Austin Church Director Accused Of Sex Incident Cover-Up On Leave

NORTH AUSTIN, TX — A North Austin area church director has been placed on leave after a woman revealed online he urged her to remain silent about being allegedly sexually assaulted by a youth minister in her youth, according to a published report.

The accuser, Jules Woodson, revealed in a recent blog post that Tennessee megachurch pastor Andy Savage forced her to perform oral sex on him in 1998 when she was 17 and he was a 22-year-old youth pastor at Parkway Baptist Church in The Woodlands, a community north of Houston.

The woman said she approached the then-associate pastor of Parkway Baptist Church, Larry Cotton — now working in Austin — to discuss the incident with him, she wrote in her blog post. Instead of support, the woman claims Cotton inferred she consented to the incident before urging her to keep quiet.

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“He said something to the effect of, ‘So you’re telling me you participated?’ " Woodson wrote. "I remember feeling like my heart had just sunk to the floor. What was he asking? More importantly, what was he trying to imply? This wave of shame came over me, greater than I had ever felt before. I had just gotten done telling him everything that Andy, my youth pastor, asked me to do.”

The former youth pastor has since publicly apologized before his flock for what he termed a "sexual incident," a confession for which he was given extended applause and a standing ovation from parishioners at Memphis-based Highpoint Church where he serves as pastor. As for Cotton — who's been working at the Austin Stone Community Church, which lists a North campus at 1150 McNeil Rd. in Round Rock — he's now been placed on leave after the victim's outcry, according to a report in the Austin American-Statesman.

Officials at the Austin church issued a statement: “We grieve for what happened to Jules Woodson. It was wrong and unjust; we cannot overly express our sadness for what this woman experienced in God’s church.”

Church officials added they would secure the services of a third party to objectively assess Cotton's qualifications for his role in the church "...in order to remove our potential bias from the situation," they explained.

Cotton's picture and bio have since been removed from the Austin Stone Community Church website. But a screen shot preserved by the Statesman identifies him as director of the internship and residency program, a role that "...provides leadership development for men and women who are qualified and called to lead in the church, the marketplace, nonprofit organizations or the nations."

>>> Read the full story at Austin American-Statesman

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