A Brooklyn Encounter with Grant

Rochester TV reporter Al White accompanied Dr. Paul Kurtz and me to Grant’s April 15, 1986, healing crusade in Brooklyn. White and I adopted disguises. Willy Rodriguez, a long-time colleague of mine, showed up to infiltrate the Grant camp. He dressed in a maintenance uniform and waited outside for the Reverend’s arrival. As Grant’s car pulled up, Willy jumped for the door and grabbed Grant’s briefcase, literally pulling it from his hand. Grant did not seem to want to let go of it, but Rodriguez was very persuasive. He simply cleared the crowd away, walked down the aisle of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and went up the stage stairs with Grant puffing along behind. He authoritatively asked where the dressing-rooms were, thus eliciting curious stares from the stage-hands, who must have assumed he was working personally for Grant. Grant, in turn, probably assumed he was working for the Academy. Watching from the balcony, Kurtz was astonished to see Willy walking around freely with Grant, but I was not at all surprised. He and I have been through far more than that together, and he has always managed to do the impossible. He came back to us with interesting details about what was going on backstage. Later, when Grant came onstage to do his bit, I decided to do some reconnaissance myself. That section of the Academy, I discovered, is divided into two theaters. Grant was using one, and the other was empty. However, the backstage areas are connected. I groped down a dark aisle in the empty section, mounted the stage stairs, and carefully inched into the backstage corridor. Voices were coming from several rooms, and I intended to listen in wherever I could. Just as I passed a water fountain, two coveralled workers rounded a corner and I barely had time to bury my face in the stream of water, to appear busy. As I straightened up, they were looking at me strangely. I said to them: “We’ll be out of here by ten-thirty, guys.” One of them snorted: “We don’t care. We have to be here all night anyway.” I wished them goodnight, and stepped into the nearest room. I paused, hearing Reverend W. V. Grant in full evangelical fervor out in the theater singing and screeching about hell and damnation in the first part of his evening tirade. I was suddenly aware of someone’s breathing near me, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw a woman festooned in several gold chains and bracelets, curled up asleep on a couch right beside where I was standing. I quickly stepped out into the hall and headed back into the theater, into the blackness. Stumbling around in the dark, I was almost at the exit when two rented cops burst in, waving walkie-talkies. Flashlights were aimed everywhere, and I ducked down just in time. The two decided that this was a good time and place for a short break, and they plopped down into seats one row behind me. From the conversation I overheard, it seemed they had been told that a strange man had been seen entering the unused portion of the Academy, and they were checking it out. Judging from their lack of success, I felt that they’d have been hard put to find a bowling ball in a bathtub. Finally, they decided to move on, and I was once again able to rejoin my colleagues in the balcony, where I saw the woman whose nap I’d almost ruined with W. V. Grant on stage! It was his wife, Shirley Grant.

An On-the-Seene Report

Elinor Brecher, a reporter for the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, paid a visit to Haiti in December 1986. The result was a blockbuster feature article that laid bare the heartless exploitation of children in that country. She discovered that Grant was staying at the El Rancho Hotel, in a suite (214/215) draped in red velvet and gold trim, at $110 a night. He was there to film at a nearby orphanage he claims to support and was shown by his TV crew giving what was supposed to be the annual Christmas dinner for the kids. Dressed up in a monogrammed designer safari outfit, pith helmet and all, the reverend posed with emaciated children on his knee and pleaded to the cameras for donations to cover the cost of the sumptuous meal being served to them. Brecher discovered that the entire meal consisted of half a paper cup of Kool-Aid and a wrapped candy. In her very powerful and devastating March 29, 1987, article describing the incredible conditions she found in the orphanages there, she reported:In one, a home for about 30 young girls and one boy supported at the time by Dallas faith-healer W. V. Grant, West Virginian James McClelland allegedly raped a young child in his care. Arrested and jailed in December, he was allowed to leave Haiti three weeks later.

And, according to Rod Sherrill, a TV director for Grant who twice visited Haiti to film for his program, Grant would choose an orphanage there and simply use whatever preacher happened to be handy. The preacher whom Rod encountered on his last trip there, he says, was very “touchy-feely” with the children. Rod left after the filming and left Grant behind in Haiti.