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Pastor sued for student loan debt prior to Whole Foods cake claim

 AUSTIN (KXAN) – The openly gay pastor who filed a lawsuit against Whole Foods over a gay slur on a cake was sued himself a few weeks earlier.

According to the lawsuit from the Travis County Clerk’s Office, it claimed Brown defaulted on a $27,000 student loan.

The petition was filed March 11, 2016 by a student loan trust, and said Brown stopped paying on the student loan issued for the 2007-2008 school year at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania.

Numerous calls and emails to Brown and his attorney have not been returned.

KXAN has not seen or heard from either of them since Monday when they called a press conference, and said an employee in the bakery wrote a derogatory word below the phrase “Love Wins.”

Whole Foods filed a counter suit claiming Brown was lying, and released surveillance video of him checking out with the cake in his hands. In the video, the sticker on the cake box Brown says he did not remove, is in a different spot.

Tuesday, KXAN reporter Chris Sadeghi went to Brown’s attorney’s office, and could see the cake box sitting on a conference table through the window.

Someone came out and told him they were not ready to comment, and were still reviewing the Whole Foods video.

Wednesday, KXAN went by Brown’s address listed on the student loan lawsuit which is the AMLI apartment complex on East Riverside. It is also the address Brown lists on his church website. The page says the Church of Open Doors meets in the AMLI social hub.

A manager at the complex told KXAN Brown’s church does not meet there.