Baptist Pastor Who Was Outed in Ashley Madison Hack Commits Suicide
A seminary professor and pastor committed suicide in the wake of the Ashley Madison scandal.
John Gibson’s wife Christi says her husband was afraid he would lose his job at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary after his name was released by hackers.
“He talked about depression. He talked about having his name on there, and he said he was just very, very sorry,” Christi tells CNN Money. “What we know about him is that he poured his life into other people, and he offered grace and mercy and forgiveness to everyone else, but somehow he couldn’t extend that to himself.”
Before John Gibson was a beloved professor at NOBTS, he was a pastor at several churches in the Southeast, according to the NOBTS Gatekeeper.
At the time of his death, he was the pastor of First Southern Baptist Church.
“As a colleague, he was known as one to express care and compassion in a tangible way both to our students and to our faculty,” Thomas Strong, dean of Leavell College at NOBTS, tells the Gatekeeper. “John was loved by the students because of his love for the ministry and for them; he was always a favorite. Our hearts are saddened as we miss greatly a significant part of our Leavell College family—a colleague—a friend. We are better because of John and the way God used him in our lives.”
Christi Gibson is now using her husband’s death to talk about the fallout of the Ashley Madison hack.
She tells CNN Money that though the revelations are difficult, “Nothing is worth the loss of a father and a husband and a friend. It just didn’t merit it. It didn’t merit it at all.”
John Gibson’s death is one of a handful of suicides that have been attributed to the data dump.
Other popular Christian figures have been caught up in the scandal as well, including R.C. Sproul Jr., Josh Duggar and Sam Radar.
