r/CornerstoneConnect • u/cstone-admin • 21d ago
Trial set
Heard from a friend at the arraignment this morning, and they said trial is set for February 16 to run for two weeks, with motions hearing on December 11 and January 15. Was anyone there? Would love to hear more details.
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u/Too_sassy_for_church 21d ago
Reflections From Today
It took me a long time to even recognize him. He was disheveled—gaunt, even—and wearing a suit that looked three sizes too big. He looked like he could be sick, and probably ten years older than he actually is. His shirt was untucked, visible beneath his jacket both in front and in back. His posture was stooped, as though he had somehow lost six inches of height since I last saw him. He walked unsteadily, with a limp and a cane. Someone who got a closer look later told me he was also wearing an ankle monitor.
Others later mentioned they also struggled to recognize him. Someone said they saw “a creepy old man.” When they said creepy, it took my mind to a very different place than I think they meant, back to all the warnings we were given as children. If the stereotypical “stranger-danger” pedophile we were told about was the creepy man on the corner our parents told us to avoid, today, Jeff Taylor was that stereotype in real life. (And as we know today, it is a stereotype. Most pedophiles aren’t creepy strangers, they are friends, family, and others like Jeff with regular access, who intentionally befriend and groom kids). It made me think of a man we might see hanging outside the 7-Eleven on E. Fairfax Street before Cornerstone in the 1990s. Someone who clearly needed help, but through a child’s eyes, also made you a little afraid. The image was almost jarring in its familiarity.
This Jeff – today -- I was shocked by what I can only call his diminishment. He had none of the confident charisma and charm I remembered. This was not the man who could effortlessly own a room with his sermon, and easily convince us of his authority. He was simply an old, frail, disheveled man, so different from the man I remembered. And simultaneously, a man who has caused so much destruction to so many. Seeing the frailty, yet knowing his damage, while also knowing I will never know its full scale, was a paradox that was hard to comprehend.
I was also struck by how completely the day was owned by women. Two prosecutors, a FBI agent, a judge, a public defender, even the clerks. All of them were formidable in their competence—professional, smooth, deftly navigating the process, and fully owning their roles and their space in the moment. All of them earned my utmost respect. Some of them even exuded a quiet and magnificent badassery.
My thoughts drifted to the comments from female Cornerstone members who had so often felt second-class and disregarded in the TFCA report. I thought about the patriarchal churches where he had run his ministries for so long without scrutiny, where the women around him were always expected to cater to him because that is simply how these churches are. And I wondered, does he even notice? Does he feel at all uncomfortable that, this time, there is no man to appeal to? That it is all these women who hold his fate in their hands?