Part One: The Throat-Slitting Evangelical Minister of Jamaica
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Call zone media.

I don't know. They make up my day-to-day life, and that's pretty depressing. But not today, because we've got Molly Lambert as a guest. Molly, welcome on the show. Are you ready to have your day be worse? Oh, yeah. Oh, great. A transition to the tall boys of Zevia. You have. For some reason, that's very funny to me. Yeah, yeah. 12 ounces just wasn't enough. Molly, what do you got to plug today at the start of the episode before I introduce our bastard?

I've got a book that came out called Double Axe and Pop. Holy shit. Congratulations. Yes. Thank you. It's out from commercial type. It's about musical duo acts and everybody check it out. And then later this year, I have a podcast coming out called Jenna World, which is about the history of the porn industry through kind of the Jenna Jameson story. Oh, awesome. Awesome.

Yeah, that sounds fascinating. Well, today we're not talking about Jenna Jameson. We're not talking about anyone who has ever done anything good at all. We are talking about Kevin Smith. Not that Kevin Smith. Not the one who directed Dogma. Ha ha ha ha!

Although it is, I don't know, we'll title this the other Kevin Smith or some shit. We're talking, this guy is a Jamaican pastor who led a charismatic Christian end time sect in Jamaica and lost his mind as a result of COVID lockdowns and wound up trying to have dozens of people's throats in mosque during a church service. Sensational. This is a wild story. And the fact that he has just named Kevin Smith the whole time is going to be frustrating. I'm going to, I'll cop to that right now.

Um, if you want to imagine silent Bob committing the heinous atrocities we're about to discuss, that's your business. Although you should probably also talk to a therapist if you feel compelled to do that. Uh,

Molly, you ever heard of this guy? I'm going to guess not. I had not until I started doing this digging. No, I've never heard of him. Uh-huh. Well, welcome to a real fascinating piece of shit who is also kind of a Canadian bastard, too. So we've got that going for us, like Canadian-Jamaican real monster solidarity here in this week's episodes. And we'll have all that and more when we come back from the cold open. This is an iHeart podcast.

Who's holding them?

Enough of that nonsense. Now listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead. We're back. Molly, you ready to get into it? Let's do it. Okay. So our bastard for this week's full name was Kevin Antonio Smith. O-N-T-O-N-I-E-L, right? That's his name. We could call him Kevin O. Smith to differentiate him from, again, Silent Bob, but...

I don't know how necessary that is. He was born in 1982, probably. Although, again, this guy is like a cult leader. You never know with these fuckers. That's the first sign someone's a cult leader is like the birth date's a real open question.

So funny. Probably, though. There's some sources that suggest he might be a little younger than this, born more in the late 80s. And I've just got no idea what day or month he came into the world. I guess it doesn't matter all that much. He was definitely born in a town called Glynngulf.

G-L-N-G-O-F-F-E, in the parish of St. Catherine. And this is in Jamaica. It's one of the most prosperous parts of the island. It's second only to Kingston as an industrial center. And it's got good access to water and a really good growing climate. So he comes up in like a fairly, you know, Jamaica's an island with a lot of poverty, but he comes up in a fairly comfortable part of the island compared to some other parts.

We have very little information about his early life, aside from the fact that he would later claim to have been physically abused by his father, who died when he was very young.

So his mom's going to raise him on her own for much of his adolescence, which, again, not a wildly uncommon cult leader backstory. And this statistically, you know, just the fact that she's a single mom might suggest that he came up in a degree of poverty. But there's not a lot of evidence either way. Right. Like, in fact, it kind of seems the evidence suggests more that she managed to keep them fairly comfortable. I'm not sure what she did, but they don't seem to have been like on the edge of poverty or whatever. Right. Right.

He claims to have been baptized at age nine, and it's unclear which denomination he was from, but some sort of Protestant sect, right? Just based on kind of the demographics of Jamaica and based on his later religious life, it was some kind of evangelical Protestant sect that he's baptized into. We can be pretty sure of that.

Years later, as part of a court case that we will talk about more in the future, Kevin would claim to have, again, been sexually abused as a child by a male relative. So both physically abused by his dad and sexually abused by a male relative. We don't know how old he would have been when this happened, but he's probably pre-adolescent, somewhere around like 10 to 12 years.

We know that he goes on to attend Jamaica College, which confusingly is not a college. This is a high school. I've read enough of the history to tell you I can't give you a perfect idea of why they called it Jamaica College. Other than that word hasn't always meant the same thing. Right. I think the school is initially established by like some I believe it's a Catholic member of the clergy who like leaves a bunch of money behind. But I forget exactly. Right.

But it's one of the best secondary schools in all of Jamaica, right? So this is – and it's not just – I say it's primarily a secondary school. I think you can start going there when you're about 10 years old, right? So it doesn't exactly map onto what we call a secondary school. But this is a really good school, and it's a public school, right? It's free to attend.

And it's kind of got like a degree of international fame. So being able to get into Jamaica College suggests that you're like a kid who's done really well in school or has connections or both.

Now, my sources somewhat disagree here, but it seems like he kind of he doesn't finish his education at Jamaica College. He goes there. He probably starts when he's around 10 and he probably leaves when he's around 14. The Toronto Caribbean newspaper claims that this is when his mother moves the family to Canada in 1996.

But there's disagreement on when the family moves to Canada. The Walrus, which is an award-winning Canadian magazine, says they moved when he was 12, which would have been probably around 94. Although, again, we don't know his birth date, really. So it's unclear how much time he spent at Jamaica College. But a report on his social media history by the Jamaica Gleaner shows a photo of him wearing the school uniform. So we know that he went there at some point.

Right. So sometime between two and four years at this fairly prestigious academy. And then the family emigrates to Canada. And the fact that they were able to do so legally, again, suggests kind of a degree of financial comfort because that's just not like a super cheap or easy thing. Right. And it probably also suggests that, like, there's a lot of family support. That's usually the case when people are able to make this move from Jamaica to Canada that like members of their family kind of pool to help make this possible. Right. Right.

Whatever the case, he graduates high school in Canada, and it's here that he starts preaching for the first time, right? And this is where we start getting, like, the foreboding music, you know? This kid is, like, one of these teenage preachers. Like, he gets into being an evangelical pastor at a very early age, which is almost never a good thing, right? Whenever someone's described as a gifted child preacher, which I found references to in the Toronto Caribbean newspaper, it's like a bad thing.

thing, right? Like that almost, I've never heard of that ending well. Hey, what if he's just got the touch? Come on. Yeah, he's got the touch. He's got the power. If you watch, I always recommend the documentary Marjo when we talk about this, which is about a kid who was like used by his parents as a preacher from like age five or six on and

It's a really fucked up documentary, won an Oscar. But there's a lot of this in the kind of apostolic community and the Pentecostal community, right? That like this attitude that, well, because you're sort of touched by God to become a preacher, that's...

the younger you can bring someone in and get them preaching. Number one, it helps establish their career. If you can be like, I've been doing this since I was 16 or 17 or even younger, right? But it also, it's kind of like a, it's a marketing tool, right? That you've got, we've got a child preacher, you know, God speaking to this little young man and, you know, you need to hear what he's got to say. That's kind of a big deal in the community.

We're not entirely certain where he comes up within sort of the evangelical community in Toronto. I've heard references to the apostolic community in the Toronto Caribbean, although the Walrus claims he joins the Exodus Deliverance Temple in Mississauga at age 17. And these are slightly in conflict, although he could have done both because that's just sort of the way this community works.

If that's the case, the Exodus Deliverance Temple is founded in 1999, which meant he would have joined the year it was founded. And I kind of doubt that this is the case just because I looked at their website and they say that when the church was founded, it was founded with only a few family members in a quaint and old white village hall.

And he's not a member of the family that founded this church. So I think it's more likely that he comes out of the apostolic community in Toronto, but the walrus may have done, you know, have access to information. I don't, I don't know if I'm getting into the weeds too much on this sort of thing, but yeah.

If you get started in the Apostolic Faith Church in Toronto, that is kind of a separate thing. And the Apostolic Faith Movement is a strict fundamentalist Pentecostal sect that originates actually in Los Angeles, right? It gets its start kind of in Hollywood at the end of the, like, right at the start of the 1900s, into the 1800s, start of the 1900s. And this is

There's like a wave of different evangelical Christian revivals that sweep, and they often do start in the West Coast for all of its sort of reputation as like a progressive haven. This is a thing that occurs at the start of the 1900s. It occurs like in the mid-century. It occurs after the hippie movement, right? Like it's this constant place where you get these sort of ecstatic evangelical movements that like rise up, and they often will kind of sweep north and then east from Los Angeles. Right.

Okay, but Robert, have you ever considered getting into it? I mean, I kind of was as a kid, right? A little bit. I guess like I was sort of, I came out of the sect of the, whatchamacallit, the fake Catholics. The sect of the whatchamacallit. Yeah, what the fuck are we, what do we call it? Everyone's shouting who knows what I mean by fake Catholics. They're now part of the African Anglican Church, right?

But we started out as this like kind of sect that was sort of like Catholicism light. And then my church left because they made a gay guy in California, a minister and that was or a bishop. And that was not cool with a lot of people. I thought you were just like they made a gay guy. And so they had to stop. No, no, no, no. They let a gay guy be a bishop. And that was a real problem for the guy who ran my church. So we had like news cameras and shit at our at our church in Plano. It was a whole deal. But.

But this is a little bit of like a different thing. It's called the Azusa Street Revival that gives a start to the apostolic faith movement that is going to wind up probably being the church that Kevin Smith, the other one, gets involved in. It was started by a lady called Florence Crawford. And it's part of this wave of evangelical revivals that sweeps L.A. from 1906 to 1915. And it's characterized like all Pentecostal revivals are.

Right.

And so a mission comes out of this on Azusa Street, which is why it's called the Azusa Street Revival. And they start a newspaper called the Apostolic Faith that begins circulating. And this lady Crawford, Florence Crawford, is a part of it. And the guy who kind of founded the movement was named William Seymour, and he makes Crawford a

like the director of state-level efforts to bring more churches into the fold, and they wind up having a power struggle, right? Because Crawford is kind of looking to steer the ministry in her own direction, and this leads to like a civil war within the movement, and she winds up splitting and forming the Apostolic Faith Church in none other than Portland, Oregon.

Classic story. If you get kicked out of LA, move up to Portland. You know, many such cases, including several people on this podcast. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, you get run out of town, you come up here to start your cult, of course. Woo-hoo!

Whomst among us. Whomst among us. Yeah, when your cult's too crazy for LA. Right, right. Time to go to Portland? Time to go to Portland. Yeah. Yeah, it's beautiful in its own way. So, shit spreads from there. Once you're in Portland, you're not all that far from Canada, and pretty soon the AFC is...

There's like 2,400 affiliated churches around the world today, but they move up to Canada pretty quickly, and they wind up setting up shop in Toronto in like 1943, which is when a Canadian named Stanley Hancock founds an apostolic faith newsletter in the city. Here's how the organization he established, which Kevin probably winds up joining, describes its founding.

After reading an apostolic faith paper, Stanley Hancock received his baptism and was banned from church. In 1943, he and others started the first apostolic faith church in Canada. Now there are 11. And the apostolic faith church, it falls under this wider umbrella of charismatic Christianity, right? Which is a chunk of Protestantism who believes in brief, number one, the Holy Spirit can and does directly enter people to change them and thus change the world.

And number two, through this method, by sending the Holy Spirit into people, God bestows gifts upon them like prophecy and healing. He can like spontaneously heal your injuries by sending the Holy Spirit into you. And number three, and this is the most important part of charismatic Christianity. It's a lot of fun to ride around on the ground and pretend to speak in a fake language. People love it. Yeah, I bet. Yeah, yeah.

You could just take acid, you know, at a psytrance festival or whatever to get the same experience, but they didn't have psytrance back then. We just didn't have the technology. Nor did they have acid, really. I don't know if my psytrance jokes are going to land with anyone less than 37 years old. Your kids are all probably listening to 100 Gex while you take your drugs now. No, man. Psytrance is back. Oh, is it back? Did it come back? Thank God. Ibiza was really suffering. They got ergot. Ergot.

It'll be fine. Yeah, yeah, excellent. So Pentecostals are, again, part of this, and when I talk about the Pentecostal church, like, these guys are part of the charismatic movement, but there's divisions within charismatic Christianity based on, like, do you believe speaking in tongues is a necessary precursor to being baptized? Do you have to prove the Holy Spirit has entered you, right, or not? Right.

So it's kind of like a whiskey bourbon sort of deal. Pentecostals are all part of the charismatic movement, but the charismatic movement isn't just Pentecostals, right? Now, one thing all these churches have in common is that they're always sort of scouting for young men with what the rest of us might call strong cult leader vibes, you know?

We didn't have TikTok or streaming back then. So someone with those vibes couldn't just start a media career. They pretty much, getting involved in a church or Dianetics was basically their best option in the mid-century. Yeah.

And Kevin, though, comes up in this period right before the Internet's going to really take off. And he gets scouted at around age 17 by this community. On the brief autobiography for one of his now scrubbed social media accounts, he claims at the age of 17, he was sent to 33 countries within two years as a prophet to the nations.

And this is probably true that like once they figure out this kid's got the gift to gab and you can kind of set him up in front of any church you want and he'll keep them entertained and giving money, donating money for a couple of hours. You fly him all around, right? You put him up. He's like crashing in churches and whatnot around the world. But you fly him around and he's both building his own kind of platform, but he's also raising money for the wider organization and for each of these individual churches.

And this is a whole industry, right? This is like the charismatic pastor industrial complex, pretty much, right? Which is what like Marjo documents and why I recommend watching that documentary. So he's good at preaching to crowds and gathering followers. And it would have been a cinch for him to raise money for mission trips and even convince the leaders of his church to pay for him to go and preach the gospel. He claims that he was ordained at age 18 by an organization called the National Evangelists for Canada. And

And I can't find any evidence that this group exists. People lie about this all the time. But also, the reporting for this comes from a Jamaican news site. And it's based on claims made by Kevin. And based on just the differences in dialect spoken, it's possible that this is a real organization. They just gave kind of a name based on sort of the differences in dialects that made sense to them, but that doesn't directly correspond with what the organization is called in Canada.

Right. Because there's some organizations with similar names. I'm not sure. I don't doubt that he was ordained in some Pentecostal organization or another. It's not like being a priest in the Catholic Church where you have to go through school. Somebody just decides to ordain you and you're ordained and you get maybe a piece of paper or whatever. It's very easy.

It's like my experience with becoming a judge. There you go. Yeah, there you go. His denomination, again, there's no seminary degree required, no qualifications. The Walrus notes that Kevin himself claims, and I'm talking about a news site when I say that, claims that Kevin says that ministers are qualified as ministers when they feel the call of God on their life. And that's pretty consistent in this community. Yeah.

For his part, Kevin would claim that he was around 18 or 19 when his grandfather first saw some of the early preaching he'd done, and during a phone call, informed Kevin that he was a prophet. And I'm going to play you a video of His Excellency Dr. Kevin O. Smith discussing this conversation with his grandfather, because it's about time you get an idea of how this guy sounds and talks. I'm talking to him, 18, 19, talking to Grandpa, and he said, but you are a prophet.

I said, "Grandpa, how do you know I'm a prophet? Who told you?" "Ah, grandson." I said, "Grandpa, may not come in off the phone until you explain to me how you know I'm a prophet." He said, "You're preaching. Your tapes, I have them. I listen to them. I know what a prophet is." And he said, "You are an anointed man of God." My grandfather, who I thought don't know God. He said, "Though I have that sin,

But God opens my understanding to know who will come out of my generation. You are modest to be a evangelist and you are born to be a prophet. And you shall go through it. He said no level of witchcraft shall ever stop you.

What a fun guy. All right, just making some points. Yeah, making some points. No level of witchcraft will stop you. This is something I tell our podcasters very regularly. He looks a little more like the other Kevin Smith than I expected. Ha ha ha!

Yeah, finally a use for AI cut him into all the Jay and Silent Bob movies. Yeah, he looks a little like Silent Bob. Like, I'm surprised. Yeah, not very silent, though. Distinctly loud Bob. Speaking of things that are distinctly loud. But, like, sometimes that's super true because the volume of some of the auto ads are crazy loud for no reason. We have no control over it. Yeah. Yeah.

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Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen. That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon. Just one little spicy off comment. That's all it takes. Everyone loves me at the cancer. And then the Aries comes out and they say, what the fuck is that? No, you're going to come for me being an Aries and you have a Sag moon? Get out of here. I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable.

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And we're back. So. Back again. Yeah, we're back again. Let's keep talking about the other Kevin Smith. Legally, I have to really emphasize it's the other one. Now, that write-up in the Toronto Caribbean newspaper continues. He boasts of the fact that he was the youngest Jamaican-born bishop in Jamaica's church history. Uh.

Kevin completed a Bachelor of Theology degree, a Doctorate degree from Vision International University in Ramona, California, and a Doctor of Ministry from Mount Olive Bible Institute and Seminary in Toronto, Canada. He was a licensed counselor and certified psychotherapist, and that all sounds very impressive. I can verify...

Some of this, but the stuff I can verify doesn't matter. I have no idea if he was the youngest Jamaican born bishop in Jamaica's church history, because again, this is not like the Catholic Church where a bishop is a real position. You can just call yourself a bishop, or you can convince a friend to call you a bishop, and then you're a bishop, right? It's not difficult. Right.

That is so true, Bishop Molly. Yeah, come on, Bishop Sophie. Yes, Bishop Molly, Bishop Sophie. Look, the Pope is a Robert. I think that means I get splash over Pope power. I'm making some fucking secret cardinals. Just a sprinkle of poping. I watched fucking...

I know that I have the power to make secret cardinals that can just pop out at any time. You might be a cardinal listening right now. You have no way of knowing until you like walk into a Catholic church and demand their secret hidden gold, which I assume every Catholic church has.

not an expert on the religion that I'm Pope of. I'm going to find out where the gold is. Yeah, go find out. Get in there. Now, these institutes that he claims to have fancy degrees from are like real, but also not, right? Because this is like whenever you hear a cult leader be like, I'm a doctorate in this, I'm a therapist in this, it's always some kind of fake.

And there's a whole industry in creating fake churches for like evangelical ministers to claim that they've got fancy and impressive degrees.

reporters from Jamaica Observer called Vision University to see if Kevin had received a bachelor and a doctorate there. And quote, we were told that such information could only be provided in response to a written request and only students are allowed to make that request. Now, these guys had reached out. Yeah, they can't even verify that or they won't. But the news reaches out to these guys after he cuts a bunch of people's throats in a church service, right? So Vision International doesn't want to claim him.

So I decided to just like look into the school to see like, is this even a real school? Like, is there a chance anyone has ever earned a real degree from Vision International University? And at the risk of getting sued, I think the answer is no. If you go to their website, they brag that you can, quote, earn an affordable Christian ministry or business degree on your time. And their motto is taking the whole world to the whole world.

Now, I'll have Sophie scroll through the website while we discuss this fine institution in more detail so you can get a look at, yeah, save time and money on your college degree. That always is the first sign of a real college. Yeah.

Yeah, they've got like a lot of good stock photos. There's like a young black lady punching the sky defiantly with her diploma and the claim that Vision International holds prestigious international accreditation from ASIC. Right now, you're wondering what that is, right? Prestigious international accredited. That must mean it's a real school, right? It says it's prestigious. So that's got to be legitimately accredited, right? Right.

Well, I looked into it because I thought that was odd. People who are accredited from legitimate organizations never have to tell you that the accrediting organization is legitimate. That's the first sign that someone's not part of a legitimate accrediting organization. Harvard doesn't brag. As a graduate of podcast university, I don't know what you're talking about. Ah, great movie. Yeah, PCU. Yeah.

I really enjoy this stock photo of this guy. Yeah, the guy holding two degrees or two respected degrees in just two years. And it looks like he's like floating on a cloud. If you go to like Harvard's website, Harvard, number one, will not give you two degrees in two years, but doesn't have to tell you the degrees respected because it's a real school. And even like you go to UTD, right, where I briefly went before dropping out, they never had to brag on their website that they were accredited.

from a real organization because you just know it's a real school. So I googled Vision International University fake and the second search result was the Wikipedia page for list of unaccredited institutions of higher learning, which seemed odd because they ensured us that they were accredited by someone real. Now, the first result when I looked into that was someone on the forum for degreeinfo.com back in 2002 asking, is this a good school or a fraud? And

And someone pointed out that, like, well, they offer a master's in creation science, which means they fall under a religious exemption in California, which is not accreditation, right? It means California can't stop them from giving out religious degrees, but they're not approved by the state as, like, a real college. You just can't stop someone from giving out degrees with titles like master of theology or doctor of ministry. But they're not allowed to give out secular degrees like an MS, a master of science, and they claim to, right? Right.

And one reason I'm interested in this is because there's an attempt within sort of this chunk of the evangelical movement. One reason this is interesting is that there's an attempt within this chunk of the evangelical movement to create people who can get jobs as science teachers, right? Because they have MS degrees and then teach in Christian secondary schools about stuff like creationism, right? So that's what Vision International is doing, but they're not accredited to give out an MS in the state of California, right?

So then I looked into that ASIC accreditation, right, which is how they claim to be a legitimate university. ASIC, ASIC, stands for the Accreditation Service for International Colleges. And this is a real organization. It's a private educational agency in the United Kingdom that is literally based out of a semi-detached duplex residential property and stocked it on tees, which doubles as the residential address for its creators. So,

great, very legitimate organization run out of the home of the people who run it, just like this podcast.

And ASIC's whole business is accrediting private UK colleges for visa purposes. And they are recognized by the UK government in this capacity. But they've been repeatedly criticized for being what's called a runaround accreditor. And another poster from a different thread in Degree Info explains, the key difference is that accreditation in the UK appears vastly different from accreditation in the US. If your UK university has a royal charter, then that's all it really needs to operate.

Accreditation is wholly voluntary and doesn't confer degree-granting authority because that's not how degree-granting authority is conferred in the UK. The issue with ASIC seems to be that some of the schools accredited by them lack institutional accreditation or authority to award degrees in their respective country. So...

Vision International is accredited through ASIC, but ASIC is not approved in the UK to accredit a school. It means a different thing than it does in the US. They have no ability to grant degrees in the US, and they also don't really have the ability to grant degrees that are recognized by the UK. It just means that if you go here, you can get an educational visa in the UK. They're kind of playing with the fact that the same word means different things in two countries. Does that make sense?

Sure. I fell down this wormhole for way too long trying to figure out how this fake college for Christian scam artists works. And so now you're all going to learn about it. Yeah, I'm going to enroll. Yeah. Get your degree for sure. Yes, of course. Get your master of science. I'm going to get two degrees. Double fisting them. This is very classic you. You're like, I suffered. You must suffer. That's you. That's very classic you.

Yeah. Just doing with degrees what punk kids in the early 2000s did with tall boys. Yeah.

What you're doing with Zevia is now. What I'm doing with a Zevia right now. Yeah. So the poster then goes on to discuss Warnborough College in Ireland, which is not a real college. It's not a recognized Institute of Higher Learning in Ireland, but pretends to be because it has an ASIC accreditation. The U.S. Department of Education does not recognize ASIC accreditation, although they might in the future, given where we're headed. Every time you say ASIC, I think of shoes. Is that a shoe brand, Sophie? Yeah.

It certainly is. Yeah. That's a more legitimate company than the ASIC in the UK. They're like good shoes, like good quality, like for your feet and whatnot. Well, this is not a good quality accreditation organization. In 2009, extensive reporting showed that there's some very shady details about how ASIC got recognized in the UK. A journalist named Andrew Norfolk wrote an article on the matter with the title, Man Given Job of Closing Bogus Colleges Was Sacked by University.

And the man who's the founder of ASIC is Maurice Dimmock, who, along with his wife, lives in the detached duplex that doubles as ASIC's headquarters. He had been director of international operations for a real school, Northumbria University, until 2003, when he was fired for reasons neither he or the school will ever discuss, which I'm sure means good things. Always not shady when your school won't even tell anyone why they fired you. I'm sure no crimes were committed.

Somehow, the UK Home Office ignored numerous concerns and complaints about this guy and gave his company the job of determining which private colleges were real for visa purposes. And ASIC accredited 180 schools in its first two years. The Times reports, among them is a Manchester college that the Times exposed last month as the front for an immigration scam, which helped a thousand fake students enter or stay in Britain.

Another in London issued more than 2,500 bogus postgraduate diplomas in two months last year, earning its owners, who have fled the country, an estimated £5 million.

So great organization, very real school. That's what we can say, is that Kevin Smith gets his doctorate from an entirely real university. And again, it's important to discuss this, even though we're getting a little bit off topic from the other Kevin Smith, because every one of these abusive Christian cult leaders you come across today has some kind of PhD or other fancy sounding degree from one of these fake schools. There's a whole ton of them.

One of the claims I found is that Vision International, around 2002, was claiming to have 4,000 campuses in more than 100 countries. And to the best of my knowledge, Vision has 30 full and part-time employees, which it's hard to keep 4,000 campuses operative on 30 employees. And it kind of seems like they're just counting everyone who registered online as a campus. Like you're a campus for Vision International University if you log on with your laptop, whatever coffee shop you're in is a campus. Yeah.

I need to start a fake college. Like, Sophie, we gotta get in on this fucking racket. We're not doing that. There's a lot of money. We're not going full Tate. I'm sorry. Molly, do you like the sound of Professor Lambert? You could be giving out doctorates in like 45 minutes. Sorry, that's Bishop Dr. Lambert.

Come on, I'm a bishop. Dr. Bishop Lambert, yeah. You could give out, what kind of degree would you want to hand out to people? What would you feel confident giving, like in terms of doctorates?

I mean, whatever they'll give me money for, right? That's how we're going to do this. Scam. Yeah, yeah. I mean, college. Scam college. I'd like to make surgeons. Like, that feels satisfying to know I'd created a lot of surgeons who are going out there cutting into people. You know, as long as I get to a non-extradition country very quickly after handing out 4,000 or so diplomas. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

So, I should also note that initially, Vision University was an offshoot of a Pentecostal school in Tasmania, founded by an Australian pastor named Ken Chant. And I just mentioned that because I found a photo of him that I have to show you guys. It's really kind of funny. Hey, Ken. Look at that mustache. It's beautiful.

All right, he looks cool. He does look cool. That's a sweet-ass mustache. Ken Chant is a great name, too. Ken Chant, too. Solid name. I'm happy with him. I mean, Chant. It's right in the name. Yeah, right? Yeah, it's a perfect name for an evangelical pastor. Yeah. Especially with a soup strainer like that. The acoustics had to be great, you know? It would act like having, like, baffling panels on your ceiling. I trust him. Yeah, he seems legitimate. Yeah.

So I said we'd get back to Kevin Smith, the bad one, and I meant it. But I also kept running across funny stuff about this school that I didn't know where to stop.

According to the 1994 edition of Name It and Frame It by Stephen Levikoff, which is a book about fake colleges, Vision, quote, also offers a special additional 10% tuition reduction for students who enroll within the next 30 days, which is a real sign that someone's got an actual college going. Real colleges give you bonuses like that, right? Sign up in 30 days and get 10% off.

Okay, now, back to Kevin for realsies. In addition to his definitely fake degree, he claimed to attend Tyndale University, which is a real and respected private evangelical Christian university. He also claims to have a doctorate of ministry from Mount Olive Bible Institute in Toronto, which seems to be about as real as vision, but has a very similar name to an actual college that's in the United States, which I think is the point.

And laying out Kevin's educational history, The Walrus, who is again a Canadian news site, noted, while he has referred to himself as a registered clinical counselor and sought after holistic psychotherapist, he has never been registered with the College of Registered Psychotherapists in Ontario. So he's a Christian psychotherapist, which is different from being a psychotherapist in the way that any medical establishment recognizes.

Now, while he's getting all these fake degrees and maybe one real degree, in addition to several other questionable certifications, Smith grew up and seems to have made his living operating a ministry in Toronto and traveling around the world to give speeches at different churches. Sometime around the turn of the millennium, he founds his own ministry, which he calls KOS Deliverance International. And the initials KOS is just the initials of his name.

On August 22nd, 2006, he returns from one of his overseas preaching trips to the UK. The Walrus writes, quote,

I would need him to be as inconspicuous as possible because I live straight and I'm a Christian, Smith would recall. There was a conflict happening inside of me, in essence, to what I was going to do or not do. Now, what he did, according to Matt's allegations, is sexually assault Matt, who goes to the police the next day. Smith is arrested and charged.

He would later claim that Canadian police tried to use his Jamaican ancestry and the local stigma against homosexuality in Jamaica against him. And he claims he told them gays are just people who need redirection, which doesn't do a great job of making me more sympathetic to his case.

But he's been accused basically of calling this guy in and then sexually assaulting him, right? Now, the case, these allegations against him wind through the Canadian court system for the next several months. And the next year, in early 2007, he gets married, and possibly as a way to kind of distract from the fact that this is really bad PR to his ministry.

he's either 18 or 25 when he gets married. I found different things on different news sites. It kind of depends on whether or not he was actually born in 1982 or not. Whatever the case, this marriage does not seem to have really been like

It certainly doesn't last. There's debate as to whether or not it was legitimate. They very quickly split in the Walrus rights. Smith's ex-wife described him as verbally abusive and someone who lied about his private life. He is not living an honest life, she would later recall, according to court records. And the Toronto Caribbean's reporting adds, there have been allegations that his wife caught him having sexual relations with men. She reported it to senior ministers in the church organizations, but they denied it and there were no reprimand or consequences.

So, you know, not a story we've ever heard before anywhere else. Wow. Powerful up-and-coming guy gets caught violating the tenets of his religion for personal reasons and also violating a sex worker. And it all gets smoothed over because, hey, you know, he brings in money. Probably shouldn't segue to ads with that, but they also bring in money. Wow. Here's ads. Wow.

Right.

That is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. Right? There's nothing like having Casamigos at a party with your friends. That makes sense, seeing as Casamigos' whole vibe is friendship. It's literally in the name. I didn't realize that.

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We're back.

So I know the timeline is kind of screwy here. When he gets married, how old he is. You know, this is a guy who gives multiple versions of different stories and different news reports I see give different things. I don't actually know what's objectively the truth. I haven't seen a birth certificate here.

But, you know, basically one of two things happens. Either he marries this lady to try to distract from the scandal or they had been they get married and stay that way for years. But she had seen signs that he was kind of living a lie and eventually tries to report them. In either case, the two of them split up and he goes on trial later in 2007 for sexual assault. And this trial, we can confirm, absolutely happened. Right.

There's plenty of court records in Canada over it. During the trial, Smith identifies himself as an international minister of religion who had preached in 300 different cities. He says, Smith's lawyer denied that anything non-consensual had happened, and under oath, he claimed that Matt had tried to extort him for money during a private religious counseling session.

Quote, the prosecutor in her closing argument shredded Smith's testimony. His life and his platform is a facade, she said. Mr. Smith's reputation and his public persona are his primary concern, and he will go to any extent to preserve that facade. In the end, the judge found Smith guilty of sexual assault, sentencing him to six months in jail, followed by two months of probation. Mr. Smith, it seems to me, the judge said, to quote a parable, might be viewed as a wolf in sheep's clothing. Wow.

Yeah, and she's got it right here. She has definitely locked this guy's number down. Unfortunately, she's going to be the last person to clock him for a while, and he is going to basically, as soon as he splits up with his wife, flee the country, right? So he leaves Canada for Jamaica. He breaches the terms of his probation. He's supposed to attend counseling, and he's like, no, I'm just going to go back to Jamaica and start a church there.

And he's going to remain in Jamaica for the next six years, where he starts a local church and he burrows into the Pentecostal community, and he starts accruing clout followers and eventually wealth.

So that's where we are at the end of part one. And this is going to lead us to what I would describe as a shockingly bloody conclusion to come in part two. Where this where this one ends is is pretty fucking intense. But Molly, that's what we got for the start of this this episode. How you feeling as we sort of close out part one?

I truly don't know where this is going, so... A lot of people getting their throats slit. Oh, no. Yeah, yeah. Like a weird number. Which would be anything higher than one. Okay. Yeah. I guess let's find out. Yeah, I guess let's find out. And that's the episode. Go home. We should plug Jake Anderhan's new project. Oh, yeah. Jake's got a new podcast, Away Days. Check it out on wherever our podcasts exist. Yeah.

Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that.

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I think...

A lot of people think that you're supposed to be going to therapy once you're like having panic attacks every day. But before you get to that point, I think once you start even noticing that you feel a little bit off and you can't maintain this harmony that you once had in relationships, that could be a sign that maybe you want to go talk to somebody.

There's always a benefit in talking to someone because we can all benefit from improved insight about ourselves and who we are and how we behave with other people. So if you're human, that's like a good indicator that you could benefit from talking to somebody. Find out if therapy is right for you. Visit BetterHelp.com today. That's BetterHelp.com.

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