Article By Thomas Wilson and April Hall // EEW Magazine Online // News

In 2019, John Gray admitted to having an emotional affair with a woman but denied that there was any truth to the alleged mistress’s claims that the two had sexual relations.

Now a brand new cheating scandal has broken online with a mononymous woman known as Mary at the center of it. According to her, she and the Greenville, SC pastor were entangled in an inappropriate relationship that led to the exchange of sexual messages – a claim that lawyers for the Relentless Church leader say is part of a blackmail and extortion plot.

John Gray is pastor of Relentless Church in Greenville, SC (Credit: Relentless Church)

"There are allegations that there were phone conversations between the two parties, and that’s essentially the extent of the allegations," attorney Devon Puriefoy told Greenville News. "When you take her own words, she says there was no affair, no physical contact, they never met each other, they never saw each other."

Puriefoy also said the case will be sent to the Greenville County Solicitor's Office and the Greenville office of the FBI to be investigated.

"A formal investigation will be conducted into extortion claims about the individual that's making the allegations. There's clear evidence of extortion from the release of this information. I don't think there's a question under South Carolina law or Texas law or federal law,” he said.

In an explosive interview with online gossip blogger Tasha K, Mary of Houston, TX said that she sent Gray, 47, explicit photos and that he invited her to the Houston home he shares with his wife, Aventer Gray.

According to Mary, she linked up with Gray, who is also an associate pastor at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, after her brother’s wife passed away in April. She said Gray, who is friends with her brother, a New Jersey pastor, spoke at her sister-in-law’s memorial service.

Mary, a Houston hairstylist, said the two initially began interacting on Instagram, and after a brief period of sharing back-and-forth messages, Gray escalated things by asking about her place of employment and reaching out to her there.

“I told him where I worked at. He called my job, and I answered the phone,” she explained to Tasha K. “I’m the manager of the hair salon, and I answered the phone, and he said, ‘Hey Mary, it’s John Gray.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not!’ He said, ‘Yeah, how you doing?’ I was like, what? I said, ‘Okay, I told you where I worked, but you just decided on yourself to look up the phone number and call my job?’ And that’s how we started talking.”

Aventer Gray is the First Lady of Relentless Church, wife of John Gray, and mother of the couple’s two children (Credit: Relentless Church)

Mary, 48, said she was too busy to talk when Gray called the salon, so she gave him her personal number – something she admits was “wrong on my part.” Minutes after hanging up, Mary said Gray reached out again and said he wanted to “do something big” for her grieving brother.

Then, Mary said, Gray told her, “Just to let you know, I don’t do social media.’”

She said she found that to be suspicious. “I said, oh, okay. I’ve got his game. He got my number now, he don’t do social media. I was like, wow. So, that’s how we started talking for the past couple of months.”

Mary said, one time, when Gray was in Alabama, he told her he was “getting a divorce,” and while in bed on Facetime, “He was showing me his underwear.” According to her, she was “shocked by it all” but was not interested in pursuing a sexual relationship with Gray.

“That’s why he stopped talking to me,” she said.

To corroborate her account of Gray’s cheating ways, Mary leaked video evidence to Tasha K which the popular blogger subsequently posted on Instagram. In the footage, Gray is seen complaining that his wife does not cook, and his son is forced to eat frozen pizza daily. In a different clip, Gray appears to be asking Mary to board a plane with him to Cabo, Mexico during the pandemic, and bring a “two-piece” bathing suit.

As previously reported by EEW Magazine Online, Gray and his wife appeared on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk in April (the same month Mary said she began communicating with the megachurch pastor), where Gray and his spouse discussed their ongoing marital issues that had been exacerbated by shelter-in-place orders caused by COVID-19.

During the virtual chat at the red table, Gray said, “As a man of faith, what sometimes happens with the theological construct is that we think that our Higher Power will somehow fix it all, and sometimes prayer is not enough.”

Though the two have sought counseling and are faith leaders with a prominent platform, Gray is transparent about what he feels holds him back from being whole and walking circumspectly with integrity. According to the husband and father of two children, Theory Aspyn-Sky and John Gray IV, low self-esteem, daddy issues, sexual abuse and psychological arrested development have contributed to his poor decisions.

“There’s some areas of unattended manhood that need to be addressed,” he said on Red Table Talk.