Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic of American Gothic literature, The Scarlet Letter, set in Puritan New England, centers on the punishment meted out to a woman who has a passionate affair with her pastor, becomes pregnant and then is sentenced to wear a red letter A for Adultery around her neck for the rest of her life. The novel is a piercing 19th Century critique of the effects of a repressive, sin-obsessed society on the health and happiness of its people.

Erica Kirk’s TPUSA, as I wrote last week, is one of the more insidious organizations wielding regressive influence in an America where women are already bodily and legally under siege by the Trump administration’s predators’ ball. TPUSA joins Christian nationalist churches in the broader MAGA effort to promote female submission to men, early marriage and wifely obedience to husbands in both private and public matters – including one vote per household, with the man of the house filling out the ballot.

It’s brazen, it’s lunatic, and it’s effective, as TPUSA’s women leaders serve as an auxiliary to the broader Epstein class cover-up protecting abusive men.

Besides the antediluvian ideology, though, there’s another element to the TPUSA scene that reminded us of the Hawthorne novel. Instead of their conspicuous crosses, many could be wearing a red H for Hypocrisy, for passing righteous judgment on a supposedly sin-infested culture, while living with – and in some cases hiding – sexual abuse among their own.

One of the talks at the TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit was “Why Christ-Centered Classical Education Changes Everything,” delivered by the organization’s education consultant, Heather Lloyd. Lloyd is sometimes listed in TPUSA materials as a member of the leadership team. She is currently with Erica Kirk in a Chicago suburb promoting “classical Christian education” to educators and parents. Her day job is as executive director of Concordis Education Partners, affiliated with white nationalist Idaho pastor Doug Wilson.

To the conference audience, Lloyd delivered a denunciation of “government education,” accusing public schools of being rife with “crazy sin.” For example: “One percent of our population right now identifies as transgender. That’s actually a large number. Now the problem is that we tend to think that that’s the issue. But I’d like to argue today that this is the symptom, not the issue … True public education is the church providing education for biblical fluency for the community,” she declared. “The Puritans wanted every child to be able to read God’s word.”

The goal is lofty and unapologetically atavistic: eradicate secular education and get kids fearing God and reading Bibles again. In her talk, Lloyd also cheered an audience member’s claim that the Texas school voucher program – in which taxpayer education money is diverted to parents opting into private schools – had caused 14 fund-starved school districts to shut down. (The declining number of public school students is partly due to those private school vouchers and partly to the falling birth rate – another obsession of the right.)

But for someone aiming to Make Puritans Great Again, Lloyd has a peculiar challenge: Her husband, Alex Lloyd, recently spent two years in prison for possession and distribution of child pornography. Court records indicate the materials consisted of 10 videos and 3 images, including at least one involving a prepubescent minor, obtained through the Kik messaging platform. He initially pleaded not guilty, then later entered a guilty plea to a federal offense involving possession of child pornography as before facing a jury trial. He spent two years in prison and was released in 2024 as a registered sex offender. A condition of his release includes a ban on unsupervised time with children, including his own grandchildren.

Alex Lloyd was a deacon at Doug Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho-based Christ Church. Wilson is a controversial white Christian nationalist whose influence has exploded under the Epstein-class-protecting Trump administration. He is a favorite pastor of Pete Hegseth and has addressed – sermonized, actually, in flagrant violation of the separation of church and state – service members called to mandatory gatherings inside the Pentagon.

As a consultant, Heather Lloyd helps sell hundreds of Christian schools on the programs and curriculum of the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), an accreditation network of hundreds of private schools and colleges in the United States, founded in 1993 by Wilson. His abhorrent ideology when it comes to women is not overtly stated in the material, but according to some parents I’ve spoken to and who shared their experiences publicly it permeates the schools.

Wilson has suggested marital rape is not possible, although he has walked that back. Earlier this year he tweeted “Husbands are prohibited from bluster, bossing about, selfish grasping, and all the rest of it, but the Bible nevertheless requires wives to obey their husbands. This obedience is to be cheerful, complete, reverent, all the way down, and across the board. … Now I am fully aware that in our current cultural climate this is a perfectly outrageous thing to say and teach. It may even be illegal in some states. “

He also co-wrote a textbook used in the curriculum Lloyd promotes with a fellow church affiliated educator who openly groomed a high school student he was teaching. The church never charged him because the girl was 18 by the time they had sex, but Wilson did take the man’s name off the textbook.

The church has a history of leniency toward abuses like that (and worse). Marital rape is not uncommon, detailed in harrowing firsthand accounts, and claims about pedophiles within the church’s ranks are diminished or said to be overlooked. The father of one victim said that when he reported the abuse, church officials threatened to bring him – the father – under church discipline for failing to protect his daughter. “It would be like me getting robbed and the police coming over and arresting me because I didn’t have five locks on the door, only one,” he told reporters for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which published an article about the saga. “It was just bizarre.”

Alex Lloyd’s family called Doug Wilson to pick him up from the Moscow, Idaho, police station after his 2022 arrest. The church soon dismissed Lloyd from the deaconage, but in its public statement, did not mention the child pornography charges, instead claiming he confessed right away to a porn addiction, and blamed his problem on “the pornification of the culture.”

What her husband’s sex offender status means in practical terms for TPUSA education missionary Heather Lloyd – who has personally taught Wilson’s Christian classical methods to children at schools in Arizona and Idaho over the past two decades – is that she cannot drive onto school grounds with her husband in the car and would likely be required to disclose that she lives with a registered sex offender if applying for new jobs involving children. As of 2019, according to one church member’s post praising her “faithful obedience,” she was running a summer camp for teenage girls.

It’s not clear that she is teaching anymore and TPUSA did not return a comment confirming (we will update if and when they do). But Heather Lloyd goes in and out of schools with administrators across the nation. When parents at one school discovered her husband’s conviction and Sex Offender status and attended a meeting, she batted away concerns claiming Alex “accidentally” opened child porn - “about 19 seconds worth” - and quickly deleted it. She told parents there were “no issues, he can see his grandchildren.”

A parent present for that discussion said “Heather is insane to be in this business with such a skeleton in the closet, but she is just one piece in a larger organization, where people are in cahoots pushing Doug Wilson’s system. And she would not pass a school background check! if you live with a registered sex offender you can’t take a kid on a field trip yet somehow she is an education consultant at TPUSA.”

The fact that Erica Kirk’s TPUSA would front the wife of a registered child porn sex offender as an education consultant and advisor suggests that, like other well-financed Trump-supporting PACs and organizations, this leviathan of Christian right extremist influence shares with the Epstein class a sense of impunity rarely seen in modern American political history.

They will say they’re just trusting in the Lord.

With this clan, perhaps one and the same.

[Turning Point USA and Heather Lloyd, contacted together — as Heather Lloyd is a consultant — did not respond to a request for comment.]

.Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow