Eli Lilly lawsuit says rebate fraud tied to Pentecostal church leaders
Eli Lilly He accused several bishops at a major Pentecostal church of fraud, saying he had uncovered a long-running scheme to steal more than $200 million in discounts from the diabetes drug Trulicity.
The company filed a 66-page civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Miami on Tuesday.
According to Lilly, the scheme worked like this: A Florida mail-order pharmacy called DrugPlace purchased large quantities of Trulicity through authorized distributors for years, claiming that the drugs were distributed to church-member patients. But Lilly alleges that in reality, DrugPlace sold Trulicity on the secondary market while also collecting fraudulent rebates from Lilly.
According to the lawsuit, DrugPlace was working with the Community Health Initiative, an organization affiliated with the Church of God in Christ that allegedly helped church members obtain expensive prescription medications at lower costs. Lilly alleges that DrugPlace served as the program’s pharmacy benefit manager, or PBM, handling prescription drug claims and rebate negotiations with drug manufacturers on the program’s behalf.
DrugPlace and Community Health operate from the same address in Tennessee, according to the lawsuit.
Lilly alleged that the organizations used members of the Church of God in Christ to promote false discount claims and said that many of the patients linked to these statements either did not exist or could not be verified.
The church, headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, describes itself on its website as “a global movement of the Pentecostal faith” with millions of members worldwide. Although the church itself is not named as a defendant in the case, several of the church’s bishops are accused in the case.
Lilly said in the filing that the scheme had been going on for at least six years. He said he learned of the alleged fraud through data analysis of rebate claims in 2025.
The complaint says the analysis revealed an unusual pattern: Every Trulicity prescription sent through the program reflected the same quantity and 30-day supply period, with virtually no refills or claim cancellations. Additionally, rebate claims only included Trulicity rather than a broader range of medications typically seen in legitimate patient populations.
To justify its Trulicity bulk order, Lilly said DrugPlace claimed the church had 7 million members, 2.5 million of whom were eligible to enroll in the Community Health program. But the total membership of the Church of God in Christ is estimated at about 1.9 million people, according to the Pew Religion in America 2025 survey cited in the complaint.
Lilly said that other drug manufacturers, without naming them, were also defrauded in this discount scheme.
Lilly sued both DrugPlace and Community Health, claiming that they made huge profits from purchasing and reselling Trulicity because they collected both rebate payments and revenues as they resold each box.
While the lawsuit states that DrugPlace submitted rebate requests for “hundreds of thousands of boxes of Trulicity,” it does not specify how much profit the organization allegedly made from the resale of the drug.
Lilly is seeking a temporary restraining order and injunctive relief.
The company also sued church leaders who allegedly aided and profited from the rebate scheme: Readus C. Smith III of Jacksonville, Florida, who was the church’s general secretary for health and commerce; Jerry Maynard Sr. of Ashland City, Tennessee, a church bishop and businessman; son Jerry Maynard II of Nashville, Tennessee, a church pastor, business consultant and former member of the Metro Nashville Davidson Council; and Maynard Sr.’s daughter, Misha Maynard, is a church pastor from Watertown, Tennessee.
The lawsuit says Smith is the CEO of Community Health, another company that also recruits doctors to provide health care to church members.
Maynard Sr. introduced Community Health to church members, and his son was chairman of the church’s board of directors and did legal work for DrugPlace, the lawsuit said. Misha Maynard is Community Health’s vice president of operations, according to the filing.
CNBC contacted the individual defendants named in this article, as well as DrugPlace, Community Health, and the non-defendant church, but did not receive a response.
Also in the suit are Paul Joshua Leight, co-owner and president of DrugPlace; and Kevin Michael Singer, co-owner and vice president of DrugPlace.
A Lilly spokesperson told CNBC that the company “brought this lawsuit to stop fraud and protect patients’ access to medications.”
“When the defendants learned they had been discovered, DrugPlace closed its Nashville pharmacy and began liquidating its assets, behavior consistent with attempting to cover their tracks,” the statement said.
