I believe that Jesus reveals God to be a loving Father Who offers redemption, healing, salvation from hell, and forgiveness for all, even the worst of the worst.

The fact is, I had nothing to do with the tragic crime of Andrea Yates a quarter century ago, not in any way, shape, or form. I barely ever even talked to her, I met them 3 times and mostly spoke to her husband. I never resided in Texas. I was never their pastor. I wrote him some letters back and forth at his request. Rusty himself is publicly quoted as saying, “Correspondence with Michael Woroniecki was like an open book; we were free to take or leave what we wanted.” I think anyone with common sense knows if you don’t want to write someone, you just don’t. If you get a letter you don’t want, you throw it out, so the idea of any kind of mail-in cult is absurd in its very premise. Our correspondence dropped off years before the tragedy, and I knew very little of their lives or issues. I explain below how and why the media picked up this story and blew it up.

I hear now they created some kind of documentary full of filth and lies against me. They exploit passing acquaintances from 25 or 35 years ago to slander me with false accusations. Everything is outrageous lies. The producers never once contacted me, they used an actual actor to play me, and pressured people I barely knew to fabricate stories about me and my beautiful family. I would hope that you might not be naive and realize such a process is common in our media-crazy society. They cut and pieced VHS tapes I made almost 40 years ago, without my consent, to paint me in an extremely negative light. They cut out all the context and especially any parts where I share at length about the need for husbands to serve, support, love, and care for their wives and children, and about the love, mercy, forgiveness, and beautiful life in Jesus.

The truth is, I have spent a significant portion of my life helping children who are hungry or poor, orphans, and foster kids in third-world countries; buying food, clothes, toys, and putting on fun educational wholesome events with bubbles and mascots, and cotton candy..etc..  I have letters from directors of international orphanages stating the positive impact my wife and children and I had on the lives of the children and teens in their care after a year working at their facility. If Rusty and Andrea had been influenced by me at all, those children would not only be alive but would be as happy and successful as my own.

Context

The fact is, the media is desperate for salacious and sensational content to get hits and views. It is actually quite sick for them to take advantage of a mentally ill woman for the sake of their own gain. These people fabricate stories posing as experts of what?  I understand that that profile exists, especially in Texas. But it has nothing to do with me; on the contrary, I am opposed to anyone who twists the Gospel in any way. Everything I have said and done in my life has come from the full counsel of the Gospel written in the Bible. Things I said 25 years ago that may sound extreme to some have a context, a backstory, and a time period in which they were said.  It’s not like I randomly wrote people out of the blue and talked about hell or the devil or sin. If in the context of a five-page letter, I referenced these biblical concepts, reading the entire letter would provide you with the realization that it was a normal discussion about common Christian principles. For example, I write pages about God’s love and the need to love one another, then add a statement like “if you reject this love, it would be tragic”. Then the media says, “Michael insists rejection of his version of Christianity results in tragedy”. Obviously, that is entirely out of context. Nearly anything taken out of context can sound bizarre in another light. They did this to Paul and Jesus, and many people today.

Maybe someone has lied about you at some point in your life. Maybe someone spread rumors about you or hurt you and some point, and you’ve wanted to say, “hey that’s a lie”. Sure, they mix in some truth to give it credibility, but in essence, it’s not true at all. Maybe you said something once as a young man or woman, then 30 years later you say, “hey there was a context to that that made it very normal, but it’s never included when they slander me”.

Other Topics I Will Address:

• I have never made any statements to anyone at any time about how many children a woman should or should not have. Not once. That narrative is entirely concocted by the media (i.e. a few bottom-feeder ‘authors’  who just made up stuff to write books and profit off this terrible tragedy.) Any counsel I have ever given to any couple has been simply to love each other, love God, and love any children they have. As I have done with my own loving and united family.
• I am not a “hellfire and brimstone preacher”, and never have been. I am not a cult leader, nor have I ever been associated with any group/cult-like atmosphere. Any allegations of such are absolutely absurd and based on an entire fabrication of the truth. I was never like Westboro psychos or sandwich sign-holding nutjobs or yelling about hell for the sake of getting a reaction. I think their methods and ways are repulsive and entirely contrary to Christ.
• I have never once ever stated that a child has a certain age by which they must be saved, or afterwards it is too late. That, too, is a narrative concocted by the media. What I said is a very common-sense, well-known principle that I told Rusty to love and instruct his children when they are young so that they can flourish as they grow older. This is common sense.
• The devil mask I used was a drama prop I had from communicating the gospel in the downtown area in Bratislava, Eastern Europe, in the middle of an ethnic war in a country that was at war. I did not know the language and was trying to make a clear differentiation between hatred that is from the devil and love that is from God. To depict the common reality of good vs evil, alongside a cross, a bible, and other theatrical elements to communicate beyond the language barrier. Numerous Hollywood movies and Easter plays – that are played all over the world use similar artistic means to depict the battle between good and evil. As a young man, I made a video saying that the devil wants to do evil, but we must resist, and God wants us to do good, and shared it with a few people I thought were friends at the time. 30 years later, out of context, it might seem bizarre. I get that. At that time, and in the context of normal people, it was understood as a common dramatic artist depiction. Go into any theater, and you might see something similar.
• I heard someone say a rumor that, “we said think we’re the only ones who are saved”. This, too, is not true.  Just think about it, would I really travel to 60 countries and suffer all that I have to do so, go through hell at times, if I didn’t think others are being saved by reaching them with the love and truth of Jesus? It doesn’t even make sense.

Concerning My Relationship with Yates

Here are the details of the Andrea Yates case to anyone who is interested. About 45 years ago, I met a young man named Rusty Yates on a university who expressed interest in wanting to follow Jesus. We exchanged a few letters back and forth over several years, as I did with a few dozen other students across the country. Long story short, he got married and started a family. We had sparse contact over about a decade and a half and met them a few times at a public place when we came through their area, usually a restaurant or a picnic area at a park.

He indicated that he wanted to raise his children to love the Lord, travel, and have a family as I did. He wanted to buy an RV I was selling, I told him clearly not to buy it and that that lifestyle was not for him, but he insisted he wanted it and said it was bigger and better than the trailer he had. I cautioned him that this is not an easy undertaking and told him not to try to imitate my life, many times. Any time he talked about this, I clearly discouraged it. He had an intense job at NASA, which consumed his life. He obviously had a track record of not listening to others (doctors, counselors, hospitals, psychiatrists, and me, who all warned him) and instead insisting on his own way. I told him to love his family, to care for his wife and children as I did my own. We fell out of touch for a long time and had no further contact.

One night, while my family and I were down in Mexico City, working on the streets and in an orphanage, I heard of the egregious crime she committed on the news. My wife and I were devastated and could not believe it. We wept and were physically sick. We were distant but we loved him and his family as we would with anyone we came into contact with, and would have done anything to try to help them.

As the trial began, an emotionally unstable individual whom I had met ONE TIME, hated me for his own private vendetta, created a massive smear campaign against me online that I was completely unaware of. This individual contacted every news and media outlet in North America (from Canada to Argentina) to spread sensational lies, trying to link me to this unspeakable crime based on the casual correspondence I had with the family years before the crime. He wrote me letters years prior, and I responded to his letters; he was never a follower. I had no influence or control, or even knew what he did in life. He was a stranger I met once at Texas A&M alongside a crowd of several hundred other students. Any letters he may have kept if read aloud would only validate the gospel of Jesus I shared with him. I never resided in Texas or had any cult meetings with groups. There are no pictures, recordings or pamphlets that would validate claims of doctrines contrary to the Scriptures. It’s all crap.

Anyways, tabloid magazines picked up his lies and began writing fantastical stories, complete fabrications, and slander about my family and me. Some said we were outlaws, some said we were aliens (they really did), some tried to paint me as a radical weirdo or ‘cult leader’. None of these are true. I never had any “following”, never was a leader of any type of religious group in any way. I always shared about the truth of Jesus as based in the New Testament with those who asked me to.

I was naive to the media machine that fed on sensationalism. Eventually, even ‘respectable’ news sources began fabricating entire stories about my life without ever speaking to me or meeting me. Other bottom-feeders who may have met me once or twice, who hated the God I love, jumped on and made up their own twisted lies. Some wanna-be experts, authors and journalists looking to market their book or an article deliberately distorted various issues, made up things that never happened, and took parts of the message of the gospel out of context to try to paint a picture of me that could not have been further from the truth. Some, I gave an interview to, only to see that they edited the clips and twisted everything they could to fit their narrative; they edited out any shot or mention of my own beautiful family, and painted me however they wanted. I was devastated.

Rusty initially publicly dismissed any ‘influence’ I had in what she did as being ridiculous. But it seems that in the years since, maybe he realized he could paint himself as the victim, and allowed and encouraged others to blame anyone else, including me, instead of taking responsibility for his actions. Rusty blames everyone but himself. The fact remains that I was someone he barely knew. We never held meetings, we had no ongoing in-person contact. I am not going to get into all the details that I later found out, but there were many other factors in their lives leading up to the crime. Doctors told him not to leave her alone with the children and that she might harm them. He refused to listen.

The cyber-stalker went on to make it his obsession for many years to link my name to this event. The individual (posing as a group of people) even wrote a Wikipedia biography on my life. We contacted the founder and CEO of Wikipedia, Jim Whales, who was sympathetic and appointed a team to investigate the matter and they successfully righted the wrongs. Jim Whales expressed how he, too had been a victim of this type of cyberbullying. We went on to contact Youtube, Google, AOL Geocities, My Space, Yahoo Pages, and each one immediately removed the illegal content. But the internet is huge and keeps circulating other articles and things.  The media outlets that circulated his lies, maintain their garbage stories in their archives and their lies become record for some.

This was in the early days of the internet about 25-30 years ago. I had never been on the internet and was unaware of how it all worked (my son helps me do stuff from time to time now, and put this out). So it went on a long time without me knowing it. To the point where his reach was so far, I still could never find all this hatred.  This was in the era of internet chat rooms and AOL personal pages. He spent years taking over any mention of my name on the internet and carrying out what is considered anonymous “cyberbullying”. I only became aware of it when he began calling over and over again my workplace (the Home Depot, at the time), to harass my coworkers and me and inflict harm. Many lawyers told me that he could be prosecuted for his crimes, but I chose to forgive.

But now, when anyone Googles my name, all these bizarre, twisted, and hideous lies come up. They have had a profoundly devastating impact on our lives. My son has tried to remedy some of the damage, but many websites will not remove the libelous material because it continues to garner “hits”.

Summary

I cannot deny that when someone stands for Jesus as I have, they will undoubtedly be subject to persecution. Jesus says, “All men will hate you on account of my name”(Mt 10:22). He says, “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:11). So I cannot prevent them from peddling these lies, but I stand on God’s word. 

Any details regarding the things they say about me can be easily proven false. My life is an open book. I am never ‘hiding’ or secretive and am around large groups of people often, most of them poor people, whom I am trying to help. I had nothing to do with the tragedy of Andrea Yates. I warned Rusty not to neglect her, but to love and care for His family and children as I did mine.