Mary Cosby and her husband Robert Sr. are reportedly suing the executives operating their church’s business. In the suit, Mary is named as Faith Temple Pentecostal’s evangelist, first lady, and vice president, and Robert is named as the church’s president and bishop.
On The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, castmates have often discussed how Robert was once Mary’s step-grandfather before her grandmother passed away. The grandmother allegedly was wealthy and ran the church.
According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Mary and Robert are suing two executives who are operating her church’s for-profit business.
She’s accusing the two leaders of embezzling millions for years from the company, which is completely owned by Mary’s church.
Mary and Robert are seeking a total of about $6.3 million in damages from the business firm, United Security Financial (USF), as well as officers Shawn Turner (secretary of USF) and Annie L. Johnson (president of USF).
Per a complaint filed last Wednesday, Faith Temple and the Cosbys are accusing Johnson and Turner of using the church funds for personal purposes, forging Robert’s signature, and intimidating employees.
The outlet was unable to contact Johnson and Turner’s reps at the time.
They accused Johnson of taking in her name the title of a radio station owned by the church, and in 2017, she began to cancel the channel’s FCC license, demolish its transmission tower, and dismantle the channel itself.
Their complaint claimed Johnson transferred the radio station’s property in 2020 to her son, and a third party purchased it from him and the proceeds went back to his mom. The property at the time was allegedly worth over $4.3 million.
They also accused Johnson of “commingling” money and using the church’s account to fund the USF mortgage for an Indiana property, which the husband of Johnson sold to a cousin. The $173,000 mortgage was allegedly never repaid to the church, and the payoff with interest totaled $421,912.40.
The suit claimed Johnson abused the church’s reps and USF employees “with intimidation, threats, verbal abuse, racial degradation, and physical abuse,” and she allegedly “repeatedly” told the USF workers to cash company checks before giving the money to her, though she allegedly asserted that it would go to Faith Temple. She purportedly used the money for personal purposes “as a form of money laundering,” and a total of $350,000 was taken in this manner.
According to one accusation, an audit found that the USF president made payments from 2006 to 2018 from Mary and Robert’s personal checking account, controlled by Johnson at the time, concerning a $119,000 loan that Robert signed to purchase an Ensign Peak property. It was believed that the loan was paid off in 2006 via refinancing.
The complaint claimed that a company Turner owned sent the final check for paying off the loan to a USF account, which was “used for personal gain.”
The suit alleged that $126,611.10 was paid off – after Mary and Robert thought the loan was already paid.
Their lawsuit also claimed that a second mortgage for the property was made for $99,217 in 2008 after the USF president forged Robert’s signature, and she threatened a notary into notarizing this false signature. The complaint said that Johnson used Mary and Robert’s personal funds to pay $76,448.40 on this mortgage, but Johnson and Turner later asserted that “there has not been a single payment made to this Mtg.”
According to the complaint, Turner “provided a payoff amount of $137,475.35 with no explanation of how this was determined,” and Mary and Robert didn’t find out about this second mortgage until December of last year.
They accused Johnson of funneling congregants’ “sacred tithes and offerings” to pay personal expenses, including an Amex bill, and a ledger was allegedly found that showed that a total of $90,670.32 in payments, in Johnson’s handwriting, were made to her.
RHOSLC Live Viewing Thread – This is also the live viewing thread for tonight’s new episode of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City season five, so please feel free to chat in the comments section below as the new episode airs on Bravo at 9/8c.
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