Growing up in the Dallas evangelical community felt like living in “a small town,” Ashley Squires says. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone especially knew the Harmons. The family’s patriarch, Hank Harmon, coached football and taught the high school Bible class at Trinity Christian Academy (TCA) in Addison, which Squires attended in the late '90s and early 2000s. Harmon was also a spiritual leader at Camp Kanakuk, a Christian summer camp in Missouri that is popular with “affluent” North Texas families.
Hank Harmon, Squires remembers, was a man considered to have “near God-like authority.”
So she immediately recognized the mugshot of Hank’s son, Matthew Harmon, when it was published by media outlets earlier this month. Matthew, 46, was arrested by Dallas police for sexual assault of a child in 2007. According to police, Harmon had access to “thousands of children” through his time teaching and volunteering at Dallas-area private schools and Camp Kanakuk.
For Squires, who spent years “deconstructing” the rigid ideologies she grew up learning as a TCA student, Matthew Harmon’s arrest was a “bombshell.”
“This is a big deal. For where I grew up, this is as big as the Josh Duggar thing. It’s that big of an explosion,” Squires, now a Kansas City-based English professor, told the Observer. “I’m back and forth between ‘Oh my god, I was right. Something was deeply wrong here.’ But also just very sad, and very angry.”
According to Dallas police, Matthew worked at Providence Christian School of Texas from 2004 to 2007, at Camp Kanakuk from 1995 until the mid-2000s and he volunteered at TCA — where both his parents taught — for an unspecified number of years. TCA declined to say which years Matthew Harmon was involved with the school, but a TCA email shared with the Observer states Matthew most recently joined students on a trip to Israel in 2016.
“We grieve for anyone who has experienced assault or abuse. Although Matthew Harmon was never an employee of TCA, he did attend some school-sponsored trips along with his parents after his 1996 graduation from TCA,” the school said in a statement to the Observer. “We have made our community aware of this arrest and are in the process of conducting our own independent investigation with a third party.”
Several individuals associated with TCA and Camp Kanakuk told the Observer that the Harmon family’s influence as community spiritual leaders would have granted Matthew “unfettered access” to young people, even as red flags were raised about his alleged misconduct with minor girls. It’s a side effect of the “systemic spiritual abuse” that ran rampant in the tightly knit Dallas evangelical community, Squires said.
“It just wouldn’t surprise me at all if the folks at Providence and the folks at TCA said ‘Oh, Hank and Diane’s son? He’s fine,’” Squires said.
Buckets of Failures
According to a statement by the Providence Christian School of Texas, concerns about Matthew Harmon’s misconduct with minor girls existed before his hiring in 2004, but an internal investigation found his background and reference checks were never completed. Matthew’s ex-wife told Dallas police that Matthew had once admitted to kissing a camper at Camp Kanakuk, and she had heard rumors of his being moved between camps as a result of an inappropriate relationship with a camper.
Camp Kanakuk and Providence Christian School did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment.
The incomplete background check is only the first of several “big buckets of failures” Providence committed during Matthew’s time with the school, Dallas attorney Zeke Fortenberry told the Observer. Fortenberry is representing the female victim of the 2007 assault Matthew was arrested for in a civil investigation into Providence’s actions.
“Once he’s hired there are multiple accounts of behavior that is inappropriate with other girls predating my client. And they weren’t handed appropriately, they weren’t taken seriously,” Fortenberry said. “He was allowed to continue having closed door sessions with young girls. No one even changed the way they treated him. Nothing was done.”
“Providence had so many opportunities to prevent a predator from taking advantage of a young teenage girl and they failed to do so.” — Dallas Attorney Zeke Fortenberry
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According to an arrest warrant affidavit, Providence administrators held a limited, internal investigation into Matthew’s relationship with the minor, who by then was no longer a Providence student, after he resigned from the school in 2007. They found evidence that Matthew was engaging in late-night phone calls with the victim and buying her gifts. But, after determining the relationship was not sexual, the behavior was not reported to the police, Camp Kanakuk or the victim’s parents.
Fortenberry believes Matthew’s behavior was indicative of grooming, and, by not notifying the girl’s parents, Providence allowed the abuse to continue “for several more years.” An email shared with police stated Providence administrators decided not to report Matthew’s behavior to Camp Kanakuk out of concern they were “sticking their noses where they don’t belong.”
“Providence had so many opportunities to prevent a predator from taking advantage of a young teenage girl and they failed to do so,” Fortenberry said. “There’s these allegations of misconduct, they’re credible, you know her age, and then you know exactly where he’s going to work at [Camp Kanakuk] dealing with the exact same demographic. I can’t imagine not reporting it.”
According to the warrant, Matthew was “heavily involved” in the Branson, Missouri, summer camp, which has now been tied to dozens of cases of child sexual assault.
“I don’t even know what Matt did [at Kanakuk],” Rachel Attwood, who attended TCA and Camp Kanakuk in the late '90s and early 2000s, told the Observer. “I would just see him driving around on a 4-wheeler. He was allowed to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted.”
The names of Attwood, as well as George Mesh and Candace Riggs, who are quoted later in this story, are pseudonyms given to three interviewed individuals who asked to remain anonymous due to their ongoing involvement in the local evangelical community and their fear of possible retaliation.
A Culture of Deference
Attwood was a TCA student on one of the many overnight 8th Grade Wilderness trips that Matthew Harmon chaperoned. Even as a preteen, she remembers being confused why a man who wasn’t a faculty member and wasn’t a student was there.
“He gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I stayed far away,” Attwood said. “I remember thinking ‘That guy, there is something off and I don’t know why he’s here.’ And the answer was because he was Coach Harmon’s kid.”
Since Matthew’s arrest, Attwood has been “disappointed” to see Hank Harmon’s “instrumental role” at TCA and Kanakuk underrepresented in the media, because of the freedom she feels it gave Matthew. While Camp Kanakuk has five different campuses around Branson, she remembers noticing the Harmons' influence while attending K-2, a sports-focused teen camp. A cabin adjacent to the camp is known as the “Harmon cabin.”
"For where I grew up, this is as big as the Josh Duggar thing. It’s that big of an explosion." — Ashley Squires, TCA Alum
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The camp strictly enforced a culture of purity while Attwood attended, with female campers undergoing dress code checks while being instructed to “not even look” at the boy’s half of camp “in case they were running around naked,” she said.
(One Kanakuk abuser, counselor-turned-director Pete Newman, has over 50 victims and was repeatedly reported to camp leaders for misconduct, including engaging with campers while naked. Newman is serving two life sentences, plus 30 years, at the Jefferson City Correctional Center in Missouri.)
The camp encouraged a “boys will be boys” culture, Attwood said, going so far as to describe the needs of young boys as “animalistic.”
“Now, as a grown-up, I see that oh, that shouldn’t have been happening at all,” Attwood said.
The “modesty and purity culture” at Camp Kanakuk also thrived at TCA, multiple sources told the Observer. Squires attempted to speak out against it while a student. During her junior year, she approached administrators about her concerns regarding some of the teachings in Hank Harmon’s Bible class.
After that, she said, nothing changed.
An Unquestionable Figure
“I’m not at all surprised to hear that female students have been talking to you about [Hank’s] classes,” George Mesh told the Observer.
Mesh, a TCA student in the early 2000s, was one of the alumni identified by TCA as being present on an eighth-grade wilderness trip with Matthew Harmon. He remembers the trip, and at the time, he saw the man as a role model.
“I just remember thinking to myself, ‘Matt is so cool,” Mesh said. “I wanted to be like Matt.”
But as Mesh got older, he remembers noticing odd relationships between male teachers and female students at TCA. It was not uncommon for male coaches to approach female students in the hallway to “work on their form,” Mesh said, touching the girls' legs, feet and arms between classes. And he remembers some male teachers, including Hank Harmon, held one-on-one tutoring with female students.
Hank Harmon did not respond to the Observer's request for comment.
"When I heard about Kanakuk and Matt, everything just kind of made sense to me, unfortunately. I kind of felt in the back of my head, while I was a student at TCA, that something was off." — Candace Riggs, TCA alumna
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Several female students, whose times at TCA span multiple decades, have described a culture of harassment, sexism and intimidation dominating their high school experiences. In a statement provided to the Observer, TCA said any harassment, intimidation, sexually inappropriate comments or any other disrespectful or unkind behavior would be a violation of the school’s code of conduct and “does not represent the Christian values” of the school.
Squires said on multiple occasions she witnessed male students committing verbal and physical harassment against female students with no consequence.
“I remember being in a majority male class, and a male classmate asking me if I was a feminist,” Candace Riggs, who graduated from TCA in the early 2020s, told the Observer. “And [I remember] having the entire room look at me waiting for a response. I knew if I said no they would accept me into the class and if I said yes they would continue to ignore me.”
Riggs said female students faced inequities that male students did not, such as time-consuming dress code checks, being pressured into signing celibacy promises and facing public ridicule for engaging in sexual behaviors. In Hank Harmon’s Bible class, specifically, she felt she was “made to feel beneath her male counterparts.”
In the class, Hank often devolved into “crazy tangents,” Riggs said. Students who disagreed with his teachings were required to argue “directly from the Bible,” and only if he agreed with their interpretations.
Riggs and Squires both recall being taught that homosexuality is a sin and that women were meant to be homemakers. Squires described the class as “very toxic,” led by a teacher who “could not be questioned or challenged.”
“Even for an evangelical Christian school, he was out there,” Squires said. “[It was] abuse of his authority, abuse of God’s word, abuse of the Bible to try to coerce conformity.”
When Riggs learned of Matthew's arrest, “it all clicked.” She doesn’t feel it’s a stretch that a culture that enforces female submission and purity would create a man who exerts his own power over young women.
“There were always moments in [Hank’s] class that I felt uncomfortable and unheard, as a woman,” Riggs said. “When I heard about Kanakuk and Matt, everything just kind of made sense to me, unfortunately. I kind of felt in the back of my head, while I was a student at TCA, that something was off. I could never put a word or a reason to it.”
For Squires, who remembers Hank strictly enforcing “purity” behaviors with female students, it feels like a “betrayal.”
“You can just feel the hypocrisy of all of it,” Squires said. “I just don’t see how they couldn’t have known that this was going on. And that they would be enforcing these very strict standards of behavior on some students while turning a blind eye to what Matt was doing is deeply disturbing to me.”
Dallas police said they have identified "additional victims" and "it is possible" Matthew Harmon will face additional charges.
