The law firm also found a pattern of intimate relationships by email and text with women. In reviewing their electronic devices, they found the phone numbers of more than 200 massage therapists and more than 200 selfies, some of them naked, of much younger women. Mr. Zacharias also used the nonprofit ministry to financially support some of his long-term therapists. The report also reveals that he owned two apartments in Bangkok, where he spent 256 days between 2010 and 2014. One of his masseuses stayed in the other apartment.
Mr. Zacharias said in 2017 that in 45 years of marriage, “I never got involved in any kind of inappropriate behavior”.
The report is a devastating blow to the reputation of a man who for decades was a widely admired evangelical leader. Born in Chennai, India, and boasting impressive academic credentials, he had a reputation among many evangelicals as a captivating and worldly intellectual. The motto of his ministry is “Helping the thinker to believe. Helping the believer to think. “
Mr. Zacharias specializes in apologetics, a tradition that focuses on making logical appeals for the truth of the Christian faith and equipping evangelicals to engage non-believers in conversations about the faith.
“People in the pews of evangelical churches, when they think of a Christian intellectual, would think of Ravi Zacharias,” said John Fea, historian at the evangelical Messiah College. “He had an immense influence on how ordinary American evangelicals thought about how to defend their faith.”
He also built RZIM, which at the time of his death employed more than 100 full-time speakers worldwide. The ministry appealed to Christian donors who viewed Mr. Zacharias as the rare evangelist who could reach out to atheists and intellectuals in academia, corporate meeting rooms and other elite spaces. As his health deteriorated last spring, public tributes came from high-profile fans, including football and baseball player Tim Tebow and Christian rap artist Lecrae.
Ultimately, Zacharias’ academic reputation was built in part by exaggeration. Although he often called himself a “professor” or “researcher” at Oxford University, for example, he had only a loose honorary affiliation with a Christian college there. He had also inflated his relationship with the University of Cambridge. And although he used the title “Dr. Zacharias ”in many contexts, including in his 2006 memoirs,“ Walking From East to West ”, his only doctorates were honorary, as RZIM granted in 2017.