Content warning: This story contains descriptions of domestic abuse and sexual assault.
For some time now, evangelical leader and Samaritan’s Purse CEO Franklin Graham has used the legacy of his father, Billy Graham, to carry water for the religious right. It initially appeared that he had finally bottomed out when he joined numerous other so-called moral guardians in prostrating himself before Donald Trump. If you’ll remember, Graham claimed with a straight face that hearing Trump openly brag about degrading women on the Access Hollywood tapes didn’t matter nearly as much as ensuring a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
But last year, we learned that Graham may have bottomed out a lot sooner than that. Last September, Naghmeh Panahi, the ex-wife of an Iranian-born pastor living in the U.S. who spent almost four years in an Iranian prison on account of his faith, revealed that when she came forward about suffering years of physical and emotional abuse by her husband, Graham actively tried to bully her into silence. As a religious right watcher, and more importantly as a domestic violence survivor, seeing Panahi tell Christian journalist Julie Roys about what Graham did to Panahi made my blood run cold.
On Monday, Panahi shared her story with The Washington Post. While chatting with The Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey, she revealed more details of Graham’s disgraceful treatment of her. Now the rest of the world knows what religious right watchers and advocates for survivors have known since September: Franklin Graham is a heartless bully who has nothing in common with his father apart from a full name.
The story begins in 2012, when Saeed Abedini, an ordained Assemblies of God minister, was hauled into jail on trumped-up charges of compromising Iran’s national security while visiting his family in western 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 better part of Obama’s second term, the Abedinis 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.
Panahi told The Post that during this time, she and Graham became particularly close. While advocating for her husband’s cause at churches, conferences, and before Congress, she called Graham’s office in hopes of leveraging his international connections. That call paid dividends, and then some. From 2013 to 2015, Graham sent 71 emails to Panahi, along with dozens of calls and text exchanges. He also promoted the Abedinis’ cause on social media.
But in November 2015, Panahi detonated a bombshell. She emailed her family’s supporters to tell them that 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 Abedini’s arrest had become too much to bear, and she was stepping back from public life.
Panahi told The Post that her email came a month after she stopped speaking to her then-husband after his verbal abuse over Skype became too much to bear. While at a conference in North Carolina, she sat down with an area pastor with “educational training in psychology” who told her what she’d endured almost from the time she’d met Abedini was abuse. According to her interview with Roys, that pastor was David Chadwick, a longtime pastor here in Charlotte.
Among the first to see that email was Graham, the man whom she now considered her “spiritual father” and whose words she’d come to trust “more than my own thoughts and emotions,” as she’d put in a 2014 email. He called her with a shocking question: “Naghmeh, are you cheating on him?” Panahi adamantly denied that was the case.
Bailey spoke with Graham about this encounter in 2020, and Graham didn’t appear to be the least bit apologetic.
Graham, son of the evangelical titan Billy Graham, confirmed in a phone interview with The Post that he asked the question, saying he suspected an affair because Panahi had been advocating so fervently for her husband’s release only to “go cold on him.”
“It was a good question to ask,” Graham said, “and I would have asked it again.”
As coldhearted as this sounds, it’s even more so considering that Abedini’s abusive history is well documented. For instance, Abedini severely beat Panahi in 2005 at their then-home in Dubai. Panahi didn’t report it in part because she didn’t believe Dubaian law would protect her. She also feared endangering Abedini’s American visa. She did, however, go to the police in 2007, a year after they moved back to the States, after Abedini grabbed her by the neck. Abedini pleaded guilty to domestic violence and was ordered to undergo anger management training. Apparently that didn't stick; in 2007 he broke his father-in-law’s nose.
By this time, Panahi had finally reached her breaking point. She told me via in Twitter and Instagram direct messages that Abedini had subjected her to “everything from name calling to isolating me to beating to the silent treatment.” It started almost as soon as they met, when he started mocking her looks and isolating her. It quickly got physical as well. It is beyond comprehension that anyone with an iota of decency, let alone someone holding himself out as a “man of God,” could believe a woman could endure this and finally say “enough” only because she was cheating on him.
As callous as Graham’s suggestion was, he somehow found a way to keep digging, subjecting Panahi to victim-blaming and victim-shaming of the worst type. In one of many emails Panahi shared with Roys, Graham wrote Panahi in January 2016—not long before Abedini’s release—and wagged his finger at Panahi for taking her two children and moving back in with her parents in Boise, Idaho. He told Panahi that her kids “need their father [and] they need you,” and warned that “a broken home” could potentially “destroy their lives.” He suggested that she and Abedini “get away from both [your] families” and reconcile.
Later in January, Graham claimed Panahi’s email “exposed [Abedini] to the whole world and embarrassed him” when he couldn’t defend himself. He pressed Panahi to agree to reuniting with Abedini at the Cove, his retreat center near Asheville. Panahi was initially willing to go along until she spoke with Graham’s older sister, Anne Graham Lotz. In a 2020 interview, Lotz told The Post that she didn’t believe this was “a marriage-counseling situation,” and didn’t want to chance a situation where Abedini could harm Panahi or the kids.
Soon afterward, Graham dropped all pretense of impartiality. He arranged for Abedini to fly to Boise on a private jet. Panahi only learned about it when a reporter called her, forcing her to scramble to court in order to obtain a temporary protection order for her kids. Panahi told The Post that after the order expired in May 2016, Abedini grabbed their son by the neck after he didn’t clean up a spill. The eight-year-old needed a neck brace. A judge granted Panahi an emergency protection order.
Under the circumstances, it’s hard to blame Panahi for insisting that Abedini seek abuse counseling before any marriage counseling. It would have not only helped get him to a mature understanding of what he’d done to Panahi, but helped him heal as well. Panahi told me that Abedini was “horribly physically abused” by his father, making Abedini part of a long list of abused kids who grow up to be abusers themselves.
Although Abedini refused to go along, Panahi ultimately agreed to meet with him and Graham at a conference room in Boise to show she was trying to make the marriage work. Panahi recorded the whole thing, listen here. Graham not only claimed the marriage could be saved, but coldly suggested that Panahi’s claims of abuse were a big fuss over nothing. Graham also suggested getting abuse counseling wasn’t the answer, since Abedini risked getting “some godless psychiatrist.” Graham and Panahi haven’t spoken since. Three months later, Abedini filed for divorce, and Panahi was granted full custody of their children.
None of this comes as any surprise to lawyer and abuse advocate Boz Tchividjian—who is also Graham’s nephew (his mother, Gigi, is Franklin’s older sister). He believes, and spoke with The Post, that Panahi experienced something that is all too common with domestic violence survivors in the evangelical world:
(Tchividjian) said there is a pattern in parts of conservative evangelicalism that emphasizes the authority of men and fosters skepticism among leaders toward abuse allegations.
“He had a loud megaphone, he spun a particular narrative,” Tchividjian said of his uncle. “Her voice is comparatively like a whisper. That adds to the trauma that someone like her and many other women struggle with.”
Graham is apparently still spinning this narrative: in his 2020 interview, he called Panahi a “dishonest woman” and “disappointing.” Never mind that Abedini is still in denial; in his own interview with The Post, he claimed Panahi made the whole thing up to draw attention to herself.
Seen in this light, I can only agree with Tchividjian—this isn’t a bug in the evangelical world, but a feature. And as long as Graham continues to promote this feature, he has no place in polite society. We’ve known this for almost a year. And now the rest of the world knows it as well.