Brian Houston, the founder of the Hillsong megachurch, desperately scrambled to explain why his X account had shared pornography in the early hours of the morning.
The social media account belonging to Houston was found to have shared an explicit video from an X page entitled “The Classic Pornostar Era 80/90/2000” last week at around 2 a.m. California time, where the New Zealand-born evangelist now lives.
The video remained online for several minutes before it was deleted. Houston, whose church once counted Justin Bieber and Chris Pratt among its high-profile supporters, later posted that his account had been “compromised overnight” without further explanation.
The 72-year-old then released a video on Facebook on Tuesday to further defend himself over why his account had shared hardcore pornography.
“A good starting point is to say I do not watch pornography, not online, not on social media, nowhere else,” he said.
“I’ve been in active ministry for over 54 years, and in that time I’ve seen the fallout of pornography on individuals, on marriages, on families, and I detest it.”
Houston said he and his wife, Bobbie, were in bed when the video was shared, and he then took issue with the wording used in The Christian Post’s reporting of the embarrassing incident.
“So what happened? Well, according to the Christian Post, and probably others, they said in a tweet that I did since then that I said that I was ‘hacked.’ I never used the word hacked. That’s false. It’s untrue. I did say my account was compromised.
“And you might say, ‘Well, what’s the difference?’ But I think there is a difference. I don’t believe that it’s likely that anyone actually hacked into my X account. Not impossible, but not likely. I think there’s a different explanation,” he added.
“I believe that someone has used one of my own devices, using my own passcode, to access my phone without my knowledge or my permission—someone with a grudge wanting to cause maximum damage, with perhaps minimum effort, to smear and humiliate me.”
Houston suggested that such an attack is “not the first time it’s happened.” In February 2024, Houston’s X account posted the lewd phrase “ladies and girls kissing,” which was swiftly taken down.
In a follow-up post and in an official statement, Houston suggested that the post was shared because his account had been “hacked.”
Houston, who prayed for President Donald Trump during a visit to the White House in December 2019, resigned from the Hillsong megachurch he founded in 2022 after facing sexual misconduct allegations from two women.
The evangelist was also accused of failing to alert police after being made aware that his father, Frank, a preacher who died in 2004, sexually abused a child in the 1970s.
Houston was found not guilty in August 2023 of concealing his father’s sexual abuse after a judge believed he had a reasonable excuse not to do so at the request of the now-adult victim.
During the trial, Houston told an Australian court that his father was a “serial paedophile” and that the full extent of his crimes may never be known.
