Woman says IHOPKC founder groomed, sexually abused her when she was 14 in the 1980s

A Michigan woman has come forward with allegations that International House of Prayer founder Mike Bickle sexually abused her starting when she was 14 and before he formed the Kansas City ministry.

Her allegations, which some say are the most damning to surface yet about Bickle and come after four decades of silence, are the first claims that involve sexual abuse of a minor. She alleges the abuse began when she was a babysitter for Bickle’s two young children.

Tammy Woods, who told her story exclusively to The Star this week, said the abuse occurred in the early 1980s in St. Louis, where Bickle pastored a church before moving to Kansas City and later founding the 24/7 global prayer ministry IHOPKC in 1999. She said the abuse took place in Bickle’s car, at her home, in the church and in his office, and that it involved sexual contact but not intercourse.

Woods, now 57 and a mother and grandmother, said she didn’t tell anyone for 43 years. But after watching the details unfold about a woman identified as Jane Doe, whose sexual abuse allegations were made public in October and led to Bickle’s removal and upheaval in the round-the-clock prayer movement, Woods said she couldn’t keep silent any longer.

She told her husband, some family members and her pastors last week. And on Saturday, she called St. Louis police and filed a report.

“This is my story. It really happened. I’m not Jane Doe, I’m Tammy, and you did this,” said Woods, who is using her maiden name, referring to Bickle. “But I don’t want you to continue controlling the narrative of my life today, as Mimi, as mom.”

She said she hopes that by speaking out, “somehow it helps the others to find their voice and say, ‘You know what? We don’t want to have a life sentence of shadows and lies. We don’t want to be given a script, like we can be manipulated as some pawns.”

Bickle, when contacted by email several times on Wednesday, did not provide a comment. The international prayer movement has been in turmoil since allegations against him first surfaced in late October.

IHOPKC’s attorney, Audrey Manito, said in an email on Wednesday that the organization didn’t know about Woods’ allegations until a Star reporter reached out to ask about them.

“Information coming from another individual claiming to be the victim of sexual misconduct by Mike Bickle, remains a deeply disturbing theme,” Manito said. “We note that while the timeframe of the claimed misconduct is more than 40 years ago, and decades before IHOPKC was even in existence, the claim still resonates, and even much louder so, because it is the claim of an individual who was a minor at the time.

“We have immediately reported this information to Rosalee McNamara, independent investigator of the Bickle-related allegations and will fully cooperate with her. We reiterate that Mike Bickle was permanently removed from all elements of IHOPKC in late 2023.”

Last week, McNamara issued a report of the findings of her investigation, which concluded that Bickle “more likely than not” engaged in inappropriate behavior that included sexual contact and clergy misconduct.

That behavior was “an abuse of power for a person in a position of trust and leadership,” the report said. It also revealed that in addition to the primary accuser, known as Jane Doe, Bickle had engaged in inappropriate contact with a second woman in 2002 and 2003.

Bickle, 68, issued his first public statement on Dec. 12, admitting that he had “sinned” and “my moral failures were real.” But he was vague on details. In the lengthy note posted on X, Bickle said his “inappropriate behavior” occurred more than 20 years ago, but he did not admit to engaging in any sexual misconduct.

The primary accuser, Jane Doe, has said in interviews, first reported by The Roys Report, a Christian media outlet, that Bickle sexually abused her from 1996 to 1999, starting when she was 19 and he was 42. She said Bickle told her repeatedly that God had spoken to him, saying his wife was going to die and that they would then be married. She said that during that time, Bickle gave her a key to his office, put her up in an apartment and had sexual interactions with her that included everything except intercourse.

On Dec. 22, IHOPKC announced that it was “immediately, formally and permanently” separating from Bickle, saying it had confirmed “a level of inappropriate behavior” on his part.

IHOPKC described McNamara’s investigation as independent, but critics question whether it could truly be impartial. They have demanded what they say would be a true third-party investigation.

In her report last week, McNamara said that “the evidence is clear that MB has publicly admitted that 20 plus years ago he ‘sinned by engaging in inappropriate behavior. My moral failures were real.’” The report said Bickle also admitted to inappropriate contact on three occasions with another woman connected to IHOPKC.

“He described the contact as ‘consensual sexual contact that involved her touching me but not me touching her,’” McNamara wrote in the seven-page report. “He said they both agreed it was wrong and the conduct stopped. MB’s account and the account of the individual are very similar, including that it occurred in 2002 to 2003, and I find the individual’s account credible.”

Regarding the primary Jane Doe, the report said: “MB admitted that ‘over 25 years ago, prior to the [May 7, 1999] formation of IHOP, I recall five occasions where I engaged in inappropriate behavior with [her] (which includes two occasions when we kissed). We both repented and agreed that those actions were wrong. Our friendship has been entirely appropriate for decades, over which time I have received dozens of friendly emails from [her] …’”

It started with babysitting

Woods said she first met Bickle in the summer of 1980 when her family started attending South County Christian Fellowship, his church in St. Louis. The family went to a potluck dinner at a church member’s condo, and Bickle and his wife, Diane, were there. Bickle asked her how old she was, she said, and couldn’t believe she was just 14.

Bickle then asked her if she did any babysitting. When she said yes, he told her it would be great if she could babysit the couple’s two sons, one who was younger than 2 and the other a newborn.

Soon after that, Woods said, Bickle called her at her uncle’s veterinary clinic, where she had a summer job answering phones and scheduling appointments, and invited her out for pizza to talk about the babysitting job. He picked her up and they went to Mazzio’s, she said.

“At that time, I was the most shy 14-year-old you could imagine,” she said. “Straight-A student, perfectionist … I had never been on a date before. I was so intimidated. I just remember feeling so overwhelmed.”

Bickle asked her what she knew about Jesus, she said, “which was basically nothing.” He said he and his wife went on dates every Monday night and would love for her to babysit.

She started babysitting on Monday nights and other times when she was needed. Bickle would pick her up and take her home, she said. During those times, he started taking a special interest in her and “sort of mentoring me in spiritual things like the Bible and Bible study.”

He gave her books to read about missionaries and revivalists, she said, and her heart “was actually really coming alive in those things and wanting a relationship with the Lord.”

“He gave me my first Bible, like my first Study Bible,” she said. “He had my name engraved on it — Tammy Woods. He wrote in it, ‘My beloved Tamara,’ and some nice things. And I guess his wife Diane had read that and said, ‘You can’t say those things. Do it again, do over.’ And he took that out and wrote something more generic.”

Her dad worked on Saturdays, Woods said, and her sister was involved in acrobatics. Sometimes, if their mom was busy, Bickle would drive her sister to acrobatics, then take Woods to a park, where they would “hang out and talk, and he’d talk about the Lord.”

Bickle also would drive her home from church youth group on Saturday nights. Her parents never caught on that something was amiss, she said.

Around the time she entered her freshman year of high school that fall, Woods said, Bickle was driving her home one night when he pulled his yellow Volkswagen Rabbit off the road and into an undeveloped lot.

“And he just said, ‘I just want to talk to you for a minute. I have a question for you. Do you feel for me as more than a friend?’ And I remember my heart racing, because I’m thinking as a 14-year-old, I’m busted. I’ve been crushing on this 25-year-old … and he knows, and I’m gonna get in trouble.’

“I just nodded, waiting for the correction from a mentor, like, this is inappropriate. But he didn’t say that. He said, ‘Now I have another question. Do you think that I feel the same?’”

It caught her off guard, she said, and she didn’t know how to respond.

“All I could say was, ‘I don’t know.’ And he said, ‘Well, I do.’ And that was the turning point. He was not physical or anything that night. It was just a declared statement. But something shifted.”

When school started, she said, Bickle wanted her to call him once a week on her lunch hour. There were two pay phones at the main entrance, and she would get up from the cafeteria, go to put a quarter in the pay phone and call his direct line. She said he would talk about what he’d been doing and reading and also tell her he was thinking of her, missed her and looked forward to seeing her.

People were starting to notice, she said: “I had to answer to this social circle of, ‘Who are you calling? Who are you talking to?’ I never told them who. It was a lot of pressure.”

As things progressed, she said — when she was still 14 — he would hold her, embrace her and play with her hair. He told her that he loved her. And a few times, she said, Bickle mentioned something that has surfaced as a common thread among other women who have recently accused him of sexual abuse and inappropriate behavior.

“He believed that Diane (his wife) would die … that we could be together,” Woods said, adding that she never heard him say that God had told him that, as some other women said he had done. “He also told me that Diane believes this, too.”

And on one of those occasions, Woods said, “He did say to me, ‘and you could be Lukey’s mom.’”

She said Bickle first kissed her at her home on a Saturday morning when no one else was around. She was still just 14.

“He would kiss my neck, he would kiss my cheeks, he would kiss my forehead,” she said. “But the first, like, ‘kiss’ kiss was in my house. He kind of pulled me into my bathroom. And he kissed me like a man kisses a woman.”

After that, she said, things progressed to fondling and beyond. “He never had sexual intercourse with me … but he did lay on top of me and move on top of me until he released,” she said.

“I just want to be very clear, because of what was said in the report that came out,” she said, referring to the outside investigation commissioned by IHOPKC. The report of its findings released last week said that Bickle admitted having an inappropriate relationship with a second “Jane Doe” in 2002 and 2003 but said it involved her touching him, not him touching her.

“He did touch me,” Woods said. “And so he moved my hand to touch him sexually. And he did touch me in return.”

After sexual contact, Woods said, Bickle was always remorseful.

“I have witnessed him genuinely weep and repent, like ask the Lord’s forgiveness, ask my forgiveness,” she said. “I saw at 14, a man in anguish over failure, and he would always be like, ‘I can’t, we can’t do this again. And please forgive me.’ I believed all of that to be genuine … but it didn’t stop. We’d do good for a while and then crash.”

Throughout the relationship, she said, he told her that if anything ever came to light — if anyone saw something or they were caught — that she would have to “own” it, “because he was a father, he had two little kids, he had a family and he had a ministry.”

She said the fear of someone finding out was enormous, especially because she was a perfectionist, a “people pleaser” and a “rule follower extraordinaire.” And as a teenager, she said, she was so confused that she wasn’t even sure she wanted a way out.

“I’ve never dated anybody, never had a boyfriend,” she said. “And suddenly this 25-year-old man is putting things in my locker at school and surprising me, and he would sometimes pick me up at the bus stop at my best friend’s house.”

The Bickles moved to Kansas City around 1983, she said. She was devastated: “I not only felt like I lost him as this huge person in my life, but the community as well.”

She continued to remain silent about their relationship.

“I made a vow to him, and also in my own little young heart, that I would cover him in love to the grave,” she said. “And the reason why I made that is because I saw and experienced the moral failure, but also the repentance.”

Over the years, she said, they would have that conversation: “And I would just say, ‘You know what? I’m safe to the grave.’”

After high school, Woods attended Covenant College, a Christian liberal arts college in Lookout Mountain on the Tennessee/Georgia border. Her sophomore year, she said, Bickle called her and said he was at a conference just three hours away. He drove there to see her and took her to dinner, she said. They drove up the mountain, looked at the lights and even met her boyfriend, who is now her husband. It was a romantic setting, she said, but there was no sexual contact.

Woods transferred to the University of Missouri her junior year. Her dad bought her a yellow Volkswagen Rabbit, very similar to the one Bickle drove, “because those were supposedly such endearing times.”

“You know, that’s how they saw me, that’s how they remembered me — in Mike’s yellow Rabbit, kind of his Batman and Robin.”

Bickle visited her at MU once, she said, and they ended up lying on her bed, fully clothed, with him on top. That was the last sexual contact they had, she said.

Woods got married in the summer of 1988. She said Bickle didn’t attend the wedding, explaining that it would be too painful, but Diane and their sons were there. Bickle called Woods the morning of the wedding “to bless me,” she said, and then started crying, which made her cry.

Woods said she and Bickle stayed in touch over the years. He spoke at her church in St. Louis in 1993, she said, and would call her a few times a year. In 1996, she said, while he was staying with her family during a trip, he told her they needed to “cut things completely off.” No phone calls, no conversations, he said.

“And I remember just feeling that devastation again, like everything I had felt when I was 16,” she said. “That abandonment, it was just unearthed again.” But she said it forced her “to really seek the Lord, for me to go after wholeness in my heart.”

That also was about the time Bickle had allegedly started up a relationship with the primary Jane Doe back in Kansas City.

Woods said she and Bickle had no contact for five years. She continued to keep the secret, she said, “because he’s doing all these amazing things.”

“He got literally a get-out-of-jail card,” she said. “And he was doing it right. We were doing it right. Everybody deserves a second chance. He got his from the Lord, from myself. And I was growing in wholeness. He was growing in notoriety as this godly man, as this incredibly generous man, as this anointed teacher. So I’m thinking, ‘We did it. You know? We really did it.’”

Bickle returned to St. Louis in 2001, Woods said, with a group from IHOPKC to discuss a vision for a house of prayer in St. Louis. Things were different then, she said. She was grown up and had three children. They called him Uncle Mike, she said, “because there was affection. He honored me publicly, he honored my family.”

She felt they could be distant friends, co-laborers in a similar ministry. She became the director of a small house of prayer in St. Louis, and because of her family’s central location, their home became a bridge uniting prayer streams from around the country.

“And I honestly felt good,” she said. “I felt like this is a beautiful story of redemption and how wrong things are made right. And his sons didn’t grow up with an incarcerated father.”

Others saw warning signs

Barbie Thompson said she and Tammy met when they were 4 years old, and the two quickly became “kindred spirits and souls.”

“I treasured their family,” Thompson said. “And when Mike came in, like just guns-a-blazing, he took their whole family over, and they were mesmerized by him. And then he kind of bromanced Tammy’s dad with football. This guy is smooth. He knew exactly what to do.”

Soon after Bickle came into the picture, she said, her friend changed.

“And this huge wedge, like this unspoken wall, came up between us,” she said. “And then, if I wanted to be with Tammy, it would be like I would have to babysit his kids. And he would pick us up from school, he’d pick us up at Tammy’s house, and then on Wednesday night for prayer meetings. Then they’d walk from his house to the church for the Wednesday prayer meetings and I would be left in his house, you know, with all these strangers …”

People were smitten with Bickle, Thompson said.

“He had this energy about him, she said. “And using their words, he was on fire for the Lord, literally. All these things just make me cringe.”

Thompson said before long, Tammy began taking on Diane Bickle’s persona.

“Tammy started speaking like Diane, and she took on Diane’s cadence, or her voice,” she said. “She took on Diane’s mannerisms, and she started dressing like Diane.”

Thompson said Bickle used to come to the high school and meet Tammy at her locker.

“And you’d hear all the whispers in the classes about, ‘That’s her boyfriend, that’s her boyfriend.’ And I’d be like, you know, want to scream at the top of my lungs, ‘No, it’s a creepy preacher.’”

Thompson said the two remained friends — they were in each other’s weddings — “but it was always this kind of, there was an elephant in the room that nobody talked about.”

Twice in the ’90s, she said, she broached the subject with Tammy on the phone.

“And I said, ‘Mike stole you from me, he took our friendship.’ And the air on the phone went dead. It was like she played possum. … And I realized I may go to my grave never getting any of this resolved.”

But late Monday night, Thompson said, she got a call from Tammy.

“And she’s like, ‘I’m not going to protect him anymore,’” Thompson said.

Thompson said she has no doubt her friend is telling the truth: “Not for one minute. I would go before a firing squad on this.”

“Anybody that knows me has heard this story for 44 years,” she said, breaking down with emotion. “And I’ve cried about it for many years.”

Tammy’s aunt, Rochelle Woods, said she was leery of Bickle from the start.

“I thought he was strange, and it seemed odd to me that someone 10 years older seemed so attached to Tammy,” she said. “He would always be near her. My husband and I didn’t like him, and my mother said, ‘Something’s wrong here.’ Right from the beginning.”

Then, at Thanksgiving dinner at her house, Rochelle Woods said, “My mother said she saw him put his hand on Tammy’s bottom. She was livid.”

Rochelle Woods said the family stands behind Tammy and is proud of her for speaking out.

“He created an environment that allowed him to abuse women,” she said of Bickle. “He created this church to get his sick needs met.”

Tammy’s younger sister, Susan Claridge, said she was 9 or 10 when Bickle came into their lives.

“He latched onto Tammy right away,” she said. And early on, Claridge said, she noticed things between him and Tammy that seemed off. Like the time Bickle took the girls to dinner.

“He grabbed her leg and kind of rubbed her thigh under the table, and I saw that,” Claridge said. “And I thought, ‘Well, that’s weird.’ But this is the early ’80s. You trusted preachers. And at 10 years old, nobody’s going to listen to you. You don’t really process it.”

Claridge said Tammy would talk to Bickle on the phone at home, taking the “kid’s phone” with the long cord into another room so she could have more privacy.

“He obviously groomed Tammy in every way, like spiritually, emotionally, physically,” she said. “But he groomed my parents as well. He would play racquetball with my dad. He would come over to the house for dinner.”

Tammy made the cheerleading squad her freshman year in high school, Claridge said. Once she started hanging out with Bickle, Claridge said, she didn’t want to be a cheerleader anymore. But their parents told her she’d made a commitment and needed to stick with it that year.

Claridge also said her sister started dressing like Diane Bickle and trying to look like her.

“It was scary,” she said. “And then when Mike and Diane moved to Kansas City, Tammy just went downhill. She was devastated. It was the way that you would be if you were in love with somebody who up and left. And she gained weight, her hair went back to brown, where she’d had it blonde like Diane’s.”

Claridge said their parents eventually thought Tammy had developed a crush on Bickle. After Bickle moved to Kansas City, she said, their mother wrote to him “and told him that Tammy was too young to be in this relationship, that she was in love with him and he needed to stay away from her.”

At some point after that, Claridge said, “My dad drove to Kansas City, met with Mike and told him to leave Tammy alone.”

Claridge said she first brought up her concerns with Tammy in 2010, but things became so contentious that “for the sake of peace, I finally just shut up and sat down.”

“She would just constantly defend Mike, and I was hitting a wall. She would just never have any of it.”

Things got more complicated in 2012, when Claridge, who is an author, wrote a novel called “House of Lies,” about a woman who went on a mission to rescue her sister from a deadly cult. The book caused a stir because it was published the same month as the death of Bethany Deaton, who at 27 was found in the backseat of a minivan at Longview Lake just weeks after her wedding, a white bag over her head and a pill bottle within reach.

Deaton was part of a group that had moved to Kansas City to be part of IHOPKC. Her death was ruled a suicide, but a member of the group confessed to killing her on the orders of her husband and was charged. The group member later recanted, saying his confession came as a result of an exorcism. In 2014, the murder charge was dropped.

Claridge issued a statement saying she had studied “five groups with cult-like tendencies” in researching her book and said IHOPKC was among the five, but added that the book was fiction.

Last month, on Jan. 24, Claridge said, Tammy called her unexpectedly to tell her about the allegations that had surfaced against Bickle.

“And she told me, ‘I know Mike’s lying.’ She said, ‘I don’t know how you saw through him.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know how you didn’t.’”

Then Claridge started asking some tough questions: “‘Did he ever touch you? Did anything intimate ever happen? Did he tell you that Diane was going to die?’ And she was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’”

On Monday night, however, Tammy called her and told her the rest of the story.

“I’m extremely proud of her,” Claridge said. “I honestly never thought she would ever see the truth. And that’s a huge relief.”

‘Holy mackerel, I was duped’

In 2020, Woods and her husband moved from St. Louis to Michigan, where she oversees a prayer room in their local church. She said after their move, she and Bickle seldom communicated.

Then came October. Her supervisor at church got on a FaceTime call with Woods and her husband to let them know there had been some serious sexual misconduct allegations against Bickle that appeared to be credible.

“I was so defiant and adamant and no, no, no,” Woods said. She said she couldn’t believe that Bickle would have squandered the “get-out-of-jail card” she’d given him.

After the call, she sent Bickle a text with three question marks.

“He called me and said there are some people right now who are saying some false things about me.”

Woods said Bickle told her he needed to get a lawyer and that she may be contacted but didn’t have to talk to anyone. She said he added: “‘But if you want to make a statement, I mean, you can just tell them he’s, you know, he’s the godliest man.’ That was my script.”

Woods said Bickle asked her again to forgive him.

“‘I know you said this over the years that you’ve forgiven me, but I just want to say it again. Please forgive me. I was clueless. I could have gone to jail,’” she said he told her. “And I just said, ‘I forgive you. It’s done. We’re on the other side of this.’”

Then she read Jane Doe’s victim statement, she said, and realized, “Holy mackerel, I was duped. The parallels took my breath away. Literally.”

Even down to Bickle using code words, she said, like saying the word “Houston” to her, which stood for Whitney Houston’s song, “I Will Always Love You.”

Bickle started reaching out through text messages with more frequency, Woods said.

“And I just told him, ‘Listen, you don’t have to fear me. I don’t want to get in this.’”

He even showed her the statement he released in December admitting an inappropriate relationship with Jane Doe and wanted to know what she thought. She said there was a portion at the end where he implied he was being noble by speaking out.

“And I just said, ‘I would take that out. Because nobody wants to hear how noble you are right now.’ And then I look back and just go, ‘Tammy, what were you thinking?’”

Now, she said, she realizes that when there have been rough times in her life, Bickle has increased his presence to try and make sure she stays quiet.

“He can’t afford to have me crack,” she said. “He can’t afford to have me go to a counselor or you know, like, lose it, because he doesn’t know what I’ll say. He needs me to be OK.”

Woods said she finally decided she had to come forward because in the past six weeks, she’s lied to three loved ones who asked her direct questions about her relationship with Bickle.

“And suddenly here he is, all these years later, controlling the narrative of my life,” she said. “This chafes my soul to live as a liar. It’s not who I am. And I thought, ‘I can’t do this.’ And then I realized he’s doing this to these younger women … all of them.

“And I just snapped.”

On Jan. 30, she said, she wrote a would-be letter to Mike and Diane Bickle.

“I guess it was more cathartic,” she said. “It was just like, ‘Get your story down.’”

Then she went to see her pastors. She told them her story and showed them the letter. She contacted Boz Tchividjian, the lawyer who is representing the primary Jane Doe and others, and then filed the police report. The officer who took her report said a detective would contact her this week. She’s not expecting much, she said, because of statute of limitations issues.

“It just needs to be on the record.”

Tchividjian, now her legal counsel, said Woods’ actions were courageous.

“Tammy has made a profoundly bold decision to step forward in truth as she begins to reclaim the narrative of her life that was stolen so many years ago,” he said. “Her voice gives hope and inspiration to so many abuse survivors who still struggle as they continue to suffer in silence.”

Woods said she hated having to get involved in the issue but knew she couldn’t stay on the sidelines any longer.

“Nobody can script your life for you,” she said. “Nobody can control the narrative of your life. No matter how dark the chapters are, they don’t define you. That’s why I went to my pastors here and said, ‘Once upon a time …’”