Bishop Earl Paulk, the evangelical pastor whose leadership of a megachurch in Atlanta ended in a sex scandal, died at the Atlanta Medical Center on Sunday.

The 81 year old pastor was fighting cancer for years before death. His brother Don Paulk, a retired minister said Earl was hospitalized with blockage of his intestines and died on early Sunday morning.

Paulk was the founder of the Cathedral at Chapel Hill in South DeKalb County and had seen the church swell its membership to 10,000 in the early 1990s. Meanwhile numerous women testified that they have had a sexual relationship with the Bishop and in 2007 a DNA testing revealed that he was the biological father of Don Paulk’s son, the Rev, D.E. Paulk, who now heads the church.

In 2008 Earl paulk pleaded guilty to lying under oath by saying he did not have affairs with other women. He was fined $1000 and put on probation for ten years.

A lawsuit filed by Mona Brewer, former church employee lead to events that ended in the guilty plea. Ms. Brewer had said that Pulk had forced her into a 14-year relationship. About Paulk’s death she said, “I’m still kind of sorting out how I feel. It’s a tough one. It’s sort of like [being] in a train wreck right now.”

Paulk had faced allegations of sexual misconduct from the 1960s that forced him to leave the CHurch pf God denomination to found a church that came to be called the Chapel Hill Harvester. About the news that he had fathered his own nephew, his brother Don Paulk had said later that it “makes no difference in my love for my brother or my son. In the world that we live in, people are human beings.”

No funeral dates have been announced yet.