North Carolina Lt. Gov Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in the state, is hosting a fundraiser Tuesday with a religious group with a controversial past.

Word of Faith Fellowship, the group backing the fundraiser, has given Robinson thousands of dollars in campaign donations. Robinson has made speaking at churches a large part of his campaign as he wishes to highlight his conservative Christian values.

The church, however, has been publicly accused of having a cultlike control over its followers as well as engaging in criminal behavior such as slave labor, financial fraud, and the sexual and physical abuse of children, according to WRAL. Some of those accusations have ended in the criminal conviction of church leaders.

Robinson’s campaign did not respond to the Washington Examiner about his ties to the church, but his opponent in the gubernatorial election, Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, found it “disturbing, but unsurprising.”

“It is disturbing, but unsurprising, that Mark Robinson would raise money from leaders of a group alleged to have engaged in child abuse,” Stein campaign spokeswoman Morgan Hopkins told the news outlet, adding that this fundraiser shows Robinson is “too extreme and dangerous to be governor.”

Church leaders deny accusations of abuse. In 2017, the Associated Press reported church founder Jane Whaley was recorded saying she knew at least three children involved with the church had been sexually abused but did not report it to authorities. 

Whaley’s son-in-law Frank Webster was previously a local prosecutor until 2017, when it was discovered that he and another church official, Chris Back, allegedly “helped disrupt a social services investigation into child abuse in 2015, and had attended meetings where Whaley warned congregants to lie to investigators about abuse incidents.”

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Webster is listed as a main sponsor of Robinson’s Tuesday event, and Back is listed as a patron. 

“None of the allegations are true,” Webster told WRAL. “Chris and I were investigated by the NC [State Bureau of Investigation] over these claims and we were cleared a long time ago.”