(FāVS News) — Days after challenging Pastor Doug Wilson to a public debate, Peter Bell, producer and host of the podcast “Sons of Patriarchy,” made a social media confession that has forced a reckoning within the community he helped build around exposing abuse in patriarchal churches.
Bell, whose podcast investigates Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho-based church movement, said in a since-deleted Aug. 23 Facebook post that he struggled with pornography addiction for nearly two decades, was fired from multiple jobs for lying and experienced marital separation during his podcast’s first season last year.
The confession came shortly after Bell appeared at a Moscow community event Aug. 8 at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Center, where he and others spoke about the impact of Wilson’s teachings. The podcast producers scheduled their first Moscow visit to coincide with Grace Agenda, a weekend conference hosted by Wilson’s Christ Church that serves as a major recruiting event for the church. After the Kenworthy event, Bell and “Sons of Patriarchy” staff approached Wilson at the conference, and Wilson agreed to a one-on-one conversation with the podcast host, who has spent months documenting abuse allegations within Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.
Bell acknowledged to FāVS News that the timing of his Facebook post was deliberate.
“With the recent airing of the CNN interview with Doug Wilson” — a profile that examined Wilson’s Christian nationalist movement and connections to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — “our team began receiving far more media inquiries, survivor stories and ‘interest’ after Doug agreed to a one-on-one with me,” Bell said in an interview.
“This compounded with the kinds of messages we were receiving, mostly coming from women, who were praising me. They wanted to let me know that they wished their husbands could be like me, their sons would grow up to be like me, and their pastors cared like me,” Bell said. “I couldn’t handle the praise, knowing that if those who were messaging us knew the truth about me, maybe they’d be less inclined. I had told parts of it before, but I needed everything out there.”
A crowd attends a “Sons of Patriarchy” live event at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Center, Aug. 8, 2025, in Moscow, Idaho. (Photo by Tracy Simmons/FāVS News)
The confession sparked tension within the “Sons of Patriarchy” team. Bell’s co-host and majority owner of the podcast, Sarah Bader, responded with a social media statement distancing the team from Bell’s post.
“He did not run this post by the team. And we are holding him to account for it,” Bader posted. “We apologize to our survivor community for his actions and are putting measures and controls into place so that it can’t happen again.”
In Bell’s confession, he revealed he had been “addicted to porn for a little less than 20 years” and continues to struggle “to this day.” He also said he was “fired from two or three full-time ‘secular’ jobs … for lying,