a Manchester college that the Times exposed last month as the front for an immigration scam which helped 1,000 fake students enter or stay in Britain. Another in London issued more than 2,500 bogus postgraduate diplomas in two months last year, earning its owners, who have fled the country, an estimated £5 million." So, great organization, very real school. That's what we can say, is that Kevin Smith gets his doctorate from an entirely real university. And again, it's important to discuss this, even though we're getting a little bit off

• 33:04Robert Evans?

  topic from the other Kevin Smith, because every one of these abusive Christian cult leaders you come across today has some kind of PhD or other fancy-sounding degree from one of these fake schools. There's a whole ton of them. One of the claims I found is that Vision International, and around 2002, was claiming to have 4,000 campuses in more than 100 countries. And to the best of my knowledge, Vision has 30 full- and part-time employees, which it's hard to keep 4,000 campuses operative on 30 employees. And it kind of seems like they're just counting everyone who registered online as a campus? Like, you're a campus for Vision International University if you log on with your laptop? Whatever coffee shop you're in is a campus?

• 33:48Robert Evans?

  I love, I need to start a fake college. Like Sophie, we gotta get in on this fucking racket.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  We're not doing that. We're not.

• 33:53Robert Evans?

  There's a lot of money and.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  We're not going full Tate. I'm sorry.

• 33:58Robert Evans?

  Molly, do you like the sound of Professor Lambert? You could be giving out doctorates in like 45 minutes, you know?

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Sorry, that's Bishop Dr. Lambert.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Come on, I'm a bishop.

• 34:07Robert Evans?

  Dr. Bishop Lambert. Yeah. You could give out, what kind of degree would you want to hand out to people? What would you feel confident giving like in terms of doctorates?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  I mean, whatever they'll give me money for, right? That's how we're gonna do this scam.

• 34:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  I mean, college.

• 34:24Robert Evans?

  Scam college. I'd like to make surgeons. Like that feels, that feels satisfying to know I'd created a lot of surgeons who are, who are going out there cutting into people, you know? As long as I get to a non-extradition country very quickly after handing out 4,000 or so diplomas.

• 34:40Robert Evans?

  So I should also note that initially Vision University was an offshoot of a Pentecostal school in Tasmania founded by an Australian pastor named Ken Chant. And I just mentioned that because I found a photo of him that I have to show you guys.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  It's really kind of funny. Hey, Ken.

• 34:57Robert Evans?

  Look at that mustache. It's beautiful.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  All right. He looks cool.

• 35:01Robert Evans?

  He does look cool. That's, that's a sweet ass mustache.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Ken Chant is a great name too.

• 35:06Robert Evans?

  Ken Chant too. Solid name. Um, I'm happy with him.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  I mean, chant. It's right in the name.

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right. Yeah. It's a perfect name for an evangelical pastor.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:15Robert Evans?

  Especially with a soup strainer like that. The acoustics had to be great, you know? And it would act like having like baffling panels on your ceiling.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  I trust him.

• 35:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he seems legitimate. Um, so I said we'd get back to Kevin Smith, the bad one, and I meant it. But I also kept running across funny stuff about this school that I didn't know where to stop. According to the 1994 edition of Name It and Frame It by Stephen Levitschekoff, which is a book about fake colleges. Vision quote, "Also offers a special additional 10% tuition reduction for students who enroll within the next 30 days." Which is a real sign that someone's got an actual college going. Real colleges give you bonuses like that, right? Sign up in 30 days and get 10% off. Okay, now, back to Kevin for realsies. In addition to his definitely fake degree, he claimed to attend Tindale University,

• 36:07Robert Evans?

  which is a real and respected private evangelical Christian university. He also claims to have a doctorate of ministry from Mount Olive Bible Institute in Toronto, which seems to be about as real as Vision, but has a very similar name to an actual college that's in the United States, which I think is the point. And laying out Kevin's educational history, The Walrus, who is again a Canadian news site, noted, "While he has referred to himself as a registered clinical counselor and sought after holistic psychotherapist, he has never been registered with the College of Registered Psychotherapists in Ontario." So he's a Christian psychotherapist, which is different from being a psychotherapist in the way that any medical establishment recognizes. Now, while he's getting all these fake degrees, and maybe one real degree, in addition to

• 36:51Robert Evans?

  several other questionable certifications, Smith grew up and seems to have made his living operating a ministry in Toronto and traveling around the world to give speeches at different churches. Sometime around the turn of the millennium, he founds his own ministry, which he calls K O S Deliverance International, and the initials, K O S is just the initials of his name. On August 22, 2006, he returns from one of his overseas preaching trips to the UK. The Walrus writes, quote, "Smith was jet lagged and lonely, craving to spend time with someone besides his brother. I wanted, you know, emotional company," Smith would later recall, as per court documents. "So he perused online ads for escorts and reached out to a man for his services. Matt, whose real name is under a court-ordered publication ban, arrived at Smith's home around 10:30 one evening.

• 37:36Robert Evans?

  I would need him to be as inconspicuous as possible, because I live straight and I'm a Christian," Smith would recall. "There was a conflict happening inside of me, an essence to what I was going to do or not do." Now, what he did, according to Matt's allegations, is sexually assault Matt, who goes to the police the next day. Smith is arrested and charged. He would later claim that Canadian police tried to use his Jamaican ancestry and the local stigma against homosexuality in Jamaica against him, and he claims he told them gays are just people who need redirection, which does do a great job of making me more sympathetic to his case. But he's been accused basically of calling this guy in and then sexually assaulting him, right? Now, the case, these allegations against him wind through the Canadian court system for the next several months.

• 38:21Robert Evans?

  And the next year, in early 2007, he gets married and possibly as a way to kind of distract from the fact that this is really bad PR to his ministry. He's either 18 or 25 when he gets married. I found different things on different news sites. It kind of depends on whether or not he was actually born in 1982 or not. Whatever the case, this marriage does not seem to have really been like, it certainly doesn't last. There's debate as to whether or not it was legitimate. They very quickly split in the walrus rights. Smith's ex-wife described him as verbally abusive and someone who lied about his private life. He is not living an honest life, she would later recall, according to court records. And the Toronto Caribbean's reporting adds, there have been allegations that his wife caught him having sexual relations with men.

• 39:06Robert Evans?

  She reported it to senior ministers in the church organizations, but they denied it and there were no reprimand or consequences. So, you know, not a story we've ever heard before anywhere else.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 39:16Robert Evans?

  Powerful up and coming guy gets caught violating the tenants of his religion for personal reasons and also violating a sex worker. And it all gets smoothed over because, hey, you know, he's, he brings in money. Probably shouldn't segue to ads with that, but they also bring in money.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 39:35Robert Evans?

  Here's ads.

• 39:37Speaker 02

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• 39:40Speaker 04

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• 40:44Robert Evans?

  We're back. So I know the timeline is kind of screwy here. When he gets married, how old he is, you know, this is a guy who gives multiple versions of different stories and different news reports I see give different things. I don't actually know what's objectively the truth. I haven't seen a birth certificate here, but you know, basically one of two things happens. Either he marries this lady to try to distract from the scandal or they had been, they'd get married and stay that way for years, but she had seen signs that he was kind of living a lie and eventually tries to report them. In either case, the two of them split up and he goes on trial later in 2007 for sexual assault. And this trial, we can confirm absolutely happened, right? There's plenty of court records in Canada over it.

• 41:29Robert Evans?

  During the trial, Smith identifies himself as an international minister of religion who had preached in 300 different cities. He says, "We do crusades all around the world in churches and open fields and stadiums and things to that magnitude to preach the gospel." Smith's lawyer denied that anything non-consensual had happened and under oath, he claimed that Matt had tried to extort him for money during a private religious counselling session. Quote, "The prosecutor in her closing argument shredded Smith's testimony. His life and his platform is a facade," she said. "Mr. Smith's reputation and his public persona are his primary concern and he will go to any extent to preserve that facade." In the end, the judge found Smith guilty of sexual assault, sentencing him to six months in jail, followed by two months of probation.

• 42:12Robert Evans?

  "Mr. Smith, it seems to me," the judge said, "to quote a parable, might be viewed as a wolf in sheep's clothing."

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 42:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and she's, she's, she's got it right here. She has definitely like locked this guy's number down. Unfortunately, she's going to be the last person to clock him for a while, and he is going to, basically as soon as he splits up with his wife, flee the country, right? So he leaves Canada for Jamaica. He breaches the terms of his probation. He's supposed to attend counseling, and he's like, no, I'm just gonna go back to Jamaica and start a church there. And he's gonna remain in Jamaica for the next six years, where he, he starts a local church, and he burrows into the Pentecostal community, and he starts accruing clout followers and eventually wealth. So, that's where we are at the end of part one, and this is going to lead us to what I would describe as a shockingly

• 43:01Robert Evans?

  bloody conclusion to come in part two, where this, where this one ends is, is pretty fucking intense. But Molly, that's what we got for the start of this, this episode. How you feeling as we sort of close out part one?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Uh, I truly don't know where this is going, so...

• 43:18Robert Evans?

  Lot of people getting their throats slit.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Oh, no!

• 43:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I got a weird number. Um, would you be anything higher than one?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  I guess let's find out.

• 43:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I guess let's find out. And that's the episode.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  We should plug Jake Andrehans new project.

• 43:36Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, Jake's got a new podcast, Away Days. Check it out on wherever our podcasts exist.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

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