A Devastating Exposé in Rochester

That CBS-TV program was nothing compared to the job that newsman Al White, now with WWOR-TV in New York City, did on Grant when White was with WOKR-TV in Rochester, New York. In a six-part series featured on the WOKR newscasts, Grant’s ministry was taken apart piece by piece, and the question was asked, “W. V. Grant: Who is he healing?” The answer No one. WOKR showed viewers an evangelist who licked his lips, stuttered, blinked, and faltered as he was faced with penetrating questions that he could not answer. Al White said that, in examining Grant’s claims, he had found “shocking examples of trickery, magic and deception used in his ministry to bring in those big bucks.” At Grant’s April 8, 1986, crusade in Rochester, at the Dome Arena, White was shocked to see Grant “mass-heal” 114 cases of “sugar diabetes,” 132 high blood pressure problems, and 800 arthritics, merely by saying that God had told him these were now healed. Then, three weeks later, WOKR looked at some individual cases in detail. White interviewed Evelyn Green, a woman whose leg had apparently been lengthened three inches by the Grant leg-stretching trick, in which the subject is seated and a leg which has been declared “short” appears to grow out visibly. (This is the same trick that fooled Cheryl Prewitt, Miss America 1980. She told the press that 11 years previously, when she was 10 years old, she had been in an automobile accident and had been confined in a body cast and a wheelchair for eight months while she was receiving treatment for her left leg, which had been “crushed” in that accident. She said that in 1975, at a Jackson, Mississippi, revival meeting she had been told by a faith-healer that she had one short leg. He promised to lengthen her leg. She said that she “was sitting there very calmly. We prayed and we asked. I sat and watched my leg grow out instantaneously two inches.” I will describe later how this trick is performed.)

An Odd Coincidence

Concerning Evelyn Green’s leg-growing miracle, White said:Reverend Grant claims God was revealing to him that she had a back problem that made her leg short and caused her to walk sideways, although it wasn’t obvious to our camera or to Mrs. Green.

But Green was less than willing to accept this miracle. She was understandably puzzled, because she had visited Grant during a previous crusade two years earlier, and at that time, too, she had been “called out” and then Grant had seemed to lengthen that same leg by three inches! He had the bad luck to choose the same victim twice for the same stunt! As White pointed out, if both miracles had been true, Evelyn would have had to walk with one foot in a ditch in order to walk straight. Barney Medwin, who suffered from two ailments—arthritis in his legs and a deformed left arm—was “healed” by Grant of the arthritis but was warned not to expect a healing of his arm. To the TV cameras, he appeared to walk with just as much difficulty both before and after the “healing.” Elmer Barber, a victim of polio and arthritis, was another Grant “healee.” He was asked by Grant to leave a wheelchair and walk, which he did. This had pleased the enthusiastic crowd that saw the miracle performed. Al White questioned Barber afterward:White: Were you surprised that you could do that? Barber: No, no. I could do that before!

Not only could Barber walk, he could drive his car as well! White questioned him furtherWhite: What did W. V. Grant do for you? Barber To be honest about it, I feel just as I did before I went there.

Al White commented at that point that the wheelchair stunt was, in his opinion, “nothing more than a cruel hoax.” But Grant’s audience had gone away believing they had seen a miracle. White also covered an episode in which a woman in a wheelchair, accompanied by her daughter-in-law, was “healed” to the cheers of the enthusiastic crowd, who never got to know the outcome unless they watched the WOKR program. White told viewers:There were sad consequences from the phony healing of this Rochester woman. While at the Rochester Dome Arena, Reverend Grant claimed that, in the name of Jesus, this woman should get out of her wheelchair, too, and he said she was healed of terminal cancer.

But when White spoke to the daughter-in-law a few days later, she was furious with Grant. Asked what condition the cancer victim was now in, she sighed and said simply, “She died.” When asked why this woman he had “healed” of cancer had died of the disease 48 hours afterward, Grant just smirked and said, “Everyone Jesus ever prayed for, died!”