Beth Moore Opens Up about Her Childhood Sexual Abuse: ‘It So Messed Me Up’

Author and speaker Beth Moore reveals in a new book that she was sexually abused by her father and that she chose to go public with her story in order to help other people in her situation.

Moore’s book, All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir, was released this month. Although she previously had said she had been sexually abused, she had never revealed the perpetrator.Moore told ABC News it was important to name names. Her father died in 2015.

“What is clear to me is that this subject matter has remained so general that people don’t know the pain of it, and the cost of it to the victim,” Moore told ABC News. “And so it was important to me to put some color in it, place it in a home, give that home an address and a yard and a street, and understand what it is like to be in secret, where you feel like you carry all of this shame. When we in our churches or our homes care more about protecting our power than our people, we are in desperate need of reformation not to mention repentance.”

.@BethMooreLPM was one of the most celebrated female teachers in the Baptist faith until she spoke out against former Pres. Trump. She opens up to @LinseyDavis about the backlash, her decision to reveal a deep trauma from her childhood and new memoir, All My Knotted-Up Life. pic.twitter.com/KjAOiTPE7c ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) February 21, 2023

Moore said she had considered writing about the issue “for a number of years.”

“I have wanted to be able to go a bit deeper with women who have been traumatized in similar ways to my own trauma,” Moore told NPR. “And that understand with me, there is no kind of abuse whatsoever that is not profoundly affecting. None. Zero. When your protector is your perpetrator, it so messes you up or let me make that more personal. It so messed me up. But I long to be able to say, if you have been in this situation, I want you to know that I have, too. And if you made every conceivable poor decision in the wake of it, I want you to know that I did, too. If you have been prone to self-sabotage every single time something good was about to happen to you in your adolescence and young adulthood, I want you to know me, as well.”

Ultimately, Moore said, she wants women who have been in a situation similar to hers to find healing in Christ.

“I love to see somebody that thinks that there is no hope for her, thinks that there’s no way out of a place where she has been harmed, or minimized or had her dignity taken from her I just want her to know how valuable she is and who she is to her Maker,” she said.

Photo courtesy: Getty Images/Terry Wyatt/Stringer

Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.