Texas prosecutors on Thursday established that a Roman Catholic priest being tried there on charges that he illegally exploited his status as a priest to pursue sex with three spiritually vulnerable congregants had a child with a separate congregant in approximately 2023 – while working outside New Orleans.
That explosive development unfolded on the third day of Anthony Odiong’s trial at a state courthouse in Waco, Texas, where he worked before being transferred to Luling, Louisiana.
While building the case being tried against Odiong, then Waco police department employee Melissa Beseda traveled to the metro New Orleans area to obtain a DNA sample from a girl whose mother investigators had probable cause to believe had been in a sexual relationship with Odiong – while he provided spiritual direction to her in his role as a clergyman in Luling.
The woman, assigned the pseudonym Presley Jones, also provided a DNA sample – and one was obtained from Odiong, 57. Under direct examination from McLennan county first assistant district attorney Ryan Calvert, Beseda testified that the testing of those samples determined that Odiong was the father of Jones’s daughter, who as of Thursday was about three years old.
Odiong is not charged in connection with a crime against Jones, whose existence had previously been reported in the media – but she was revealed for the first time on Thursday to have met the priest while he ministered in New Orleans in recent years.
Nonetheless, authorities maintain that the daughter of Jones and Odiong is living, breathing proof of his pattern of pursuing sex with female parishioners whom he met through his clerical work, which in Texas is considered felony assault.
Monitors in the courtroom of Judge Thomas West showed a picture of Odiong holding his daughter next to her mother as Calvert questioned Beseda. Odiong was in a white priestly vestment that matched the color of the outfits worn by the mother and daughter. All three stood inside a church in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie – a relatively short drive from Luling.
‘Felt like my life was over’
Meanwhile, also on Thursday, the woman who initiated the criminal case pending against Odiong publicly told her story for the first time. She told jurors how she was working at Waco’s Baylor University and going through a tumultuous divorce with the father of her seven children when she met Odiong on campus in about 2008.
Odiong was a priest at a Catholic church where Baylor employees and students attended, and he approached her while she was crying there over her circumstances one day, said the woman, who chose the pseudonym Mary Doe. He hugged her, invited her into his office to talk about what was distressing her and successfully suggested that she enter into what is known as spiritual direction with him after she detailed the end of her abusive marriage – and her primary custody of seven children under the age of 12 at the time, the woman said.
In the ensuing few weeks, she said, Odiong kissed her on her mouth and fondled her while dropping her off at her house and in various places around the church. She said they eventually had sexual intercourse, mostly at her home while her children were visiting their father – and continued to do so for years.
He assuaged her feelings of guilt that she communicated to him by telling her that the conduct was natural and that their connection was “spiritual”, she explained. As their physical relationship escalated, she testified, he purportedly joked, “Oh baby – if you don’t slow things down, we’re going to fuck.”
The woman recounted how their sexual relationship ended when her son, about 14 at the time, caught them in the act in her bedroom after a small house party in 2011. Echoing testimony from her son on Wednesday, she said her boy ran to the house of a Baylor administrator who lived nearby and reported what he saw.
It “felt like my life was over” at that point, the woman told Calvert, the first assistant district attorney. “It just kept getting worse every single time.”
She said that her son’s report quickly made its way to Catholic church officials supervising Odiong, and they arranged to speak to her son, she said. But after her ex-husband threatened her custody of their children and she was admonished that she might lose her job if she embarrassed Baylor, her son lied to church officials that he possibly misunderstood what he saw with Odiong and his mother.
Eventually, the woman said, she remarried. She said she read an investigative news story published by the Guardian in February 2024 about a group of women who accused Odiong of sexual coercion, unwanted touching and abusive financial control in his capacity as a priest, including in Texas.
The story ran after the archdiocese of New Orleans in December 2023 announced that – years after learning about the complaints – it had removed Odiong from his ministry at Luling’s St Anthony of Padua. He had been pastor there since 2015, after previously spending several years in and around Waco as well as studying overseas in Rome.
The Guardian piece noted that Texas considers such conduct by a religious clergyman in particular a felony sexual assault. She said she initially believed the Guardian article was about her and that her story had somehow been leaked. She then realized that was implausible, deduced the story was about other women and – at her husband’s encouragement – went to Waco police with a copy of the article to report Odiong.
The woman said she had no expectation that investigators would move on her complaint. Yet going to the police “felt like the tiniest bit of justice [I] would get even if no one except [my husband] knew about it”.
In reality, her report prompted an investigation that culminated in the identification of two more women Odiong was alleged to have assaulted by exploiting his clerical status. That resulted in criminal charges against him and the trial in Waco.
One of those two additional women – whom the Guardian had previously interviewed in its coverage of the defendant – testified on Wednesday afternoon that she had also submitted to spiritual direction from Odiong while in the throes of an abusive, ultimately failed marriage with a Baylor instructor. Having chosen the pseudonym Jane Doe, she said Odiong eventually kissed her against her will. And she said he compelled her to allow her then husband to engage in a form of sexual intercourse which she found uncomfortably painful as a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, which prosecutors now maintain qualifies as assault by Odiong.
On cross examination, Odiong’s attorney, Gerald Villarrial, asked her if she began spiritual direction with his client because of problems with another priest. She said no. Villarial also had her acknowledge that she kept in touch with Odiong for several years after their son walked in on them, prior to her reporting him to Waco police.
Whereabouts unknown
Beside Jane and Mary Doe, the third woman with whom Odiong was charged in connection was expected to testify. But before court started on Thursday, Calvert said the woman had fled her home with her cell phone, and it was not clear where she was.
Calvert said the woman was in an “extremely emotional and fragile” state as the trial had progressed and at one point nearly collapsed. He said prosecutors had decided against issuing what would effectively be a warrant for her arrest and would continue on with the case.
Odiong has pleaded not guilty to several first- and second-degree sexual assault charges against him. Any of the first-degree charges could carry up to life imprisonment for him.
He has also argued that prosecutors charged him past a deadline for which they could legally do so. But prosecutors charged Odiong under a law which eliminates such statutes of limitation from consideration if there is probable cause to suspect an alleged sex offender had at least five victims.
Calvert on Thursday suggested that Waco police had identified four such victims other than the ones Odiong was charged with assaulting. Three were from the New Orleans area, Calvert said, and one had since resided in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
The Guardian is not naming the women because the outlet generally does not identify people who are alleged to be victims of sexual assault.
Odiong was ordained into the Catholic priesthood in 1993 in his native Nigeria. The naturalized US citizen transferred to a region encompassing Waco in 2006 under the watch of the then Austin, Texas, bishop, Gregory Aymond.
Odiong later arrived in Luling several years after Aymond had become the archbishop of New Orleans, though he continued fostering a presence in the Waco area.
No later than 2019, church officials in Austin said they suspended Odiong from ever being able to act as a priest in that area over allegations of misconduct with multiple women. Austin officials did not publicly announce that move but said they notified their New Orleans counterparts, though Aymond waited a minimum of four years to similarly suspend Odiong from ministering there.
Aymond retired as New Orleans’ archbishop in February, a couple of months after the city’s archdiocese and its insurers agreed to pay $305m to abuse survivors to settle a bankruptcy protection case that the organization filed amid the financial fallout of the global church’s decades-old clerical molestation scandal. His successor is James Checchio, the former bishop of Metuchen, New Jersey.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
