All Muck is Local: God Responds to Wrongful Termination Suit

Oral Roberts built his university and medical research center with nothing but his own sweat, grit and vision of a 900-foot Jesus (oh, and lots of contributions from his viewers). But now, his son Richard is accused of using the school as his own private cash cow and forcing faculty members to illegally dive into Tulsa politics.

Dr. Tim Brooker and two other former professors are suing the university and President Roberts for wrongful termination. In a petition this week, Brooker maintains he and his colleagues were fired for presenting a laundry list of complaints compiled against Roberts and his wife, including: 11 remodels of their university home, $800/month cell phone bills, horses for their children and scholarships for their friends, all on the school’s dime.

But it’s Brooker’s complaints about the 2005 mayoral election that bring the story to All Muck is Local. Dr. Brooker is a successful professor of practical politics; his work has brought him enough attention for the Republican National Committee to base a program out of ORU to help shape national campaigns and issues. Brooker maintains (and his students have confirmed) that his class never focused on local politics, because it “turns neighbors into enemies.”

But in December of 2005, Brooker claims that Roberts approached him and said it was time to leverage ORU’s funds and campaign experience to support Randi Miller – a county commissioner and friend of Roberts’- in her mayoral bid. Brooker pointed out that directly supporting a local candidate was a bad idea, not least because it would violate the university’s 501(c)(3) status. Roberts insisted, and eventually the school began to shill for Miller. When the IRS did indeed contact the university about its campaign activities, Roberts allegedly told Brooker to take the fall and to deny that his employer or the university proper had played a role. The cover-up was driven home when the university provost signed an affidavit attesting to Roberts deniability- a statement that Brooker says he wrote and that the university intentionally distorted and even changed in order to absolve the president.

Roberts says that God says this case is a matter of “blackmail and extortion,” claiming that the plaintiff’s lawyer holds a personal grudge against him after losing millions of dollars to ORU over several cases. “’We live in a litigious society. Anyone can get mad and file a lawsuit against another person whether they have a legitimate case or not,'” God told Roberts.

In a phone call Friday, the lawyer, Gary Richardson, told me that he is not seeking “to kill the cow to get to the milk,” and that he’s only interested in the corrupt practices of the university’s current administration. He also says he’s only been in a single case involving the university’s adjacent hospital; the case never went to trial.