According to the Dallas Observer a Texas preacher has been spanking, beating and raping woman for more than 20's The Dallas Observer spoke with an anonymous woman named Joy. She recalls her story on how she first met the abusive preacher. Joy remembered the way he crept up behind her in her bedroom and touched her on the side, startling her just before he shoved her facedown onto the bed. She also remembered excruciating pain as he jammed a 3-foot club into her rectum and asked repeatedly, "Does it feel good? Does it feel good?" 

The reverend was unknown in May 1983, when Joy told Fort Worth police that he beat her with a paddle and raped her anally with a wooden club. Then, she claims, he sodomized her, slapping his hand over her mouth and cursing at her when she tried to cry out to God. 

When he was finished, the woman says, the preacher propped her up in front of a bathroom mirror, pried her eyes open so she was forced to look at herself and called her a bitch, a whore, a prostitute, a cokehead. "God told me to do this to you," she recalled him saying. And there was more. 

He allegedly told her, no one would ever believe her. But if she was stupid enough to tell, he'd come back and do the same thing to her 4-year-old daughter. As she hunched naked on a love seat in her apartment after the attack, numb with pain, hating this God he invoked and hoping she would die, the preacher handed her two rolls of toilet tissue. He kissed her on the forehead and walked out the door. Time to add a name to the face

The year was 2007, and Sherman Clifton Allen was a man of stature in the black Pentecostal church. Allen, senior pastor of Shiloh Institutional Church of God in Christ in Fort Worth, had become known across the country for his bold, eloquent preaching. He hung out with top-ranking church leaders, such as Charles E. Blake, now the presiding bishop of COGIC, the biggest Pentecostal denomination in the United States. He personally knew Pentecostal luminaries such as T.D. Jakes. When Allen's first wife died, Jakes, delivered the eulogy.

Davina Kelly But in early 2007, even as Allen, now 46, a former church member, Davina Kelly, had mailed a letter to the 12 bishops of COGIC's ruling body alleging that Allen had beaten her repeatedly with a wooden paddle and ultimately raped her in a relationship while in counseling. When Kelly got no response from the bishops, she filed suit against Allen, Shiloh and the Church of God in Christ. 

The suit became public in early February 2007, and a strange thing began to happen. Women started contacting the law firm handling Kelly's case, with similar allegations spanning more than 20 years. elly, the daughter of a Church of God in Christ pastor from California, says she accepted the beatings from Allen because he persuaded her that they were necessary for her spiritual growth. 

She trusted Allen, Kelly's lawyers, in fact, had landed on one of the worst-kept secrets of the local black Pentecostal scene: Allen had a predilection for paddling young women on the rear end as a form of discipline a practice that had earned him the nickname "Spanky."