A Disillusioned Employee

In the summer of 1984, Clarke witnessed—and videotaped—an episode in Tampa, Florida, in which a woman with a heart condition was “healed” by Grant and then instructed to run up the aisle. As she returned to Grant, Clarke could see her turning bright red, and he knew she was having a heart attack. She suddenly collapsed at the feet of the healer, who turned to the crowd and declared that she was drunk. The woman was carried away by her friends. Whether she lived, we do not know. Clarke’s tour with W. V. Grant was not without humor. A few days after the heart attack episode, at the end of the Tampa stay, Clarke was leaving the meeting when a young man in his early twenties came running up to him. “I’ve got to see Reverend Grant!” he exclaimed to the cameraman. Clarke told him that Grant had left the auditorium, and the distraught young man explained that he had given Grant his last $10 bill and now had no money to get his car out of the parking lot. “He asked for it, and I gave it to him,” he said to Clarke. “I was caught up in the moment, and I gave it all to him!” Clarke doesn’t know if the man ever got his car back. As a cameraman, Gary was in a particularly good position to observe certain aspects of the Grant ministry. For example, he was once on a tour of Charlotte, North Carolina; Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia; and New York City; looking through his TV viewfinder, he noted a startling fact. Either Grant had many of his flock devotedly following him around on that tour or he had a small repertory company working for him. There were a number of faces there that showed up at all the services! How could Gary Clarke, a practicing Christian, stay with the Grant operation as long as he did? He told me that he was bothered by what he had seen and what he knew about the fakery. He said:It upset me. I never thought anything was being accomplished ... I just got caught up in the position in the first place, and the status that was given me, and the opportunity. The big joke—well, not so much of a joke, I guess—was that we were all going to Hell. When we’d do a good job, we’d say, “Boy, we’re really going to Hell for this one!” I hired a friend of mine, a Catholic, who only lasted a week. With W. V., there was a kind of fascination. The guy was so quick. He was the kind of guy you love to hate. You knew he was a fiend, but you wanted to see what he was going to do next. I used to think, you can’t admire a guy like that at all, because of the cruelty he’s doing to people, forgetting any religious convictions, just being a human being. I mean, what is this person doing to this other human being? It’s intolerable! That’s the thing that got me—how can this guy, because he’s so good at lying, hurt this other person? You want to just take the guy and punch him out, or something. He’s so despicable.

When it got to be too much for Clarke, he announced his resignation to Grant. He promptly received a letter several pages long that threatened a lawsuit if Clarke told what he knew and had witnessed of the internal operations of the W. V. Grant operation. Michael Beck, hired off the street by Grant at $70,000 a year, was at that time the head of Grant’s TV production company. Beck told Clarke when he left, in very plain language: “[If you talk,] we’re going to get you. We have the dollars to do it.” There was good reason for Grant’s organization to fear Gary Clarke. He had been in on so much of the behind-the-scenes operation and had stayed with it for so long that Grant believed he would just continue on without allowing his conscience to bother him; therefore, little had been concealed from him.