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When Elise Heerde mustered up the courage to report a pastoral care leader at Hillsong church who had stalked and sexually assaulted her, she was threatened with losing her job.
Then, she was urged to forgive the man who had abused her. Senior clergy at the Pentecostal megachurch, where she was working at the time, warned her against going to the police and “bringing shame to God’s church”.
The clergy also attempted to reframe the grooming and sexual abuse the mother-of-one had endured as an “affair”, and then put her in further danger when they told her perpetrator she had reported him.
The 39-year-old, who had been a devoted congregation member and staff member of Hillsong for years, was devastated.
The man, who cannot be legally named due the Spent Convictions Act, was appointed by Hillsong with providing Heerde with pastoral care and support after she had sought help from the church following years of overwork and personal strain.
In her written submission to the Victorian government inquiry into cults and fringe groups last October, Heerde revealed how he had groomed and stalked her, and psychologically, emotionally and sexually abused her.
She also detailed how he found out where she lived, sent screenshots of her house on Google Maps, and flooded her with messages at all hours, leaving her paralysed with fear.
“It was a big decision to go public with my personal story,” Heerde said.
“It was such a relief to finally have a safe space to be able to say exactly what happened without having the church be able to sue me for telling the truth.”
Now, Heerde is among a growing number of survivors calling for a broadening of coercive control laws to cover religious settings, fringe groups and cults.
At the moment, criminal coercive control laws are used largely in domestic violence cases, but Heerde wants the laws expanded to include extreme religious sects and high-demand groups.
As previously reported by this masthead, an expansion of the coercive control laws could allow greater powers for “cult-like” leaders to be held accountable.
Coercive control refers to a sustained pattern of controlling, threatening or humiliating behaviour.
Heerde said she endured a pattern of coercive control during her time at Hillsong and when she disclosed the sexual abuse she was threatened, blamed for the abuse and silenced by non-disclosure agreements and non-disparagement clauses in her staff contract.
“This experience was not only traumatic, it was emblematic of the institutional betrayal, gendered power imbalance, and coercive manipulation that pervaded Hillsong and I believe Hillsong globally,” Heerde said.
“It demonstrated that even in the face of serious criminal conduct, the priority was never truth, justice, or care.
“The priority was to protect the church’s reputation, discredit the victim, and maintain power at all costs.”
In recent years, Hillsong’s reputation has been rocked by scandals, including allegations of child abuse and sexual assault, racial discrimination and claims of extreme labour exploitation of young volunteers.
Heerde eventually sought assistance from police and reported the sexual abuse.
Court documents seen by The Age show Heerde’s perpetrator was criminally charged with sexual assault and pleaded guilty in 2021 at the Bendigo Magistrates’ Court.
He was given a good behaviour bond, and no conviction was recorded.
But months after facing the courts, he left Hillsong and quietly moved to another network of more than 100 Christian churches and agencies, which was unaware of his sexual abuse offending.
There, he was counselling vulnerable church members in a senior safeguarding and professional standards role and training pastors on how to deal with complaints of abuse.
“I was horrified,” Heerde said. “It just keeps putting victims in harm’s way while perpetrators are allowed to just move on to the next place.”
She wants to see an end to “cover-ups” among religious organisations that for years have allowed perpetrators to move from church to church.
At his new church, Heerde’s abuser was appointed as support contact for a Melbourne man who had raised a historical complaint to the church.
He said was alarmed when he learned of his support person’s past.
“It was like a re-traumatisation in a way because this guy was a predator who was handling complaints of abuse at a denominational level,” he said.
A spokesman for the church that employed Heerde’s abuser said as soon as the organisation became aware of the man’s offending it appointed an external law firm to conduct a thorough investigation.
He said the man was no longer an employee of the church, nor an endorsed minister, and misconduct of any kind was unacceptable.
“It has no place in our community, and [the church network] acknowledges the impact it has on the lives of those it affects and their families and friends,” he said.
“[The church] undertakes due diligence as part of its employment policy and conducts appropriate police checks.”
Heerde’s abuser is listed on the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission as a public officer for yet another church in Melbourne.
Heerde now works as a mental health practitioner specialising in religious trauma and cult recovery.
She estimated there were thousands of cult victims in Victoria who have escaped highly controlling religious groups and told the inquiry last year this included “hundreds” of people linked to Christian megachurch Hillsong.
Every week, she hears from people whose experience mirrored her own including tactics such as “love bombing”, used to recruit new worshippers, and what she described as obedience and fear disguised as faith, which form a troubling pattern of coercive control.
Heerde, who is the co-founder of the Religious Trauma Collective (Australia/New Zealand), is pushing to raise awareness of the prevalence and growing threat of group-based coercive control, particularly among faith-based organisations and cults.
“The first thing that we really want people to understand is that cults aren’t about belief,” she said.
“It’s a matter of sustained, patterned coercive tactics, over multiple domains of someone’s life that amounts to totalistic control.”
Heerde is also calling for the appointment of an independent commissioner, who could oversee all elements of such laws.
It mirrored safeguards in other countries, including Austria, where there is a federal office for cult affairs.
“This is not a fringe issue,” she said. “These are not isolated behaviours, they are systemic tactics of group-based coercive control operating in plain sight within socially legitimised mainstream institutions.”
A Victorian government spokesman said the government would carefully consider all recommendations in the parliamentary inquiry’s final report.
“In all its forms, coercive control is insidious, abusive and manipulative,” he said. “We stand side by side with victim-survivors and recognise their pain.”
Hillsong church did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114.
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