Inside the Stonebriar Church Investigation: Why DCN Protected the Identities of Its Sources

How community relationships, source protection, and firsthand access shaped Divine Connection News’ investigation of Stonebriar Church

DALLAS, TX—Throughout Divine Connection News’ investigation of events at Stonebriar Church, readers may have noticed something unusual.

Ages are almost never reported.

Detailed personal biographies are frequently absent. Some witnesses are identified only by the information they agreed to have published. Family details, occupations, relationships, and other seemingly ordinary pieces of information have sometimes been deliberately left out.

That was not an oversight.

It was part of the reporting process.

From the beginning, the Stonebriar investigation involved an unusual problem: How do you document what people witnessed inside a church community without exposing those same people to risks they were already afraid to take?

For the journalists who eventually formed Divine Connection News, that question was personal.

The Investigation Began Inside the Community

Divine Connection News did not begin its Stonebriar Church investigation by sending an unfamiliar reporter into the church and asking strangers for interviews.

Several people associated with the publication had already attended Stonebriar Church. Some were students at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX. They knew people in the congregation. They recognized familiar faces. And, on several occasions, they personally encountered situations inside the church that raised questions they believed deserved further investigation.

Sometimes they saw only part of what was happening.

Then they began asking questions.

Craig Arnold, now Managing Editor of Divine Connection News, previously described one of the advantages the team had when the investigation began:

“Some of us were already part of the Stonebriar community. We knew the people … and where to begin asking questions.”

That distinction became increasingly important.

A journalist arriving years later could search public records, contact church leadership, interview people willing to speak publicly, or ask for official responses.

But that reporter would not necessarily know the person who had been standing across the lobby when something happened.

They would not necessarily recognize someone who had repeatedly appeared around particular people or situations.

They would not know which church member had quietly talked about an incident afterward, who had been present at a Bible study, who had noticed something unusual in a hallway, or who might know another person who had witnessed something important.

The DCN investigators did.

Trust Came Before the Publication

Many of the people who eventually spoke with DCN were not strangers responding to a media request.

They were people members of the reporting team knew, recognized, had encountered at Stonebriar Church, or reached through relationships within that community.

That created access—but it also created an obligation.

Some witnesses were willing to describe what they had seen but were deeply uncomfortable with becoming publicly identifiable.

Their concerns varied.

Some feared retaliation within the church community.

Some feared reputational or professional consequences.

Others were concerned about the allegations being investigated themselves. The Stonebriar Church reporting included accounts concerning suspected trafficking activity, efforts to approach or control vulnerable people, unusual interactions involving children and adults, and individuals witnesses believed were connected to larger trafficking networks.

For people who believed that traffickers or their associates had been operating in or around the community, appearing publicly in an investigation was not simply an uncomfortable social decision.

Some believed it could make them—or their families—targets.

DCN took those concerns seriously.

Justin Peterson, who participated in the investigation, describes that responsibility this way:

“These were not people who came to us because they wanted attention. In many cases, they talked to us because they already knew us and trusted us. If somebody tells you what they witnessed but is afraid that speaking publicly could affect their family, their church relationships, or even their safety, you have a responsibility not to expose them just to make the story easier for a reader to verify. We wanted the testimony preserved without turning the witnesses themselves into targets.”

That principle affected decisions throughout the investigation, including decisions about information that might ordinarily seem insignificant.

Why Ages Were Usually Not Published

One of the simplest protections was also one of the most consistent.

DCN generally did not publish the ages of Stonebriar witnesses or other individuals unless age was genuinely necessary to understanding the account.

An age may seem harmless.

But source identification rarely depends upon one fact.

An age combined with a church role, gender, approximate date, family relationship, occupation, physical description, volunteer position, or description of a particular incident can significantly narrow the number of people who could possibly fit the description.

When investigators promise to protect a source, protecting that person means thinking about all of those identifying details together.

DCN therefore avoided collecting or publishing unnecessary personal information simply because it might make a story more descriptive.

The purpose of the investigation was to document what witnesses saw—not to construct public dossiers on the witnesses themselves.

Victoria Cameron’s age was sometimes relevant because her own chronology formed a central part of the investigation and she had already chosen to identify herself publicly.

That did not mean every other witness was required to do the same.

Names and Identifying Information

Some witnesses agreed to be identified publicly.

Others wanted greater protection.

In those circumstances, DCN published the identifying information witnesses authorized for publication and deliberately withheld private information that was unnecessary to establishing their testimony.

In some cases, that meant publishing a witness under the name or identifying information that person provided and authorized for publication, without requiring DCN to disclose additional private information about the person’s identity.

That distinction matters.

Source protection means the publication separates two questions:

What does the public need to know to evaluate the testimony?

and

What personal information does the public have no legitimate need to know?

A person’s home address, exact age, family information, employment, private contact information, or other identifying details may add nothing to the substance of what that person witnessed.

Publishing those details merely because they are available can expose a source without strengthening the reporting.

DCN chose not to do that.

Why Outside Journalists Have Faced a Different Problem

This also helps explain why the Stonebriar Church investigation has been difficult for journalists outside the community to independently reconstruct.

By the time broader scrutiny of Stonebriar Church in regards to the firing of Tony Cammarota generated national interest, many of the events DCN had been documenting had not been made available to the public.

An outside reporter might reasonably ask:

Who should I call?

Who was actually there?

Who remembers this?

Who was standing in that part of the church?

Who knew these people?

Who heard about the incident immediately afterward?

Those questions are much harder to answer from outside the community.

DCN’s early investigators had a different starting point.

They had been there.

They knew people who had been there.

And when something appeared unusual, they could often ask someone nearby what had happened.

One witness could lead investigators to another. One remembered encounter could provide context for another event. Separate accounts could be compared against one another.

Arnold has described the larger purpose of that process as bringing individual accounts together so that the chronology, witness testimony, and documented events could be considered as a whole rather than as disconnected incidents.

That accumulated record eventually became the extensive Stonebriar Church investigation now published by Divine Connection News.

An Unusual Kind of Investigative Access

None of this means proximity automatically makes reporting easy.

In some respects, it creates an additional responsibility.

Reporters investigating a community they know must be especially careful to distinguish what they personally observed from what another person told them, what can be corroborated, what remains disputed, and what cannot presently be independently established.

But proximity can also reveal information that institutional reporting methods frequently miss.

People speak differently to someone they already know.

They remember details in ordinary conversations that they might never think to send to a newsroom.

And people frightened of retaliation may speak privately to a familiar person while refusing entirely to respond to an unknown journalist.

That was one of the realities of the Stonebriar investigation.

DCN’s access did not come primarily from press credentials.

It came from relationships.

Protecting a Source Does Not Make the Source Less Important

Anonymous and partially identified sources are sometimes treated as though their testimony is inherently less significant.

That is too simplistic.

There are legitimate reasons journalists scrutinize anonymous sourcing carefully. Readers should know whether serious allegations rest entirely upon unidentified individuals, whether testimony has been independently corroborated, and whether a publication has taken reasonable steps to evaluate the credibility of its sources.

But there are also circumstances in which demanding public identification effectively guarantees silence.

Investigations involving organized exploitation, trafficking, institutional power, retaliation, employment, family safety, or vulnerable children are among them.

The question is not simply whether a person’s complete identity appears underneath a quotation.

The better questions are:

Did the reporter know who the source was?

Did the source have a plausible opportunity to witness what was described?

Did investigators compare the account with other available information?

Were important limitations disclosed?

And was identifying information withheld for a legitimate reason?

Those are the standards by which DCN believes its Stonebriar Church sourcing should be evaluated.

The People Behind the Accounts

Behind many of the Stonebriar Church articles are people who decided to talk because they believed what they had seen mattered.

Some spoke extensively.

Some contributed only one fragment of information.

Some were comfortable being named.

Others were not.

A witness should not have to choose between contributing potentially important information to an investigation and unnecessarily exposing his or her family to danger.

For that reason, DCN has intentionally preserved a degree of anonymity around portions of its Stonebriar Church reporting.

The publication did not need every reader to know how old a witness was.

It needed to know whether that witness was there.

It did not need to publish every private detail by which members of the congregation might identify someone.

It needed to understand what that person witnessed.

And in an investigation that grew from relationships inside the church itself, those distinctions helped make testimony available that an outside journalist might never have known existed.

The Stonebriar investigation began because people who were already there saw things they could not easily explain.

They asked questions.

People they knew began answering them.

And eventually those answers became a record.

Protecting the people who helped create that record has always been part of telling the story.

How Readers Can Respond

If this article has impacted you, there are several ways you can help:

• Learn more about the Stonebriar Church investigation.
• Share this reporting with others.
• Pray for survivors, whistleblowers, and investigators.
• Support ongoing recovery and advocacy work.

---

Explore the Stonebriar Church Investigation

---

Stonebriar Church in Frisco, TX

Stonebriar Community Church is an Evangelical traditional style church located in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex at 4801 Legendary Dr, Frisco, TX 75034. The pastor of Stonebriar Church at the time of this incident was founding pastor Chuck Swindoll, who retired in October 2024. Chuck Swindoll is an evangelical Christian pastor, author, educator, and radio preacher. He founded Insight for Living, and is chancellor emeritus at Dallas Theological Seminary. Jonathan Murphy is the current senior pastor of Stonebriar Church. The church website is: https://www.stonebriar.org

---