t was an early afternoon in July, and Paula White was holding court before an audience of about 25 Southern Baptist ministers in a room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The televangelist was recounting one of her favorite stories – about when Donald Trump reached out to her in 2011 for guidance on a possible White House run. “Would you bring some people around me to pray?” she said he asked her. “I really want to hear from God.”

White recalled that she and another pastor gathered about 30 ministers from different evangelical Christian traditions at Trump Tower in Manhattan. After the prayer session, when Trump asked her what she thought, she responded: “I don’t feel it’s the right timing.”

The two talked and prayed about the matter over the next four years. When White again gathered religious leaders at Trump Tower in September 2015, she supported the decision he’d already made to run. Videos on YouTube of that event show her standing on his right, head down, laying hands on him as she prayed.

So here she was in the summer of 2017 at the head of a long table in the Executive Office Building just steps from the White House, addressing a group of religious leaders who had been invited to Washington by the president’s evangelical advisory council. With her blond hair, scarlet Oscar de la Renta sheath dress and matching patent leather stilettos, she was a bright bird among the forest of dark-suited clergymen – and, she made it clear, the one with the access to Trump. “The president says hello,” she told them. “I was with him first thing this morning.”

Because of White, evangelicals have “an unprecedented opportunity to have our voice and be heard” in the Oval Office, said Tim Clinton, president of the American Association of Christian Counselors. “God has placed Paula in a unique place for such a time as this.”

Not all Christians are fans of the wealthy, thrice-married White, who has long been associated with the prosperity gospel, a set of beliefs that says God will reward faith, and very generous giving, with financial blessings. Detractors point to a congressional investigation of her former church’s finances and accusations that she has taken advantage of her mostly African-American parishioners through her fundraising. Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore has called her a “charlatan,” conservative Christian writer Erick Erickson has said she’s a “Trinity-denying heretic” and Christian rapper Shai Linne named her a “false teacher” in one of his songs.

But since the election, White’s star has soared. She offered a prayer at Trump’s inauguration. She sat by the president at a dinner for evangelical leaders on the eve of the National Day of Prayer. She has hovered close by during prayer sessions in the Oval Office. She was present when Trump met with advisers to discuss the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, she has turned many of her duties as a pastor of a large church in Apopka, Fla., over to associates as she jets to the White House an average of once a week. (The Trump White House does not release visitor logs, so it’s difficult to confirm how often White is there.)

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White has no title and no official position at the White House but plays several roles. After helping put together an evangelical council for Trump during the campaign, White said she is now the convener and de facto head of a group of about 35 evangelical pastors, activists and heads of Christian organizations who advise Trump. (The White House wouldn’t release a list of members, but other names associated with this group include Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Billy Graham’s son Franklin Graham, Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., conservative political activist Ralph Reed and Dallas-based pastor Robert Jeffress.) She also acts as pastor to the president.

And in the words of Johnnie Moore, the evangelical advisory council’s unofficial spokesman and White’s publicist, she serves as “part life coach, part pastor” for White House staff.

It isn’t easy to discern how much influence White has with Trump. Michael D’Antonio, author of the 2015 biography “The Truth About Trump,” says he had never heard of White before the election. “White is deemed by many to be a deceptive poseur, who is long on self-promotion and short on substance,” he said in an email. (White, in response, said she has never encountered D’Antonio. “And clearly,” she emailed me, “he hasn’t a clue about what he’s talking about.”)

Others say White has played a significant role in Trump’s life. In June, Dobson identified her as someone who had known Trump for years and “personally led him to Christ.” Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, said by email: “She’s very influential. She has been close to Trump and the family for many years.” The president’s son Eric sent this statement: “Paula is a terrific woman and a wonderful friend to our entire family. We are very grateful for her support and guidance. Faith is so important and Pastor White continues to be an inspiration to all those who know her.”

Some details of the friendship between Trump and White have to be taken as a matter of faith, because the White House turned down a request to interview the president. But when this reporter emailed the claims White made in this article about Trump, an official responded that while the assertions hadn’t been fact-checked, “none of the below jumps out as being inaccurate.” When asked for a comment on White, Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, responded: “Reverend Paula White has been a friend and faith leader to the President for many years. Her support is a tremendous asset for which the President is grateful.”

Trump is not an active member of any church, has publicly said he doesn’t need to ask God for forgiveness and infamously bragged about sexually assaulting women. But bring up those issues with White, and she responds with the story of Jesus speaking with an adulterous Samaritan woman at a well. “He didn’t lord it over her but sat with her,” she said. “He gets down in the dirty places of life. Does that make Jesus complicit with an adulteress? No. Because you stand with people doesn’t mean you’re complicit with them.” Later, she said, “I don’t give up on people. I don’t have a dimmer switch. It’s who I am. Until I am kicked out, I will be with you. I don’t abandon people. I just don’t.”

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How did a onetime “messed-up Mississippi girl” become a spiritual counselor to the president? White often points to her tumultuous childhood as a source of her grit.

Now 51, she was born in Tupelo, Miss., to Donald and Janelle Furr. Her father committed suicide when she was 5, and her mother scraped together a living for Paula and her half brother Mark until she remarried.

White’s mother – now 76 and named Janelle Loar – said her daughter was energetic and outgoing from the beginning. “She was born breech and she hasn’t slowed down since,” Loar said. “She interacted with everyone she came across. She was a sweet kid, a very good student.”

Another element of White’s personality showed up in childhood as well: “She was very tenacious in whatever she decided to do. In gymnastics, there was a certain flip she couldn’t do, but she wouldn’t give up. She never gives up.”

White said she was molested from age 6 to 13 by a string of caregivers, relatives and neighbors, which contributed to her becoming a promiscuous teenager. Her mother said she was unaware of the abuse at the time. “I only found out when she opened up and wrote about it,” Loar says. “It shocked me, and it was a horrifying thing to hear.”

After her mother remarried, the family moved to Maryland, where Paula graduated from Seneca Valley High School in Germantown, Md., in 1984. She became a born-again Christian that same year. After getting pregnant the following February, White married the father, a local musician named Dean Knight, and their son was born in November 1985.

“She was very attractive, which was the first thing that caught my eye,” said Knight, 52, who owns a janitorial service near Frederick, Md., and is the lead vocalist in a family country-rock band called the Knight Brothers. “Her hair color was different – she was a brunette – but she was always beautiful. And she was a little wild. We were a little crazy in our youth.”

White attended a Bible school at the Pentecostal-oriented National Church of God in Fort Washington, Md. Though she did not graduate, she was nevertheless ordained as a nondenominational minister by the church’s leader, the late Rev. T.L. Lowery. While doing inner-city ministry and working with D.C. homeless advocate Mitch Snyder, she became interested in serving those communities. She met a lot of black preachers, and, according to her son, Bradley Knight, she began to pick up their vocabulary and cadence. “The black community told her, ‘You’re a white girl who preaches black,’ ” he said.

Meanwhile, in 1987, Dean Knight recalled, “I was in a head-on collision. It ripped me apart and it really put a damper on a lot of things. It was after that that things started falling apart” in their marriage.

Paula was attending Damascus Church of God in Maryland – part of the same denomination as the National Church of God – where she met Randy White, the associate pastor, who was married with three children. The two divorced their spouses in 1989 and married each other a year later, leaving the Washington area for his new job as a youth minister in Florida.

The Whites established their own congregation in 1991, which would later become Without Walls International Church.

During the next decade, she blossomed as a pastor.

T.D. Jakes, a megachurch pastor in Dallas, became a mentor, giving White name recognition among his huge, largely black fan base.

And the Whites began broadcasting their message on a regional Christian television network that reached listeners across Florida – including a restless business tycoon at Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.

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White thinks it was 2001 or 2002 when Donald Trump called.

“You’re fantastic; you’ve got the ‘it’ factor,” she said he told her.

“Well, that’s God’s presence,” she responded.

He repeated almost verbatim some of her sermons back to her, then confided that he often watched not only Billy Graham, but evangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and songwriter Bill Gaither on Christian TV.

This guy is hungry for God, she thought. As they talked further, she learned he had attended church as a youth and been confirmed in the Presbyterian Church – so he had some of the basics of the faith. He seemed curious about how her pragmatic, businesslike take on religion could relate to his life.

Meanwhile, she had ambitions of her own. “I felt the Lord said to me to go on (national) TV,” she said. In late 2001, she signed a $1.5 million contract with Black Entertainment Television for a show called “Paula White Today.” She was a hit, tackling tough issues, such as family problems, money and loneliness.

“She was honest about her shortcomings,” wrote Phillip Luke Sinitiere, whose 2009 book, “Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace,” has a chapter on White. “Her message infused an emphasis on God’s transforming power with the raw and honest faith of postmodern confessional culture.”

White said it was around this point that she began to preach prosperity theology. Years later, she would disavow some aspects of that belief system and acknowledge “God’s presence and blessing in suffering as much as in times of prosperity.”

But at the time, she reasoned that the prosperity gospel’s emphasis on giving was the only way an evangelist could get on television and stay there. “Ministry takes money, and you have to raise the funds,” she said.

Her message attracted millions of watchers.

“Paula White is an incredible trailblazer,” Clemson University political science professor Laura Olson said. “Like it or not, she is extraordinary for what she has accomplished.”

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White’s success drew Trump to her as well. “Are you ever up in New York?” he asked her during one of their calls. “Well, I am sometimes,” she responded, thinking of a Bible study she was leading for the New York Yankees at the time. “The Apprentice,” a reality show produced by and starring Trump, had started in 2004, and she says he wanted her to be on the set for informal Bible studies or prayer for whoever wanted it.

A quick survey of more than a dozen “Apprentice” alumni didn’t unearth anyone who recalled her presence during the seasons they were with the show.

But White said she remembers specific people who asked for her books and prayers.

White invited Trump to appear on her show in 2006. And she bought a $3.5 million condo in Trump Tower – with money from her businesses, she said, not the church.

But her marriage and her empire were crumbling. The Whites announced the end of their marriage in August 2007. The divorce was complicated by their extensive financial assets – a church that was bringing in $40 million a year, plus proceeds from the couple’s many business ventures.

Meanwhile, the Whites’ lavish lifestyles had drawn the attention of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a member of the Senate Finance Committee. In 2007, the committee announced that Paula White Ministries would be investigated for misuse of donations, along with five other prosperity-gospel organizations.

In 2010, the Grassley committee closed the investigation without penalizing anyone, though it released documents that remain online. The 13-page report about the Whites, which includes a number of allegations about their apparent appropriation of church and ministry finances for personal use, said theirs was one of four ministries that did not fully cooperate with investigators.

White explains how she hung on throughout the divorce and investigation: “I built up spiritual stamina, even though so much in my life was dying,” she said.

And the Trump family was there to help. “When she went through hard times, the first people to call her were Mr. and Mrs. Trump,” said Jay Strack, a Southern Baptist evangelist who became friends with White last year. “She knows the real Donald Trump, obviously.”

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Another crisis exploded when White and evangelist Benny Hinn were photographed holding hands on a street in Rome in July 2010. The National Enquirer ran a double-page spread of the two of them, along with a photo of a hotel room in which they allegedly stayed. Both Hinn and White said they were just friends (although Hinn later admitted it was “inappropriate” to be spending time with a woman he was not married to). White said she disputed the piece with the Enquirer and reached a confidential settlement. (A lawyer for the Enquirer says he knew of no such arrangement.)

It was about this time that White was on a flight to San Antonio that was also carrying the band Journey. “Paula walks on board with all sorts of stuff in her arms, and she dropped a big giant book in the aisle,” said band member Jonathan Cain, 67. “I noticed she had expensive high heels on. I asked her, ‘What do you do for a living?’ She looked at me and said, ‘I am a public speaker.’ ‘What sort?’ I asked. ‘I’m a pastor,’ she said. ‘No, you’re not,’ I said.”

Cain, who says he was a “displaced Catholic” at the time, said White prayed over him. “I see a book coming out of you and a studio,” she said. “I see God calling you back.”

Despite the 16-year age difference, the pair began to date. They were married during a December 2014 trip to Ghana.

This was followed by a public wedding at an Orlando hotel in April 2015. It was a third marriage for both. Trump did not attend but sent a $1,000 contribution to White’s New Destiny Christian Center as a wedding gift.

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Both the role of White and the role of the evangelical advisory council in the Trump administration are opaque. The White House Office of Public Liaison, which is charged with outreach to interest groups, didn’t respond to requests for details about how often White is there, who is on the council or whom she meets with.

The administration’s lack of specifics about the council has drawn criticism. “With this council, it is murky as to who is on it and what role they have,” said Robert Jones, author and CEO of the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute. “It looks more like another campaign arm than a representative group.”

White said her position is that of a “faith adviser” and head of a council with an inner core of about three dozen evangelical leaders who communicate by conference call and occasional visits to Washington. About 10 to 15 leaders who are very engaged receive daily communications from OPL about matters important to Trump, such as religious liberty or criminal justice reform. The entire council rarely meets as a group, but 10 or so members will gather at times at the White House, depending on the issue the administration is seeking feedback about. White added, however, that many other religious leaders have visited the White House for “listening sessions” and have input with the administration, including Indian-American leaders who celebrated the Hindu holiday of Diwali last month with the president.

“She leads (Trump’s) heart to the Lord, and that’s all Trump wants,” Cain said of her role at the White House. “He actually recognizes her anointing and checks in with her. Every time she’s in Washington, he has to see her.”