Tawdry truth or 'Pimp'ing a ride?

SHE WAS a 36-year-old mother of four seeking a father figure after a fatherless childhood, still dealing with her psychological wounds from being raped repeatedly at the age of 11 by her mother's boyfriend, and was emotionally raw, vulnerable, looking for a man she could trust.

He was a 52-year-old pastor/counselor, a married father of four, charismatic, wanting to know every detail of her psychological scars, quoting Scripture, seemingly offering her the solace and the wisdom she so desperately sought.

Then one day, says Shannon Bellamy, instead of the usual goodbye hug after their usual counseling session in his church office, pastor Kenneth Glenn Caines "kissed me and stuck his tongue down my throat."

"I thought it was grotesque," Bellamy told the Daily News. "He was the father in my life. It had gotten to a place where I was calling him my godfather. I was so floored, I just walked out the door of his office. It was like being in shock."

She remembers leaving Sharon Baptist Church - a mega-sized Wynnefield Heights sanctuary surrounded by fenced grounds on Conshohocken Avenue near Cranston Road - in a daze.

Soon afterward, Bellamy said, her pastor initiated a steamy, adulterous affair with her that is the focus of both her self-published book, "Pimps in the Pulpit," and the multimillion-dollar lawsuit she filed in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court against Caines, the bishop he reported to and Sharon Baptist Church.

Lambasting Bellamy's allegations, George Bochetto, the defense attorney representing Sharon Baptist Church and its head pastor, Bishop Keith W. Reed Sr., called Bellamy "absolutely the poster child for opportunism."

"Whatever her reasons are, she thinks that she can bring on and engage in a situation of her own doing, and then turn it into gold," Bochetto said. "It is terribly unfortunate that she's chosen to go that route."

So is Bellamy the vulnerable victim of a predatory pastor, or is she a golddigger who lured a too-passionate preacher to stray?

"Pastor Caines knew that my father had been killed in a motorcycle accident before I ever got to know him, and that I had been looking for a trustworthy, supportive, fatherly connection all my life," Bellamy said recently on the sidewalk outside Sharon Baptist Church.

She was standing beside her black SUV, which displays her book's eye-popping cover graphic of a pastor whose upturned eyes gaze at the words "PIMPS in the Pulpit," with "PIMPS" sparkling like a Vegas Strip marquee.

"Through our counseling sessions," Bellamy said, "Pastor Caines knew I had been raped as a child. He knew I had been married three times. He knew I had gone through a long, nasty divorce with a man who had blackened both my eyes. . . . He knew I was in pain."

Bellamy said Caines made his move when she was at a low point of her life - she'd lost her lucrative job as a real-estate agent when the housing market collapsed, and she was facing eviction.

She said that Caines, in his role as her pastor and counselor, came over to help her move, found her distraught and tearful, started kissing her and, according to the lawsuit, "things progressed rapidly to the point where the next thing she could really remember was being on the floor and having sex with her counselor, Pastor Caines."

Bellamy said: "I'm sitting there, like, what the hell just happened? It suddenly hit me. My pastor had violated me."

In a chapter titled, "Monica Lewinsky T-shirt," Bellamy describes bagging her semen-stained shirt "for DNA evidence in the event he denied what had happened between us."

Both "Pimps in the Pulpit" and Bellamy's lawsuit allege that Caines convinced Bellamy that a sexual relationship was part of his holistic healing of her stressed-out spirit.

Bellamy said she soon fell in love with her pastor, and provided the Daily News with photos of their sharing a romantic getaway in the U.S. Virgin Islands - where Caines was officiating at a wedding after allegedly convincing his wife not to accompany him.

"I put candles all over, rose petals on the floor and bed, pulled out the Pina Colada warming oil, lingerie, Canoodle game, 269 sex-play game, and sprayed the bed with perfume," Bellamy writes.

Her descriptions of Caines as a sexual "energizer bunny" are mixed with her distress over having sex with her married pastor. Predictably, it ended badly.

"He took advantage of me when I was at rock-bottom and vulnerable," Bellamy says today. "He was a master manipulator when it comes to the mind."

Bellamy alleges that Caine's control over her was so strong that he convinced her to abort the child she had conceived with her husband, who had returned home after military duty in Germany; to divorce her husband; and to have breast augmentation and tummy-tuck surgery - which endangered her life when she developed post-op blood clots in both lungs.

"People talk about this kind of affair being mutual consent, but there is no such thing as mutual consent for a minister because he's in the position of power," said Joe E. Trull, longtime editor of the "Christian Ethics Today" journal, a Baptist-seminary ethics professor and the man who literally wrote the book on "Ministerial Ethics."

"If pastors cross their boundaries, they should lose their license to practice, just like doctors, lawyers and psychological counselors would. Show me the exception clause in the Ten Commandments," he said, referring to the Biblical ban on adultery.

Trull said that sex between pastors and church members "is much more prevalent than most people realize."

In his book, he cites a 1993 report in "The Journal of Pastoral Care" that found that 14 percent of 1,000 randomly selected Southern Baptist pastors anonymously admitted engaging in "inappropriate sexual behavior," and 70.4 percent knew about other pastors who had engaged in "inappropriate sexual contact" with churchgoers.

"A woman like [Bellamy] is vulnerable because she's going through emotional problems," Trull said. "She comes to her minister with her most intimate difficulties. She is often so wounded that she is easily taken advantage of. The minister who is a predator re-victimizes the victim."

Bellamy ended the affair with Caines in 2008, wrote her tell-all book last fall, and filed a civil suit in January against Caines, Sharon Baptist Church and the church's head pastor, Reed, alleging that the church and its leader did not intervene immediately after learning of the affair.

Bellamy is asking for $20 million in exemplary/punitive damages for "bodily harm, severe emotional distress, humiliation, mental pain and anguish."

Bochetto, speaking in Sharon Baptist's defense, said that the church acted responsibly. "When it learned of a consensual relationship of whatever degree and whatever dimension, it took the appropriate action," he said. "The church, once it learned of the situation, met with the pastor, and the pastor has been relieved of his responsibilities."

Instead of accepting the church's handling of the affair, Bochetto said, "Ms. Bellamy has chosen to try to turn it into a media circus.

"She's got her own Web site [www.shannonbellamy.com], her own blog, she's been on radio shows, her panel truck has her 'Pimps in the Pulpit' mantra printed all over it, she does book signings, she sends out press releases - she's done everything conceivable to turn this thing into a money-making opportunity.

"Her lawyer has demanded $20 million," Bochetto said. "Her lawyer indicated in writing that if the church did not meet [Bellamy's] $20 million demand, she would make life miserable for the church."

The church, he said, will defend itself. "There are definitely two sides to this pancake," he said. "We believe that the pastor maybe got caught up in a situation that is a little too fast-moving for him, and maybe got taken to the hen house by the fox," Bochetto said.

"This Ms. Bellamy was barely a member for a matter of months before this got stirred up by her. It's not like she's a 20-year member who has been in the choir and on committees and done all sorts of wonderful things in the church. This is a virtual carpetbagger."

Several attempts to reach Caines were unsuccessful. His attorney, Carolyn H. Nichols, acknowledged that Caines and Bellamy had a relationship, but said that it wasn't characterized by "the kind of Svengali machinations" that Bellamy alleges.

"She's a competent, legal adult who entered into that relationship, and was aggressive and active in that relationship," Nichols said, stressing that Caines did not use his role as pastor to force the relationship upon Bellamy.

"What she's saying ain't necessarily so," Nichols said. "He certainly participated in an extramarital affair, and that happens. But this whole business of somehow there was some kind of Svengali mind-control twist is not true at all because you can see from her Web site, she's a very forceful person.

"She presents herself as a strong black woman, and on and on and on. You can't have it both ways. You can't articulate this forceful persona and, on the other hand, say, 'I'm a victim.' "

The civil case is scheduled to be heard next summer.

Meanwhile, Bellamy continues to be a one-woman whirlwind of promotional energy - driving all over town in her "Pimps in the Pulpit" SUV, personally placing thousands of fliers on windshields up and down South Street, and in parking lots from Warmdaddy's and the UA Riverview Stadium 17 movie theater, on Columbus Boulevard near Reed Street, to Ikea in South Philly to the Target in Wynnefield, near the church where it all began.

She has done book signings at 15 military bases, plans to visit Atlanta this week in hopes of interesting Tyler Perry in her book, and is readying a fictionalized stage version of "Pimps in the Pulpit" for mid-July casting tryouts at Miss Tootsie's, on South Street, and performances in Center City this winter.

For a woman who didn't get her GED until she was 32, and is now studying for a marketing and business degree at Drexel University, life is as fast-flowing and breathless as the dear-diary prose in "Pimps in the Pulpit."

Dismissed from his church, Caines is now running a pastoral consulting business called "Beyond Today Ministries" from a Web site that lists a post-office box in Secane, Delaware County, as its home address.

There is no biographical information about Caines on the Web site: no educational or theological background, no employment history, no references to the fact that he once was a pastor at Sharon Baptist Church, and is now just a name and a photo on a Web site - and how that came to be.