Since the Department of Justice launched a probe of the Southern Baptist Convention, they managed to arrest one man: Matt Queen. Queen worked for Southwestern Seminary in Texas and was accused by the Southern District of New York of providing falsified information to the FBI pertaining to the investigation. The details pertain to falsified notes that Queen has since confessed to fabricating.
The nature of the investigation dealt with a November 2022 alleged rape involving Christian Flores, a an undergraduate student who was arrested in January of 2023. Flores has been accused of felony sexual assault, which is the formal charge of rape. He was arrested by Burleson PD, which is 11 miles away from Southwestern. There is nothing to suggest that the alleged incident took place on campus. The cover-up involves Southwestern allegedly knowing about the assault at the time of the incident rather than learning about it at the time of the arrest, where Flores was subsequently suspended from the college. The details on the report remain unknown, but it is credible that Southwestern knew something before the Flores’s arrest, which then became the subject of the FBI’s probe.
Initially, the FBI alleged that Heath Woolman, the former chief of staff of the seminary, asked Terri Stovall to make the report “go away” during a meeting where Queen was present. In the first interview with the FBI, Queen denied hearing the order. In a subsequent interview three days later, Queen used falsified notes to change the story to where it was suggested that instead of deleting the report, they would defer it elsewhere. The actions of Queen on May 26, 202,3 resulted in the indictment. Queen worked at Southwestern until June of 2023 and Queen was briefly a pastor at Friendly Avenue Baptist Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, only to resign back in November of 2024 due to the indictment.
Having pled guilty, Judge Lewis Kaplan sentenced Queen to six months of house arrest, one year of probation, and a $2,000 fine and required Queen to also participate in an “outpatient mental health treatment program.” The sentence was in line with the sentencing recommendations of the DOJ.
Analysis
The actions of Matt Queen were senseless as he unlikely would have suffered any legal repercussions had he answered honestly, plead the 5th, or “not remembered” any details. Instead, perhaps out of a desire to protect the reputation of Southwestern or Woolman, he soiled his character and endured years of legal consequences. Heath Woolman has not been charged, which is likely because the case against him is weak. The sexual abuse hawks will attempt to claim Queen was covering up a rape, which is not factual since Flores was already charged and after two years, there is no reported conviction. Southwestern has a tainted reputation due to Paige Patterson, who was ultimately removed for not believing women with the proper passion. While time will vindicate Patterson, Queen will unlikely recover.
As for the Department of Justice, there was no reason for them to have taken up interest in this matter at all, except for the fact that they wanted to claim a scalp over the SBC abuse “scandals.” Thus far, this is the only arrest and sentencing they have achieved after investigating the SBC, and really, the only reason they were able to make the arrest was that the criminal was an idiot who went out of his way to incriminate himself. Taxpayer money was wasted on an investigation which resulted in a guilty plea over obstruction where no other underlying federal crime was committed. Tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands were spent all to sentence a man to a $2,000 fine.
The Southern Baptist Convention chose to self-flagellate themselves as a haven of abuse, much to the damage of their reputation. It has wasted tens of millions in lawsuits over the Guidepost Solution’s report labeling several men as abusers for unproven and even consensual allegations. This is what attracted the ire of the SDNY. The actions of a dirty Hispanic college student are not reflective of the Southern Baptist Convention nor Southwestern Seminary, but institutional incompetence appears to be a widespread problem.
