Peternel pried teen girl about sex life in closed-door ‘counseling’, woman says
Adviser to Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith pressured pregnant 17-year-old Paige and fiancé with lurid questions in 2016, Paige tells 24sight News
*** Advisory: This story contains sensitive subjects. 24sight News verified the identity of the woman and her story, but is only publishing her first name at her request. Her fiancé at the time is not being named in this story.
My full interview with Paige is available here on YouTube, but is age-restricted given the sensitive nature of this story.
Indiana pastor Nathan Peternel pressured a 17-year-old girl and her fiancé to discuss in detail how they had sex, what they enjoyed and asked about their specific body parts in a private meeting at his suburban Indianapolis church a decade ago, said Paige, who is now a grown mother of two, in an interview 24sight News.
Paige and her fiancé went to Peternel’s church in the winter of 2015-2016, after Paige got pregnant and they decided they wanted to get married. They had an initial meeting with “Pastor Nathan” as he was known to members of the church and its youth group, and returned about a week later for their first formal session in January 2016, said Paige, who is now 27 years old.
Peternel greeted them after-hours at the Life Church in Fishers, Indiana, in a small office building adjacent to the main church, she said. Peternel’s office door was open, no one else was at the church, and the young couple walked in, and Peternel closed the door behind them, she said.
Peternel, who was 39 years old at the time, said the first session would deal with establishing trust.
“We talked about trust, and then seemed like we were wrapping things up. And then he told us not to leave because he had a few more questions for us, and he started asking us sexually explicit questions,” Paige told 24sight News.
Peternel asked in graphic detail about their body parts and what they did with each other, she said.
When Paige’s fiancé refused to answer his questions, Peternel began pressuring him, “Be a man! Be a man!”, she said.
“Pastor Nathan repeatedly told him to ‘Be a man’ until he answered the question, like he said it like three or four times, fairly aggressively. He wasn’t yelling at him, but he did have some aggression in his voice, and it was like, after he got that answer from him, he proceeded to ask us more questions about toys and pornography and what we think is okay and if we do those things,” Paige said.
“So it ended up very uncomfortably, and it didn’t really sat in until after the fact how messed up it was. So we decided just not to, not to go back,” she said.
“I wish I could go back and say something, but I just felt so much pressure to answer his questions,” Paige said.
Paige and her fiance left after that meeting, shocked, and decided not to return.
Paige’s fiancé at the time did not want to speak on the record for this story.
Peternel, the lead pastor of Life Church in Indiana, has become the center of attention in the days and weeks since his son was arrested at their home on four felony charges of owning and distributing child sex abuse material. His son was also found to have more than 50 videos and pictures of Peternel and his wife, Christina, either naked or having sex, according to court records.
A few days after his son was arrested, Peternel delivered a sermon about the prodigal son, told his church he would be stepping away for a bit and said that having intimate videos of him and his wife may have been unwise, according to a recording of his sermon obtained by 24sight News.
Peternel has retained a lawyer, a church member told 24sight News, but has refused repeated requests to talk about the case.
Peternel did not respond to a text message with details of this story Wednesday, or an email with details of the incident sent Thursday morning. A text to one of the lawyers who regularly works with Life Church also went unanswered Thursday.
On Wednesday afternoon, a woman named Rebecca answered the phone at Life Church in Fishers and refused to put 24sight News in touch with Nathan. Rebecca said that Life Church had someone handling press requests for them, but when asked who that was replied, “No comment.”
When 24sight News replied that it was necessary professionally and ethically for Nathan and the church to hear the details of what was being reported, Rebecca replied it was her “First Amendment right” not to hear about it.
“You’re just going to have to accept a no comment,” Rebecca said, and then hung up the phone.
As of Tuesday, his son was still being held in an Indiana jail with no lawyer and no one having paid the $2,500 needed to release him before his criminal trial.
The arrest has rocked the politically connected church which forms the base of Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith’s political operation and office staff. Beckwith, who is close friends with Peternel and employed by Peternel as a pastor at one of his four churches, in addition working fulltime as lieutenant governor, previously said through a spokesperson that he was unaware of the criminal allegations against Peternel’s son.
In a sermon last Sunday, Beckwith addressed a separate criminal investigation of his office regarding a deepfake porn viewed by his staff and possible ghost employment, but did not say anything about the arrest of Peternel’s son.
Peternel and Beckwith have forged a close bond since Peternel hired him in 2021, co-hosting a podcast called “Jesus, Sex and Politics”, which they brand as confronting hard truths — including a now deleted episode in which they interviewed an expert on child sex trafficking and abuse — and traveling the nation with Charlie Kirk’s campus pastor movement.
The criminal charges against Peternel’s son, and emerging stories about Peternel’s own behavior, come as national attention has been heavily focused on the story of Jeffrey Epstein and the survivors of his years of abuse, with repeated calls for the White House to release all the files on its years of Epstein investigations and a posthumous memoir recently published by one of Epstein’s survivors, Virginia Giuffre.
It also strikes at a persistent political war in Indiana and around the nation in which Peternel, Beckwith and hard right crusaders from Jack Posobiec to “Q” of “Qanon”, built careers fighting against what they said were “groomers” and shadowy elites who were abusing and exploiting young children.
Just a few years before Peternel’s son was arrested, Beckwith and other members of his political team from Peternel’s Life Church, were packing library board meetings wearing shirts which read “Stop Grooming”.
Paige, who was 17 when she started attending a handful of Peternel’s services, said she was compelled to speak out again about his behavior because of the news about his son.
Paige recently detailed her story anonymously in a YouTube video which burned its way through Indiana and Christian social media circles. She said she wants others who may have experienced this to know they are not alone.
Paige first detailed the incident with Peternel in a handwritten note and a contemporaneous email she sent to herself in August 2017. She told 24sight News she also reported the incident at that time to other leaders in Peternel’s church and to the Assemblies of God headquarters in Springfield Missouri, Life Church, but never received a response.
After Paige read about Jonathan Peternel with videos of his father, Nathan, and mother having sex on his cellphone, she said it reminded her of her experience at Peternel’s church.
Paige’s fiance was a regular attendee at the church at the time and his family suggested they may be able to marry easily there. She attended a few services at the time and said she was surprised to hear Peternel preaching in detail about having sex with his wife and the sex toys they used in front of a congregation of families and children.
“I did witness him say one time that, ‘You know, a lot of people say that after you get married, you don’t have fun in the bedroom anymore more. Well, me and my wife, we have a lot of sex, and we use toys, and we’re, let me just say I’m a satisfied man,’” Paige said. “And I thought that was really strange.”
Paige said she reported the marital counseling incident to Fishers, Indiana police recently.
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