Southern Baptist pastor Matt Queen pleaded guilty Wednesday to the federal crime of making a false statement to the FBI. He created a fake document and gave it to agents as evidence, allegedly in an effort to help Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) cover up its failure to report a student accused of sexual assault, according to court documents.
Queen got caught in his lie and admitted it to federal prosecutors in June 2023. On Wednesday, he pleaded guilty to one felony charge after the US government agreed to drop an additional charge of obstruction of justice.
“He made a false statement. He has great remorse for doing so,” Queen’s attorney, Sam Schmidt, told The Tennessean. “He regrets it and wish[es] that never happened.”
Queen, who had taught evangelism at the seminary and currently serves as a minister at a church in Greensboro, North Carolina, faces a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison but is expected to be sentenced to several months. If he had been found guilty in a trial, the judge could have sent him to prison for as long as 20 years.
The North Carolina pastor is the first—and so far only—Southern Baptist to face criminal charges in a federal investigation of the convention’s handling of sexual abuse allegations.
The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has been looking into the nation’s largest Protestant denomination since 2022. The probe was prompted by a report commissed by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) that found Executive Committee staff, who are responsible for the denomination’s day-to-day operations, refused to do anything about allegations of sexual abuse. Executive Committee presidents had a secret list of more than 700 abusive pastors but flatly rejected calls for reform and maligned abuse survivors and advocates calling for change.
SBC lawyers turned internal discussions about abuse into discussions around legal liability, according to the report, until protecting the institution from lawsuits became the highest priority—higher than protecting people from sexual predators in pulpits and Sunday school classrooms across the country.
The Executive Committee announced in March the federal investigation concluded without any charges but later clarified the broader investigation was still ongoing.
Queen was indicted on federal charges two months later. The author of Everyday Evangelism worked at SWBTS for 14 years and served, for a period, as interim provost.
“The FBI will never tolerate those who intentionally lie and mislead our investigation in an attempt to conceal their malicious behavior,” FBI assistant director in charge James Smith said at the time.
According to the indictment, Queen “knowingly altered, destroyed, mutilated, concealed, covered up, falsified, and made a false entry into a record, document, and tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, and influence” a federal investigation.
Prosecutors sent a subpoena to the Fort Worth, Texas, seminary in October 2022, demanding any and all documents “related to allegations of sexual abuse against anyone employed by or associated with” SWBTS. The following month, an employee later identified as dean of women Terri Stovall was told that a current student had committed sexual assault.
Nothing happened to the student for three months, until a local police force received a report and made an arrest.
In January 2023, Stovall wrote up a document detailing the allegations against the student, the actions she had taken in response, and the seminary’s failure to report the student to police. According to the federal government, Stovall’s report became evidence in the investigation as soon as she created it and was subject to the subpoena.
The next day, however, she was told to destroy it by an employee later identified by SWBTS as seminary chief of staff Heath Woolman. According to federal prosecutors, Woolman ordered Stovall to make her report “go away.”
Queen was at that meeting, according to the indictment, in his capacity as interim provost. But when FBI agents asked him about Woolman’s instructions to destroy evidence, he said he had not heard that.
Queen then wrote about the meeting in a notebook—leaving out the part about destroying evidence—and gave it to the FBI, according to the indictment. He told the investigators it was a contemporaneous account of the meeting and supported his account of events. His notes said the administrators had discussed giving Stovall’s report to another department but noted nothing about destroying evidence or covering anything up.
Queen had actually written it five months later, according to prosecutors, manufacturing evidence to back up his story and strengthen the lie.
In June 2023, Queen confessed under oath that he had in fact heard the seminary chief of staff tell the dean of women to make her report “go away.” He acknowledged the notes were falsified.
Federal prosecutors have not filed any other charges in the case. They also have not indicated whether the investigation is ongoing. Federal officials usually do not speak about investigations before bringing charges.
Woolman, who allegedly ordered evidence destroyed, left SWBTS and now ministers at a church in Florida. He has not spoken publicly about the allegations. The head of campus police has also left the seminary.
SWBTS president David Dockery praised Stovall for refusing to cooperate with a cover-up.
“This episode is a matter of deep regret to me,” he said in a statement earlier this year. “I am, however, grateful that several employees in whom I placed great trust acted responsibly, especially Terri Stovall. I commend the service and integrity of these employees.”
On Wednesday, the school reiterated its commitment to complete cooperation with authorities.
Queen’s sentencing is scheduled for February.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the year that Matt Queen said under oath that he had made a false statement to the FBI. He confessed in 2023.
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