A Roman Catholic priest who was sentenced in June to life imprisonment for criminal clergy sexual assault in Texas was making a Louisiana parishioner with whom he had a daughter raise their child “as a single mother”, according to the prosecutors on his case.
Anthony Odiong’s daughter, born in 2023, and her mother “were living without the support a [biological] father would normally provide” even before authorities successfully pursued a case leading to his conviction on charges that he exploited his status as a clergyman to sexually assault two other women, Ryan Calvert and Liz Buice of the McLennan county district attorney’s office wrote in a lengthy article in the September-October issue of the Texas Prosecutor journal.
Perhaps the most striking indication of Odiong’s treatment of his daughter – whom he fathered despite having made the standard clerical promise of sexual celibacy – and her mother was the fact that investigators noticed the girl lacked “a proper car seat”, Calvert and Buice wrote.
She finally got one because police detectives Bradley DeLange and Zach Koenig in Waco, Texas, joined victim assistance coordinator Melissa Beseda to buy one with their own money, according to the article.
Meanwhile, Calvert and Buice wrote, there was evidence establishing that Odiong, 58, had spent more than $20,000 just on telephone calls while in jail in the roughly two years that he awaited the outcome of the case against him in custody.
Odiong’s daughter’s mother, identified in court proceedings by the pseudonym Presley Jones, nonetheless eluded authorities’ attempts to get her to testify against him at his trial. Calvert and Buice said she apologized after Odiong’s conviction and “emotionally thanked” them for holding him accountable “with obvious relief” in her voice.
The Texas Prosecutor article served as a postscript of sorts to the Odiong case, a rare instance of a cleric being held criminally liable for illegally using his religious office to sexually abuse adults. It also provided the most details yet of how Odiong fathered a child with one of his congregants in the New Orleans suburb of Luling, Louisiana, where he had been the pastor of St Anthony of Padua church beginning in 2015 after a prior stint working in the Waco area.
As Calvert and Buice put it in their article, titled “Faith was his weapon”, Jones told investigators that Odiong first kissed her as she confessed her sins to him at church. “Things progressed to a sexual relationship, and Presley became pregnant, giving birth to their daughter in 2023” initially in secret, the prosecutors wrote.
The detectives who later investigated Odiong realized that his cell phone contained pictures of him wearing his priestly vestments and baptizing his own daughter into the Catholic faith, with Jones and other members of her family looking on.
DNA samples investigators took of Presley, her daughter and Odiong established that he was the girl’s father. That DNA eventually became evidence of a broader pattern of pursuing sex with female parishioners whom he met through his ministry.
Odiong’s path to prison began in earnest with his likening members of the LGBTQ+ community to “monkeys and chimpanzees” while preaching to St Anthony congregants at a Sunday mass in November 2023.
Soon after, New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese announced it was suspending Odiong from ministering locally, mainly due to complaints of misconduct with multiple women that it had known about by then for five years. The archdiocese said the inflammatory, anti-LGBTQ+ comments also hurt his standing, and that it had asked church officials to recall him to his native Nigeria.
One of those complainants subsequently spoke with the Guardian and its reporting partner WWL Louisiana. That spurred a previously unknown accuser, eventually referred to in court proceedings as Jane Doe, to speak to the Guardian and recount how Odiong positioned himself as her spiritual counselor in Waco, where he had also worked for several years beginning in 2006.
Odiong, a naturalized US citizen, persuaded Jane Doe to have a form of intercourse with another man to which she did not legally consent, as she later testified in court. That persuasion, from a religious cleric, qualifies as sexual assault under Texas law.
Jane Doe’s account ultimately caught the attention of a woman whose son had seen her having sex with Odiong in 2011. Later adopting the pseudonym Mary Doe, she reported Odiong to Waco authorities in March 2024 under Texas’s criminal clergy abuse law.
Mary Doe’s report kicked off a criminal investigation that identified several more women who reported Odiong for behavior that met the definition of criminal clergy sexual abuse. Even though not all yielded charges that were considered by the jury seated for his trial, testimony from or about them supported prosecutors’ case against him with respect to Mary Doe and Jane Doe.
On 29 May, the jury found Odiong guilty of having sexually assaulted Mary Doe and Jane Doe. Four days later, that same panel sentenced him to life imprisonment.
Odiong has since been sent to a maximum-security prison in Abilene, Texas, according to state criminal justice department records. He filed an appeal, which remained pending at the time of Calvert and Buice’s article.
He was at least the fifth New Orleans archdiocese clergyman to be convicted of or plead guilty to sexually violent crimes after the organization filed for federal bankruptcy protection in 2020 amid the financial fallout of the Catholic church’s worldwide, decades-old clergy abuse scandal.
The archdiocese and its insurers in December agreed to pay $305m to hundreds of abuse survivors, though the individual payout process had not been completed as of Monday.
Neither the New Orleans archdiocese nor the diocese of Austin, Texas – which supervised Odiong during his tenure in Waco – immediately responded to requests for comment. His attorney, Gerald Villarial, said on Sunday: “I didn’t take the time to read the [journal] article, although it does have a catchy title. The case is now working its way through the appellate process, and I’ll reserve comment while [it] is being appealed.”
A Guardian investigation after Odiong’s conviction determined that Catholic church officials in New Orleans and Austin had internal documents clearly showing several women had accused him of sexual misconduct or unwanted advances while ministering to them years before he was removed from his role as pastor of Luling’s St Anthony of Padua church.
