Warsaw pastor speaks after words plagiarized

WARSAW, Ind. - A Warsaw pastor is speaking only with ABC 57 News after one of his blog posts was plagiarized by Hillary Clinton’s pastor in his new book.

ABC News reports that the publisher of ‘Strong for a Moment Like This—The Daily Devotions of Hillary Rodham Clinton’, pulled the book after discovering the author, Reverand Dr. Bill Shillady, didn’t give credit to the writer of one of the passages.

That writer, who’s a pastor in Warsaw, sat down exclusively with ABC 57’s Jess Arnold to talk about how the trouble started and how it’s been resolved.

A small town pastor is making national headlines with his words.

“Just scrolling through articles, and I see this article that says read this email that Hillary Clinton’s pastor sent to her on November 9…so as I’m reading I just kind of went wow this is crazy. I’ve written on something similar to this, and as I’m going on and on my heart’s beating a little bit faster, and I’m kind of getting to this shaky point of this is what I wrote! This is what I wrote!” said Warsaw Pastor Matt Deuel.

Somehow, a blog post Deuel wrote in 2016 had ended up in a book written by Hillary Clinton’s pastor, Reverend Dr. Bill Shillady, which was set to be released a few days after he came across the article.

He saw the reporter’s credentials at the bottom of the page and clicked.

“I just sort of kneejerk reaction, clicked Twitter and set a tweet to the reporter,” said Deuel.

It reads:

“I appreciate Reverend Shillady’s thoughts, because I think my words written on 3/25/16 may have ‘inspired’ his email.”

One out of many lines he said (and proved) were taken verbatim is, “For the disciples and Christ, followers in the first century, Good Friday represented the day that everything fell apart. All was lost.”

“It was kind of just surreal like wow this is so crazy, did Hillary Clinton actually read this thing, and what is this for and then later that evening the CNN reporter contacted me and I thought oh no what have I done?” said Deuel.

He says he wish he had contacted Reverend Shillady first to tell him:

“I wish you would have asked, because I would have gladly granted permission for you to use this.”

The reverend did end up calling him to apologize.

“He was very kind, very humble, and he took full responsibility for his mistake and was very apologetic…To me, it felt like a dropped ball. It was a detail that fell through. He’s never published before. He’s never authored anything before,” said Deuel.

So Matt forgave him and is using this surreal situation as a teaching moment.

“if anything would come out of it, that message would be one of grace and forgiveness, because in the mistakes that I make in my life, I certainly want people to respond to me in that way, because that’s what Christ has done for us,” he said.

Some people seem to be capitalizing on the publisher stopping the presses and are selling the book on Amazon for nearly $500.