Former members of South Carolina sex cult share their stories. Source: CBS 5
Warning: Graphic content
As a prodigy of Sean 'P Diddy' Combs who signed him to his Bad Boy label along with hip hop legends like Notorious B.I.G and a young Jay Z, Craig Mack lived out the nineties in heady rapper style with an excess of everything: expenditure, partying, sex, drugs and guns.
But years of hard living took its toll an the New York native who never matched the success of his 1994 platinum selling hit, Flava In Your Ear. In failing health, he faced his own mortality with a growing sense that the way he was living was sinful and shallow.
When he heard about Overcomer Farm and Ministry - set on 130 acres of South Carolina - he thought he'd found his sanctuary. He could not have been more wrong, according to the Daily Mail.
Because, in a bizarre turn of events, when Mack died of heart failure last week, aged just 46, he did so having bound himself to a sordid cult on the cusp of implosion and run by a man described by one pastor as a 'dog' and one victim as "Satan in the flesh."
Today, a DailyMailTV investigation exposes a litany of allegations levelled against Overcomer's leader, Ralph Gordon Stair.
Interviews with former members and a study of court documents reaching back decades have revealed the self-styled "Prophet," 84-year-old Stair, to be a serial sexual assaulter, alleged rapist, and paedophile who infected his victims with STDs and instructed one girl on how to induce a miscarriage when she feared she was pregnant with his child.
They have painted a picture of an isolated and oppressed community, utterly dependent on Stair for the most basic provisions, and shamed and manipulated by the unscrupulous preacher addicted to pornography and accused of defrauding some members out of life savings to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
More shocking still, records show that Stair was implicated in the suspicious death of one adult member of his congregation and charged with illegally moving and burying the body of a two-month-old boy whose death "by violent means" he did not report.
The baby was believed by many who were present at the time to have been fathered by Stair himself.
Stair is currently awaiting trial on three counts of criminal sexual misconduct in the first degree, kidnapping, burglary, assault with intent to commit criminal sexual misconduct, and criminal sexual misconduct with a minor.
He was arrested in December; just two months after Colleton County investigators launched a probe into Stair when YouTube footage emerged showing the preacher touching and cupping a 12-year-old girl's breasts during a worship service.
Stair can be heard saying "I'm going to touch them things until nobody else can touch them."
Investigators were also alerted to a second video in which 16-year-old Natosha Lehr accused Stair of repeatedly sexually assaulting her over a five-month period before she fled the farm - a cult compound by any other name..
Ralph Gordon Stair was arrested in December 2017, on charges of criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping, burglary and assault. Photo / Colleton County Sheriff's Office
As the sheriff's department investigation continued it grew to include agents from the State Law Enforcement Division, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security.
Incident reports viewed by DailyMailTV detail a horrifying history of alleged sexual assaults reported by at least 13 individuals and dating back to 1992.
One woman recalled how, in the winter of 1992, Stair called her into his office to sign some paperwork. She reported, "R Stair pushed her back against his desk and groped her.
"He shoved his hand under her skirt and began to touch her breasts. He then pressed his legs between her legs, forcing her to spread her legs. He forcibly pulled her panties down... touched around her genitals [and] attempted to pull his own pants down."
Fearing she was about to be raped the victim managed to fight him off and flee.
Another told how Stair entered her trailer and raped her more than 35 times between January 1998 and June 1999 - ejaculating on her stomach and telling her she had "made a man of God happy."
Another told how Stair began "constantly harassing" her for sex last spring. On one occasion she stated that he, "her vaginal area over her clothes while stating, 'I know how you black girls are, thick and creamy.'"
She gave into Stair's demand that she perform oral sex on him as he threatened she would have to leave the property. He then "penetrated her" and asked if he could "put his seed in her," but did not ejaculate.
That victim's teenage daughter was also assaulted by Stair who grabbed her breast under her shirt and asked her, "Do you miss me?"
It is a phrase that sends a chill through one former cult member who claims to have suffered years of sexual assault and rape at Stair's hands.
Speaking on condition of complete anonymity the woman who has since left the community recalled how that question - "Do you miss me?" - is one she will forever associate with Stair.
She said, "He would squeeze your waist and pat your butt and come up so close and ask, 'Do you miss me?'
Ralph Gordon Stair, who runs a secluded Christian Commune in South Carolina was arrested in December 2017. Photo / Google Maos
"I never missed him. Nobody missed him. Nobody wanted that old man."
The woman, who entered Overcomer when she was around 12 years old and stayed nine years, was an incredibly naïve 16-year-old when Stair first started making advances towards her.
She said: "In the whole time we were there I went out of the farm only four times. We didn't watch TV, didn't have access to information. I was schooled on the farm so I didn't get sex-education.
"I remember Stair used to preach to the girls that the soldiers would come and they would rape us all. I didn't know what rape was but I knew it sounded bad and like it would hurt.
"And he would say, 'I'm going to tell you sisters what can spare you all. You just stay still. You don't do nothing. You don't fight 'em. You just stay still.'
"So that's what was in my head - that's how you survive, you just freeze.
"We didn't know who 'the soldiers' were. Turned out it was Stair."
The first time he molested her, she recalled, he cornered her in a little storeroom they called the "inner sanctum" when she was reaching for a can of peach punch mix.
She said: "I'd got on the chair to pull the can down from the shelf when I heard a sound, like you know the sound shoes make on concrete sometimes? I thought it somebody trying to scare "So I got down from the chair and was getting reading to turn the light off and he comes
"He said, 'I got you now,' real low and mean. 'I got you now.'
I froze. He started rubbing my breasts, he's rubbing down there and I'm back up against the shelves and I'm just frozen and he kissed me right here on the side of my lips and then he patted my butt and said, 'That feel good?'"
Stair left leaving her in shock to continue about her chores. The life she recalled in the church was menial and repetitive: prayers at 7am, then breakfast, then cleaning, tending to the garden, farming and cooking.
From that day on she was aware of his eyes following her and it filled her with dread. She said, "I made sure I was never walking alone, I hid from him, literally hid if I could if I saw him coming."
But one day he caught up to her as she walked home after reading to his young daughter as she did most nights.
Stair (pictured right) persuaded many in his church to sign over all their wealth to him. Photo / The Overcomer Ministry
She said, "He was standing there across my path. He'd said to me so often, 'I'm going to get you.'"
Her voice breaking with emotion she continued, "He got me that night. It was in a vacant trailer. I was a virgin. After, he told me that if I told anybody we would both get into trouble.
"The next day he came up to me and said, 'Are you hurting?' I said, 'Yes. I'm stinging down there?' He said, 'Did you bleed a little bit?'
"And I thought, 'oh my gosh this man really is a prophet because how would he know I'm bleeding? Nobody knows that but me.' I didn't know that being a virgin that would happen.
"It was so cruel, so cruel."
She was raped more than 20 times after that she said and believed for some time that she was alone in her suffering.
Then one day she found her friend weeping inconsolably on her bed and she knew that her friend was also was being raped by Stair.
She said, "We came up with a nickname for him. We called him 'Chaser' because he was always lurking and following us.
"I had nightmares about that man chasing me, for years and years. Even after I was married I'd wake up in a cold sweat and my husband would hold me and tell me, 'You're safe.'
"I didn't tell him what had happened for maybe two years. Because they weren't dreams, they weren't what I was afraid would happen. They were nightmares about what had already happened to me."
During her time in the cult she recalled outbreaks of what she now believes to be venereal diseases as many girls broke out in painful sores on their mouths and genitals.
She also recalled a friend who believed she had become pregnant by Stair. She said: "He didn't want it. He made her get into a tub of hot Epsom Salts water - as hot as she could stand - to make her miscarry."
But by the mid to late nineties Stair's behavior at the community he founded in the early eighties, had begun to arouse suspicion in a neighboring Pastor, David Roberts, who now runs his own spiritual community in Jefferson County. The two churches would occasionally come together for social gatherings and more and more Pastor Roberts knew something was not right.
Eventually, one of Stair's victims confided in Roberts who, incensed, confronted Stair in a meeting of the elders and demanded that he confess before his church.
Mike Rowland, a former church member and still a preacher now living in Kansas, was at that meeting.
He told DailyMailTV how he was filled with rage and disbelief as Stair attempted to pass his crimes off by saying he had sinned but that God had forgiven him, claiming that wild spirits had overtaken him.
He said, "What I couldn't believe was that they were of a mind to protect Stair. I said we have to go to the outside on this, we have to take this to the authorities and they shouted me down, they shut me down.
"So I just held my peace and let them think I was going along with it all and then I went straight out of that farm to the sheriff's office and reported it.
"They told me they'd heard this sort of thing for years but there was nothing they could do unless the girls came forward."
But that meeting back in 2001 was enough to start a process of exposure that has brought Stair and the Overcomer community to where they are today.
Stair (pictured) managed to obtain such a hold on his followers. Photo / The Overcomer Ministry
People started asking questions and investigators started looking more closely at Stair and his fellowship. They were informed that a child had been born, died, and buried on the property and that Stair had not alerted the authorities.
Rowland recalled: "Stair had been using the wife of one of the men and she got pregnant. He didn't want it."
According to documents seen by DailyMailTV the child was barely two months old when he died.
Stair was charged in 2002 with the unlawful removal of the child's body and that, some time between February 1 and February 11, 1994 he, "did unlawfully bury the body of… a person supposed to have come to a violent death, before notice to the coroner to examine the body and before inquiry was made into the manner and circumstances of the death."
Shockingly, that case was never processed in return for Stair pleading guilty to two other cases brought against him at that time.
Investigators had interviewed two women who pressed rape charges for assaults that took place between 1997 and 1999 and in 2001.
Mike Rowland too was sickened by the outcome. He lived in the community for six years and left when Stair's crimes became public knowledge but he had long been disturbed by Stair's behavior and some of the things he witnessed while there.
He recalled: "There was the mysterious death of Brother Simon. He had gone to Nigeria on a mission and after only 30 days he came back sick.
"He had a fever. I found him one day running around the driveway in a circle about ten feet across. Something seemed wrong with his brain."
But rather than seek medical help, Stair insisted Brother Simon be left alone. According to Rowland his breathing became so laboured one of the community tried to construct a makeshift oxygen mask to help him breath.
Rowland said: "After days of starvation in his sickness, Wayne passed. Stair gave the order to bury him and did so in a wooden box make from lumber in the yard.
"Stair also told the whole group not to contact Wayne's family because that would stir up questions and our community needed to just live in peace and the world would only cause us trouble."
According to Rowland, Stair was later forced to exhume Douglas's body for proper burial.
Reflecting on how Stair managed to obtain such a hold on his followers Rowland said, 'At first he seemed like a good man. He was charismatic. I thought he was a real man of God. He had the right phrases, the right promises.
"He'd come up learning from the great preachers - he worked for AA Allen and observed it all."
Allen presented himself as a 'healing evangelist.' He attracted huge congregations - at one time he had a tent that housed 22,000 - and solicited millions of dollars in donations.
In a similar fashion Stair persuaded many in his church to sign over all their wealth to him.
Rowland said: "He pleads poverty, asks for donations, but he's got a huge amount of money. He's got complete control over people in there - they have nothing, he threatens to throw them off the property and where will they go?
"You see him these days and he's a drooling old man whose losing his mind and whose sexual perversions that were once hid have come to the surface. But he wasn't always like that.
"He asserted control and what he built was a lawless community in which he can do whatever he pleases."
Craig Mack during 2004 NBA Draft After Party at Deep in New York City, New York, United States. Photo / Getty Imagws
Someone like Craig Mack, Rowland said, simply wasn't to know the dark truth that Stair and, he said, some of his preachers, worked hard to conceal.
He said: "He just saw what I did at first - a farm, a place to make amends, to get away from a sinful life.
"He came with money so Stair would have smoothed his entrance and let him walk straight in which you couldn't usually do. He wasn't to know what was really going on.
"And Stair had plenty who would protect him when they should have been protecting those sisters."
One of Stair's victims agreed that hard as it may be to fathom, to Stair's dwindling loyal followers, "He is their leader. They would obey him over President Trump if they had to."
When DailyMailTV visited Overcomer Farm, Stair looked more the "drooling old man" of Rowland's description than a god.
He has an electronic tag and cannot leave the property nor is he allowed to be in the proximity of anyone under the age of 18 and where he once invited media onto his land to dismiss allegations of wrongdoing, these days calls to the ministry go unanswered.
Stair is due in Colleton County Court in Walterboro on Friday March 30. According to one of the women who suffered at his hands she will be praying that day - not for his soul or to find any forgiveness in her own. She will be praying for the justice that Stair has eluded, and his victims denied, for decades.
If you're in danger now:
• Phone the police on 111 or ask neighbours of friends to ring for you. • Run outside and head for where there are other people. • Scream for help so that your neighbours can hear you. • Take the children with you. • Don't stop to get anything else. • If you are being abused, remember it's not your fault. Violence is never okay
Where to go for help or more information:
• Women's Refuge: Free national crisis line operates 24/7 - 0800 refuge or 0800 733 843 www.womensrefuge.org.nz • Shine, free national helpline 9am- 11pm every day - 0508 744 633 www.2shine.org.nz • It's Not Ok: Information line 0800 456 450 www.areyouok.org.nz • Shakti: Providing specialist cultural services for African, Asian and middle eastern women and their children. Crisis line 24/7 0800 742 584 • Ministry of Justice: www.justice.govt.nz/family-justice/domestic-violence • National Network of Stopping Violence: www.nnsvs.org.nz • White Ribbon: Aiming to eliminate men's violence towards women, focusing this year on sexual violence and the issue of consent. www.whiteribbon.org.nz
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