Content warning: Discussion of domestic abuse.
One of the most galling anecdotes of the Donald Trump era is how the religious right convinced white evangelicals that Trump’s depravities didn’t matter. So what if at least 25 women have come forward to say Trump sexually assaulted them? So what if there are numerous instances of him reveling in degrading women?
Well, if you believe the nation’s so-called moral guardians, none of that really mattered. All that mattered was that Trump promised to give the religious right everything it wanted and then some on social issues. Franklin Graham, prominent evangelical and son of Billy Graham, for instance, claimed with a straight face that despite how much it unnerved him to hear Trump brag that he could “grab ‘em by the pussy” just because he was a celebrity, it was more important to ensure a lasting conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
With that statement, Graham announced in capital letters that he was willing to condone behavior that no decent person would condone in the name of getting a few policy wins. I didn’t think it was possible to get more depraved than that. But believe it or not, just months before Graham was telling his followers to bow and pray to the orange god he helped make, he may have been doing something far worse. The ex-wife of an Iranian-born pastor who had been jailed in Iran on account of his faith claims that Graham and other evangelical heavyweights actively bullied her into keeping silent about the abuse she endured at her husband’s hands—all in the name of advancing the cause of her husband.
Back in 2012, Saeed Abedini, an ordained Assemblies of God minister, was visiting his family in western Iran when he was arrested on charges of compromising national security by creating a network of house churches in Iran. While Christians are nominally a protected minority under the Iranian constitution, practicing Iranian Christians face severe persecution—especially if, like Abedini, they’re converts from Islam. He was convicted in a trial before Iran’s infamous "hanging judge,” Abbas Pir-Abassi, and sentenced to eight years in prison.
For the next three-plus years, Abedini and his wife, Naghmeh, were the public faces of persecuted Christians around the world. The hashtags #SaveSaeed and #FreeSaeed went viral on social media. After a fundraising campaign and heavy lobbying from the State Department, Abedini was finally released in January 2016.
But by then, cracks were already appearing in the facade. In November 2015, Naghmeh dropped a bombshell in an email to her family’s supporters—she was stepping back from public life after the strain of fighting for his release while coping with the scars of “physical, emotional, psychological and sexual abuse” she’d suffered for some time before his arrest.
Naghmeh—who divorced Saeed in 2017 and has since resumed using her maiden name, Naghmeh Panahi—spelled out details of that abuse in a two-part interview with Christian investigative reporter Julie Roys. Listen to part 1 here and part 2 here. She reveals that in 2005, just three years into their marriage, Abedini beat her so badly at their then-home in Dubai that she thought she was going to die. He beat her again in 2007 and was convicted of domestic violence. According to a filing from their divorce proceedings, Abedini once broke his father-in-law’s nose, and later went on a rampage at his in-laws’ house.
According to Panahi, the verbal abuse continued unabated during Abedini’s imprisonment. However, between her Iranian background (she was born in Iran, and moved to the states when she was nine) and how she was taught to “submit” to her husband, she didn’t really recognize what was happening to her.
Panahi soon started to understand what had happened to her and started feeling a lot of pressure to keep quiet. For example, she says, Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice tried to get her to claim that she’d sent that email because “you’re on medication and you’re mentally ill.” It proved to be a foreshadowing of things to come. Panahi released a tranche of emails between her and Graham, with Sekulow cc’d on many of them.
Graham urged Panahi to meet Abedini in Germany while he was on his way back to America. However, Panahi decided it wasn’t safe to do so, prompting Graham to suggest marriage counseling at the Billy Graham ministry’s facility at the Cove in Asheville. In an email to Graham, Panahi said she wasn’t willing to take part in any sessions with Abedini until he came to terms with his abusive behavior. She also forwarded Graham a letter from George Wood, the former general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, who revealed there had been concerns about Abedini’s behavior for some time. Panahi told Roys that not long after her email blast, Wood had called her and told her that years earlier, the pastors overseeing Panahi were so concerned about him that they put him under formal church discipline.
Even that wasn’t enough for Graham, who rebuked Panahi for moving in with her parents in Boise. Being a domestic violence survivor myself, this Iago-like message drove me up the wall. It made me wonder—what if someone had counseled me to move back in with my first wife after I was forced to flee to my mom’s house when the abuse became too much?
But by then, Panahi had picked up a critical ally—Graham’s older sister, Anne Graham Lotz. When Panahi emailed Lotz for advice, Lotz told her that it was best to stay in Boise “where you have your network of support.” Later, Lotz told Panahi over the phone that a counseling session at the Cove was a bad idea, since it was in an isolated part of Asheville without cell phone service.
Just a week before Abedini’s release, after Panahi opted against coming to Asheville, Graham wagged his finger at her for blasting out her email about Abedini’s abuse. Graham said that she “exposed him to the whole world and embarrassed him”—while calling Abedini a “hero.” He claimed that if Abedini came to Boise, “your family and friends (will) wag their finger in his face and humiliate and shame him more.” He also claimed that she shouldn’t be concerned about Abedini’s desire for fame—he knew a lot of people in ministry who wanted the same thing. When Panahi wouldn’t back down, Graham arranged for Abedini to fly out to Boise on his private jet—forcing Panahi to scramble to court to file for formal separation, as well as a protection order to keep Abedini from taking their two children.
For the rest of the winter and spring of 2016, Graham continued to press Panahi to agree to in-person marriage counseling. He didn’t let up even when two marriage counselors who have worked with Samaritan’s Purse for some time sided with Panahi and concluded Abedini needed abuse counseling. For instance, in April 2016, Graham claimed he was willing to work with them to heal their marriage—“but only the two of you together.”
Matters came to a head at a tense meeting in August between Graham, Panahi, and Abedini. Graham crassly suggested that Panahi really hadn’t been abused. He also faulted her for not speaking up sooner—forgetting that Panahi didn’t understand at the time that what she endured was abuse.
Despite this, it initially appeared that Abedini had seen reason and agreed to seek abuse counseling. However, only a month later, he texted Panahi to say he was filing for divorce. Soon after the divorce went final, he pleaded guilty to violating a restraining order. He was arrested again in 2018 for bombarding Panahi with abusive text messages. According to Panahi, Abedini skipped a court date, and there’s an outstanding warrant for his arrest.
Now consider that this was playing out during Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP—with the religious right as his obedient servant. And consider that just months after this, Graham and the rest of the religious right told us that it didn’t matter that Trump was a depraved jerk who reveled in degrading women—all that mattered was that he was giving social conservatives what they wanted.
Until this week, I thought that this marked the moment Graham had absolutely bottomed out after years of using his father’s legacy to carry water for the GOP. But this crass attempt to bully an abuse victim is worse, many times worse, than any of Graham’s shameful prostrating before Trump.