WARNING: The following report contains sexually graphic language.

June 7, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Recently declassified FBI documents suggest civil rights religious hero Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a sexual predator who preyed on dozens of women. FBI transcripts of secret audio recordings of King’s private life allegedly reveal a man who exploited his fame and status to commit heinous sexual acts with countless women across the country, including allegedly witnessing another minister forcibly rape a “parishioner” while King “looked on, laughed and offered advice.” The FBI documented King's sexual exploits in the 1960’s up until his assassination in 1968.

David J. Garrow, a left-wing scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of King, uncovered evidence of King as a “sexual libertine” while combing through a trove of newly-released FBI documents that were included in the "John F. Kennedy" files maintained by the National Archives. The files were released online in 2017 and 2018.

The FBI had been wiretapping King’s hotel rooms looking for evidence that he was connected to the “Communist Party.” What they found instead was evidence of King’s sexual "degeneracy and depravity" that included hiring prostitutes, partaking in violent sex orgies, engaging in “unnatural sex” practices, and offering advice to a friend as he raped a woman. It is suspected that King’s sex abuse involves 40 to 50 women, almost all of them black. It is the written records of the wire-tapping that have been released. The audio tapes themselves, which are the basis for the transcripts and would verify their veracity, are sealed until 2027.

Garrow presents all of this information in his May 30 article, "The troubling legacy of Martin Luther King," linking to numerous FBI source documents. He relates how in one instance that took place in January 1964, King and friends went to visit in a wire-tapped hotel room in Washington with a fellow minister, Logan Kearse, who a brought “several women ‘parishioners’ of his church.”

“‘The group met in his [Kearse’] room and discussed which women among the parishioners would be suitable for natural or unnatural sex acts. When one of the women protested that she did not approve of this, the Baptist minister immediately and forcibly raped her,’ the typed summary states, parenthetically citing a specific FBI document (100-3-116-762) as its source. ‘King looked on, laughed and offered advice,’ Sullivan or one of his deputies then added in handwriting,” writes Garrow, quoting from the FBI transcripts.

Garrow relates another instance when King and company participated in a “sex orgy” with 12 people at another wire-tapped hotel.

“At the Willard Hotel, King and his friends’ activities resumed the following evening as approximately 12 individuals ‘participated in a sex orgy,’” he writes, quoting the FBI material. FBI agents described what they witnessed as “acts of degeneracy and depravity.”

“When one of the women shied away from engaging in an unnatural act, King and several of the men discussed how she was to be taught and initiated in this respect. King told her that to perform such an act would ‘help your soul,’” states the FBI document.

“King announced that he preferred to perform unnatural acts on women and that he had started the ‘International Association for the Advancement of Pussy Eaters’,” the FBI transcript states.

Comments Garrow: “Anyone familiar with King’s often-bawdy sense of humour would not doubt that quotation.”

Garrow quotes one FBI agent who interviewed 28-year-old white prostitute Gail LaRue, a mother to four children, about a violent sexual encounter she and a friend had simultaneously with King.

Stated the FBI report about the May, 1964 interview: “Gail stated to this investigator that ‘that was the worst orgy I’ve ever gone through’,” adding that “she had declined a subsequent request.”

While King’s cheating on his wife was generally a well-known fact, this newly revealed information requires what Garrow suggests must be a “painful historical reckoning” with who King really was.

“King’s far-from monogamous lifestyle, like his binge-drinking, may fit albeit uncomfortably within his existing life story, but the suggestion—actually more than one—that he either actively tolerated or personally employed violence against any woman, even while drunk, poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible,” he wrote.

Garrow related earlier this week that he was forced to publish his work in Britain’s Standpoint magazine after U.S. left-leaning mainstream media sources, including New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, LA Times, and the Guardian refused to publish his discovery of King’s secret sex life as found in the FBI transcripts. The Atlantic even published a piece defending why it refused to publish the report, citing that it wanted more than a transcript, but the “audiotapes” which are sealed until 2027. The Washington Post later headlined a piece about Garrow’s discoveries with the word “Irresponsible” followed by “Historians attack David Garrow’s MLK allegations.”

While Garrow makes it clear that the veracity of the transcripts will not be known until 2027 when the audio files are unsealed, he argues there is nothing to suggest the transcripts are not genuine. He acknowledges that the FBI had a vendetta against King, even sending King a suicide letter with instructions that there is "one thing left for you to do. You know what it is."

The document’s recently-released final pages, narrating events until March 30, 1968, suggest that the unfinished revision was abandoned following King’s assassination on April 4. Without question Sullivan and his aides had both the microphone-transmitted tape-recording, and a subsequent full transcript at hand while they were annotating their existing typescript; in 1977 Justice Department investigators would publicly attest to how their own review of both the tapes and the transcripts showed them to be genuine and accurate. Throughout the 1960s, when no precedent for the public release of FBI documents existed or was even anticipated, Sullivan could not have imagined that his and his aides’ jottings would ever see the light of day. Similarly, they would not have had any apparent motive for their annotations to inaccurately embellish upon the actual recording and its full transcript, both of which remain under court seal and one day will confirm or disprove the FBI’s summary allegation.

Garrow admits in the end that the "new hoard of largely-unredacted, previously unreleased FBI documents raises more questions than can presently be answered."

'Sexual abuse of women'

Garrow, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has been accused by voices on the left in veiled language of contributing to racism through the publication of the FBI information. The historian, however, defended himself, saying that the information on King should not be looked at in terms of the “racial context,” but in terms of “gender.”

“What has more and more stood out to me is that we need to look at this behavior in the context of gender, in terms of the abuse of women, because that’s what we see here, whether with the prostitute or with the woman who was allegedly raped in this group scene at the Willard Hotel,” he told Dominic Green of The Green Room during a podcast this week.

“Everything we’ve seen here in the United States for the past two years has, again and again, highlighted what a deep extensive history there is of the mistreatment of women by powerful men. And, in this material, that maltreatment of women is especially the case with these mostly, except for the prostitute, being black women,” he added.

“So, I think the fundamental issue that is raised by my account, that is raised by these documents, has more to do with the sexual abuse of women than with questions of race.”

'Devastated by revelations'

Pro-life leader Ryan Bomberger, chief creative officer of The Radiance Foundation, told LifeSiteNews that King's achievements "can, and must" still be celebrated, but one can no longer "ignore the personal failures."

"I know the memories of our historical heroes are sacrosanct. Some feel that addressing their flaws will erase or diminish their achievements. While I have celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s history-changing rhetoric on individual and societal morality and his sacrificial actions in the fight for justice, I’ve grown increasingly disturbed by his own reprehensible moral failings. From plagiarism in his doctoral work and his historic 'I Have a Dream' speech, to his denial of the inherent Divinity of Christ, to his confused and uninformed promotion of Planned Parenthood, allowing his acceptance (via his wife, Coretta) of the inaugural 1966 Margaret Sanger Award, I’ve had deep concerns about this civil rights champion," he said.

"These latest revelations of King’s prevalent infidelity to godly character only reinforce the reality that his public virtuousness didn’t match his private vileness. I’m no advocate of purging flawed American figures from the public square; it would make for a vast empty space. But I don’t support sanitizing the lives of people like MLK. I won’t pretend his FBI-documented multiple affairs (including reportedly laughing while witnessing rape) and character contradictions don’t severely clash with a call to righteousness and justice. It comes down to integrity. (Of course, with the years-long Russia collusion hoax obsession, the FBI’s own integrity is questionable.)," he continued.

"We can, and must, still celebrate his achievements but cannot ignore the personal failures. There has to be a congruency between what people say and what they do. As a husband and father of four, this truth is essential," he added.

Princeton University professor Robert P. George and Rev. Eugene F. Rivers, in a piece published June 3 in The Public Discourse, related how they were “devastated by these revelations” of King treating women as “mere sex objects,” adding that the revelations “lowered King in our estimation.”

“As he traveled the country, he sought out women to use for nothing more than sexual pleasure; he took advantage of his stature and fame to seduce them; he participated in orgies; and, as we’ve noted, there is evidence that he allowed a colleague to force himself on an unwilling woman—indeed, a woman who objected to being asked to perform an immoral act,” they wrote.

“All of this is to be condemned. It is to be condemned unequivocally—no ifs, ands, or buts. It was against the biblical Christian faith that King presented himself as holding and in whose name he spoke against racial injustice. It was against the natural moral law, which he rightly invoked in denouncing segregation and Jim Crow. It was against the Gospel proclaimed then and now by faithful Christians of all traditions and, with special force, by those of the Black church tradition which King inherited from his father, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr.,” they continued.

George and Rivers stated, however, that “knowing the truth about King” in no way “diminishes our esteem for him, negate his work and witness in the cause of racial justice.”

“What King said about racism and segregation was true: they are contrary to the biblical teaching that each and every human being is made in the image and likeness of God and is, as such, the bearer of inherent and equal dignity; they violate the natural law,” they write.

George and Rivers argue that King should not be stripped of his “honors for his wrongdoing.”

“Shocked by what has recently come to light, some may call for monuments to King to be taken down and for boulevards, schools, and the like that are named in his honor to be renamed. We ask our fellow citizens not to go down this road. The monuments and honors are obviously not for King’s objectification and exploitation of women, but for his leadership and courage in the fight for racial justice. Everyone understands that. Future generations will understand it too,” they write.

The revelations of King’s sexual exploitation of women comes at a time when big names within the Catholic Church have suffered a fall from fame due to the revelation of their own secret sex lives. Such people include former cardinal Theodore McCarrick and now-deceased founder of the Legionaries of Christ Marcial Maciel.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh suggested in a May 30 report that instead of erasing King from memory for his sins, people should “humanize” him by acknowledging his “darker elements.”

“We do not justify their sins or rationalize them. We discuss them, openly and honestly. And we don't look to turn them into cartoon villains, either. We see them as men — nothing more or less than that,” he wrote.

“If they achieved great things, if they managed feats that few could manage, if they altered the course of human history, then we honor those accomplishments and perhaps even build statues in remembrance. We don't erase anyone from the history books just because they had personal flaws — even very serious flaws. But perhaps we add another page or two. We keep the monuments because the monuments are part of our history and culture, but we keep in mind that the person commemorated by the monument was just that — a person. And that is how we think of them and remember them.”

Rod Dreher commented in The American Conservative on May 26 that it would be “immoral to overlook” the new revelations on King.

“The greatness of what King achieved in American history cannot be gainsaid. But like so many other great men, he was profoundly flawed. It is immoral to overlook or dismiss the women King exploited and possibly even abused (watching with lascivious relish as a pastor colleague raped a church lady) for the sake of protecting an idol,” he wrote.

“As Standpoint‘s editor wrote, if we are going to tell the ugly truth about sexually abusive churchmen, then we have no good reason to lie when one of them is named the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King,” he added.