A man who, as a child, attended a camp overseen by the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democratic candidate for one of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats, is speaking up about the abuses he claims to have endured there.
Anthony Washington, who was just 12 when he was an attendee at Camp Farthest Out, told the Washington Free Beacon that he had urine thrown on him and was locked out of his cabin overnight when Warnock oversaw the camp as senior pastor of Maryland’s Douglas Memorial Community Church.
“I just wanted to get the hell away from that camp,” Washington said. “I didn’t want to spend another day there. … That camp was real messed up.”
One night, as punishment for wetting the bed, Washington said he was forced to spend the night outside.
“I’m like, ‘Hell no, I’m not, it’s cold out there,'” he said. “[The counselors] wouldn’t let me in the house, not at all. … Shut the door to the cabin, locked it.” Washington added, “It was dark. There wasn’t nothing out there but the basketball court. I ain’t never experienced nothing like that. Like, you’re not in a tent, you’re not in nothing. You’re just out, God knows where.”
He also said counselors threw urine on him from a bucket that was kept in case a bathroom was not nearby.
“I went through that experience myself,” Washington said. “I don’t even like talking about this shit. That shit happened. … It was like in a bucket. They would keep that shit in a bucket.”
Washington said his mother filed a lawsuit over the alleged 2002 abuse and that the matter was later resolved outside of court with a large financial settlement. Officials from the courthouse and the Maryland state archives told the Washington Free Beacon that they were unable to find any record of the lawsuit. The lawyer who represented the family was unwilling to speak to the outlet on the record.
Washington’s sister, a woman named Dominique, corroborated her brother’s account, both of the alleged abuse and the legal proceedings that followed, according to the report.
Warnock’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
In July 2002, Warnock was arrested at the camp after a Maryland state trooper said he repeatedly disrupted her interviews with counselors while she was investigating allegations of child abuse. He was charged with “hindering and obstructing” police. The charges were later dropped by the state prosecutor.
In June of the following year, the camp was denied its certificate to operate a youth camp by the Department of Health, citing it had failed to report at least five findings of child abuse by the camp’s director, Brian Carter. Carter ultimately resigned.
“I don’t think nobody like [Warnock] should be running for damn Senate nowhere, running a camp like that,” Washington said. “He should not be running for government.”
The surfaced allegations come just over one week before Georgia’s runoff elections in which Warnock will face off against Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler.
