Televangelist Juanita Bynum, her estranged husband and a group of attorneys met for more than five hours Friday behind locked courtroom doors in Atlanta then slipped out a back door. No one involved in the hearing would discuss it afterward.
They were supposed to be discussing whether Bynum’s soon-to-be-ex, Bishop Thomas W. Weeks III, would agree to plead guilty in Fulton County Superior Court to felony charges for allegedly beating, stomping, choking and threatening to kill her in an Atlanta hotel parking lot Aug. 21.
Weeks’ criminal attorney, Ed Garland, and Fulton County prosecutors were in Friday’s closed meeting. So were both Weeks’ and Bynum’s divorce attorneys, though couple’s divorce case is pending in Gwinnett County Superior Court.
Week’s divorce attorney, Randy Kessler, wouldn’t comment Friday other than to say: “Nothing has changed in the criminal case. It’s being scheduled for trial.”
Weeks, the 40-year-old senior pastor of Duluth’s Global Destiny Church and its international ministries, told an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter last month that he never harmed his wife and that she is the one who has struck him.
Weeks’ trial date has not been set on charges of aggravated assault and making terroristic threats.