SAN JOSE — A jury is now deciding whether a former South Bay youth pastor and well-known nonprofit leader sexually abused two sisters who were under his tutelage a decade ago at The River church, capping a lengthy trial in which his attorneys argued that several influential church families fabricated the allegations to extract a multi-million legal payday.
Brett Bymaster, 49, who was executive director of the Healing Grove Health Center in San Jose when he was first arrested and charged in April 2024, faces 10 felony charges of sexual assault involving a minor. All of the alleged crimes overlap with his tenure as a youth pastor and then youth program organizer with The River, which he left in 2019 amid a falling out with church members, reputedly over his religious philosophy.
Six counts involve an accuser identified in court only as “K. Doe,” who claims she was around eight years old when her abuse started. The remaining four counts involve her older sister, known as “J. Doe,” who came forward with her own abuse account after the initial criminal charges, based on K. Doe’s allegations, was approved for trial after a September 2024 preliminary hearing. Their allegations were later consolidated into a single case.
In his closing arguments Monday, Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Christopher Paynter told jurors that “this case is about what lies behind the image of the defendant.”
“There was something else happening, something happening in secret,” Paynter said. “The defendant was molesting two girls, two children, two sisters, over years … They gave him their trust and he repaid that trust by molesting them.”
Paynter and the DA’s office content that Bymaster serially gave “side hugs” to the sisters that spilled over into intentional touching of their breasts and “wandering massages.” In a few instances, they alleged Bymaster made illicit contact, through their clothes, with his erect penis. The girls were preteens and teens at the time, which spans from 2013 to 2019.
The prosecutor argued that the Does’ claims were bolstered by testimony from three other girls who recounted what they described as his sexually suggestive comments about their breasts, and comments about masturbation and a past porn addiction. None of those girls’ allegations led to criminal charges, but they were allowed as evidence for Paynter to portray Bymaster as engaging in sexually inappropriate and, in some instances, grooming behavior.
Bymaster’s defense attorneys, Dana Fite and Renee Hessling, characterized the charges as manipulations borne from five church-affiliated families dismayed with how their children were acting under church guidance — including K. Doe’s suicide attempt at the age of 14 — and sought financial retribution.
In her closing arguments, Fite asserted that church reviews into complaints about Bymaster during his tenure revolved around characterizations of him being a bully and ideologically rigid with his religious teachings. The complaints, Fite said, did not involve any sexual violations until years after Bymaster left the church. They coincided with the families — whose children include the Doe sisters and the girls who gave testimony about the uncharged allegations — securing a prospective $2 million windfall from the church, contingent on Bymaster’s conviction, Fite said.
The Doe sisters’ parents were in financial disarray, Fite told jurors, adding that it compounded genuine confusion and fear about their children, but nothing about sexual abuse by Bymaster. At one point, she asked Bymaster to stand up in the courtroom, arguing that his 6-foot-4 frame made his alleged sexual contact with the girls implausible.
“They convinced themselves that there was sexual abuse even though were was none,” Fite said. “They didn’t follow the evidence. They followed their imaginations.”
Then, in referring to Don Quixote, she said, “They turned windmills into giants and an innocent person into a predator.”
Both the prosecution and defense sparred over why the Does did not report their abuse accounts sooner, including during previous church investigations into Bymaster, particularly in a post-tenure 2021 inquiry by the church that found him only to have been a “toxic” leader.
Later, the girls’ families claimed that inquiry misled them about how exhaustive it was, and led the church to acknowledge that the process did not explore sexual misconduct. It initiated a new inquiry in January 2024, around the time San Jose police renewed an investigation into Bymaster that had stalled years earlier.
Paynter seized on that sentiment in his closing statements, arguing that the Doe sisters feared Bymaster’s position and influence at a church that encompassed so much of their personal lives.
“She couldn’t escape,” Paynter said of K. Doe. “The defendant was involved in every facet of her life. The defendant’s wife was her primary physician.”
Fite argued much of the misconduct alleged against Bymaster, including his sexually explicit remarks to the children under his wing as youth pastor, amounted to distortions of confessionals in which he admitted to personal failings — including once being addicted to pornography — and frank talk to create an open dialogue to discuss topics about sex.
“The intention was not deviant, the intention was to share,” Fite said.
She also scrutinized the timeline of the accusations against Bymaster by matching it up with when the families involved in the case made misconduct claims against the church, when the church apparently agreed to set aside cash and property in anticipation of a future financial settlement. She highlighted the $85,000 the church paid to send K. Doe to a Tennessee-based mental-health rehabilitation facility where K. Doe underwent eye movement and desensitization and reprocessing (EDMR) therapy, which she later told police in April 2024 unlocked her repressed memories of Bymaster’s abuse.
Fite argued that explanation did not reflect the recognized therapeutic use of EDMR, and that the Tennessee rehabilitation and financial settlement plans all preempted K. Doe’s first official abuse claim to police that spurred Bymaster’s prosecution.
“There are a ton of reasonable doubts in this case. They’re all over the place,” she said. “This story is about adults who exploited the vulnerability of two teenage girls because the adults needed it to be true.”
Paynter argued that K. Doe recalled memories of the abuse before the EMDR therapy, and he dismissed the defense’s theory multiple times by saying their suspicions could be readily explained by the families of the Doe sisters and the other girls feeling genuinely betrayed by their church, and wanting their children to be made whole.
“This was not a sinister plot by those families to make a money grab,” he said. “There is a very understandable reason for why they did what they did.”