The Louisiana Pentecostal pastor who repeatedly molested a teenage girl told her that her “world would turn upside down” if she ever reported his crimes, she said in a statement on Wednesday in a suburban New Orleans court.
Milton Otto Martin III would blame her for his crimes, saying he couldn’t resist the temptation that she presented, the survivor’s statement added.
Now 30, and having seen him be found guilty in December of indecent behavior with a juvenile, the survivor whom Martin preyed on in the south-eastern Louisiana community of Chalmette pleaded with the judge presiding over the disgraced pastor’s case to hand him the stiffest punishment possible. State court judge Darren Roy subsequently ordered Martin to spend seven years in prison, the maximum sentence for indecent behavior.
Wednesday’s sentencing of Martin all but closed the book on a prosecution in which he was initially charged with felony carnal knowledge – Louisiana’s formal name for statutory rape – by engaging in oral sex with the victim when she was 16, in about 2011. Charging documents maintained that he also inflicted indecent behavior, defined as any “lewd or lascivious act” on a minor, when she was between the ages of 15 and 17.
Jurors ultimately rendered a split verdict against Martin. They acquitted him of carnal knowledge – which could have carried up to 10 years in prison – but convicted him of indecent behavior, in what was only one high-profile instance of sexual abuse by religious authorities in the New Orleans area.
One of the victim’s attorneys, John Denenea, said in a statement afterward that he hoped the “maximum sentence to this perpetrator [meant] that pedophiles and their enablers will not escape the justice system” any longer.
Roy indicated that he had received more than 100 letters of support for Martin, a slight illustration of what Denenea’s client was up against when she came forward to investigators prior to the pastor’s arrest in March 2023. Those letters, though, did not persuade the judge to afford Martin leniency, saying his crimes were recurrent as well as “exceptionally severe, with permanent injury to the victim”.
Authorities who previously investigated Martin, the head of Chalmette’s First Pentecostal church, interviewed several more alleged molestation victims of his. But the jury later seated in the case heard from just two of them. And the charges for which he stood trial pertained to only one, whose statement on Wednesday detailed how her abuse by Martin left her still grappling with anxiety, anger, shame and guilt.
Her statement also said that Martin’s crimes have affected countless aspects of her life, ranging from the way she parents her children to her understanding of trust and faith – but she was committed to not letting the abuse define her.
“What he did to me was selfish, despicable and egregious – utterly evil,” her statement said. “I struggle … with things that I should not have to deal with because they are not the consequences of my actions.”
The statement asserted that Martin approached the survivor months after her wedding to apologize – which she interpreted as disingenuous, and a search for assurance that she would keep his abuse secret.
With respect to Wednesday’s sentencing, the survivor’s statement said: “I am hopeful that this … will carry out justice not just for me – but for all those who have been [affected] by the defendant’s betrayal of the position of authority and trust he held.”
The survivor’s statement on Wednesday provided perhaps the most extensive, uninterrupted glimpse yet into her perspective on Martin. She testified at his trial, though her testimony was closely guided by prosecutors from the Louisiana state attorney general’s office.
Martin did not speak for himself on Wednesday, Denenea said. He must also register as a sex offender.
The prosecution of Martin is separate from a decades-old clergy molestation scandal that drove the Roman Catholic archdiocese of nearby New Orleans into federal bankruptcy court in 2020, and in December produced a $305m settlement agreement for hundreds of abuse survivors involved in the proceeding.
But the two matters share multiple links.
Louisiana state police detective Scott Rodrigue investigated Martin after also building a case against the retired New Orleans Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker, a serial child molester whose church superiors provided him safe harbor from law enforcement for decades.
Rodrigue’s investigation led Hecker to be arrested, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for child rape – shortly before his death in custody at age 93, in December 2024. That investigation also spurred a wider inquiry into whether the archdiocese ran a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades” that was kept under cover “and not reported” to law enforcement, sworn police statements filed in New Orleans’ criminal courthouse said.
None of Hecker’s superiors, however, had been charged with a crime connected to that broader investigation as of Wednesday.
Furthermore, Denenea and his associates Richard Trahant and Soren Gisleson were also the civil attorneys for the rape survivor who pressed Hecker’s criminal case, along with dozens of abuse claimants in the New Orleans archdiocese bankruptcy.
