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According to court records and detectives, a Nigerian Catholic priest was charged with felony sexual assault in Texas after multiple victims reported that he had abused them financially and sexually.

A grand jury in McLennan County, Texas, indicted the priest, Father Anthony Odiong, on two counts of second-degree sexual assault and one count of first-degree sexual assault on Thursday.

In July, he was taken into custody in Ave Maria, Florida, after a Facebook post from the Waco Police Department stated that while investigating reports of sexual assault, detectives discovered he was in possession of child pornography. Although he was not charged with possessing child pornography, Detective Bradley DeLange stated that this could change in the future.

Due to “credible information” they had received that Father Odiong had committed a sexual assault in 2012, the police had been looking into the matter for months. Detective DeLange stated that during the course of the investigation, the police discovered multiple women who had come forward and related accounts of abuse in common with the first victim. At least eight women have come forward to Detective DeLange to report that the priest has groped, sexually assaulted, or financially abused them. One of the women even sought Father Odiong’s advice with marital issues.

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If clergy members engage in sexual behaviour with people who rely on them emotionally as “spiritual advisers,” it is illegal in Texas to do so without permission.

The police have stated that Father Odiong was a priest at the St. Peter Catholic Student Centre in Waco, Texas; at St. Mary’s Church of the Assumption in West, Texas, from 2007 to 2012; and in Luling, Louisiana, from about 2015 to 2023.

According to jail records, Father Odiong was brought to the McLennan County Jail on August 6 and is currently being held on a $2.5 million bond. According to Christopher King, an attorney for a number of clients in a different civil lawsuit against the priest, he may spend up to 20 years in jail if found guilty of the second-degree sexual assault allegations and could spend the rest of his life behind bars for the first-degree felony.

Requests for information from Father Odiong’s attorney were not immediately answered.

The accusations were first reported by The Guardian in February. Father Odiong called the post on Facebook in April, when he refuted the claims, calling it a “false, salacious and one-sided smear campaign.”

Father Odiong worked as a priest in the Diocese of Austin, Texas, until the commencement of his tenure there. Currently, he is the archbishop of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, where Father Odiong most recently served. The Diocese of Austin’s current bishop, Joe S. Vásquez, declared in a statement in July that the diocese will work closely with law enforcement.

Father Odiong worked there at the request of the Diocese of Uyo in Nigeria, according to Sarah McDonald, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, who made this announcement on Sunday.

“When the archdiocese became aware of allegations of criminal activity we reported him to law enforcement and removed him from ministry,” Ms. McDonald said in a text.

Amidst allegations of sexual abuse against its priests and church staff, the Archdiocese of New Orleans filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2020, joining more than a dozen other Catholic organisations in doing so. As of June, fifteen Catholic organisations were filing for bankruptcy, according to a Penn State Law database.

According to an Instagram post from the city of Franklin, Tennessee, a grand jury in Williamson County, Tennessee, indicted a priest, Juan Carlos Garcia-Mendoza, on many counts of sexual violence, child abuse, and other connected offences this summer. A former priest named Lawrence Hecker was indicted by a Louisiana grand jury last year on charges that he had molested a teenage boy in the 1970s.

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