The Rev. Sherman Clifton Allen, a Fort Worth pastor accused of paddling several women — physical abuse that some say turned sexual — is no longer in the pulpit.

She says the paddlings began when she was in the sixth grade. Her family’s pastor, the Rev. Sherman Clifton Allen, would order her to grab her ankles, she said, and he paddled her until her bottom turned purple. The woman, now 41, says she was punished if Allen was told that her room was messy, that she had made a bad grade or that she had committed some other infraction.

She believed he was a prophet, a man who received instructions from God. Because of that, Davina Kelly said, she thought the punishment administered by the Rev. Sherman Clifton Allen was justified.