The wife of a Catholic clergy molestation survivor who helped authorities catch the priest who abused him in his childhood has teamed up with her state senator father to devise a law in Louisiana criminalizing grooming – conduct that increased her husband’s vulnerability before his abuse.
Tim Gioe; his wife, Sarah Connick Gioe; and her father, the Louisiana state senator Pat Connick, are at the heart of the legislative saga – as the tight-knit family collectively fights back after being victimized by the clerical molestation scandal that for decades has plagued the Catholic church both in their home state and globally.
Pat Wattigny, a New Orleans-area priest, pleaded guilty in June 2023 to charges that he had previously molested two children whom he met through his ministry. One of them was Tim Gioe, who was in grade school in the 1990s when the abuse occurred.
As the Guardian and its reporting partner WWL Louisiana have previously reported, officials took up the molestation charges against Wattigny in 2020 after learning that he had been sending inappropriate text messages to a third person: a Catholic high school student who was underage. But investigators ultimately could not prosecute Wattigny for those messages because they were considered mere grooming, defined widely as behavior that is meant to establish an emotional connection with a vulnerable person (such as a child) and frequently precedes sexual assault.
And Louisiana, as was true in most other US states, had not criminalized it, officials had told the Gioes.
The Gioes said they could not believe that authorities essentially had to wait until molestation occurred before they intervened. If a grooming law had been in place, Wattigny may have been prosecuted for the inappropriate texts detected in 2020, and he may have netted a harsher punishment than the one he received in a suburban New Orleans state courthouse – just five years in prison, which leaves him eligible for parole as soon as 12 June.
If grooming were illegal, the Gioes surmise that Wattigny might never have dared to give a young Tim Gioe baseball cards as presents, in an attempt to win over the boy and his family – and then exploit the resulting closeness to abuse him.
“Would it have happened?” Tim Gioe, now 38, said. “I don’t know.”
It’s a valid question. At least five molestation cases reported by the Guardian and WWL Louisiana, including Wattigny’s, began with reports of grooming that church officials initially either ignored or deemed as insufficient to merit immediate action.
Other cases outside a church context have served to highlight Louisiana’s lack of anti-grooming laws, too. Former Livingston parish sheriff’s deputy Dennis Perkins long groomed a young girl in 2019 but avoided investigators’ scrutiny until after he went on a spree of sexually abusive crimes, including child molestation, which earned him a 100-year prison sentence. In another instance, the Philip Roth biographer Blake Bailey was alleged to have groomed his former middle school students for sexual encounters after they reached the legal age of consent, among other accusations.
All of that prompted Sarah – the mother of Gioe’s four children and his partner in a psychiatric nursing practice – to text her father, a member of Louisiana’s state senate since 2020, a question on 21 March.
“Can grooming become illegal?” she asked.
Sarah, 36, had researched anti-grooming laws in Texas and Mississippi, which are among about a dozen states with such statutes. And she forwarded the information to her dad.
Pat Connick, who had previously spent 12 years in Louisiana’s state house before joining the senate, said it was a “no-brainer”. Such a law could protect Louisiana’s minors – among them the Gioes’ children, all younger than 10 – from being targeted for abuse at the hands of authority figures. And it could bring something out of the trauma with which Pat Connick’s son-in-law grapples daily.
The state senator and his staff consulted with the office of his brother Paul Connick, the longtime district attorney of Jefferson parish, a suburban New Orleans community. Paul Connick’s office had secured one of the region’s other notable convictions involving child abuse and a Catholic clergyman, when deacon VM Wheeler – a prominent attorney – pleaded guilty in late 2022 to having molested the son of family friends, a boy whom he spent years grooming first, before his ordination. Wheeler’s plea got him probation and sex offender registration – then he died in April 2023.
Within two days of Sarah’s text to her dad, Connick had come up with a draft of an anti-grooming bill. He filed it for consideration by the state senate on 2 April, less than two weeks from the start of the 2025 Louisiana legislative session.
Connick’s proposed bill makes it a crime “for a person to take any actions to persuade, induce, entice, seduce, or coerce a child under the age of 13 to engage in any conduct intended to facilitate the offender committing a lewd or lascivious act upon the child, in the child’s presence, or in the presence of another child who is under 13 years of age”. The crime of child grooming would carry a punishment of up to 15 years in prison. Connick said he wanted the age associated with his proposal to be higher but settled for what he was advised had the best chance of passage.
Eighteen of Connick’s fellow state senators – Republicans and Democrats – signed on as co-authors. It passed the senate unanimously on 12 May and headed to the state’s house of representatives.
A house committee on Wednesday amended the bill to make it part of the Louisiana law criminalizing indecent behavior with a juvenile rather than its own new statute. It also raised the associated age to 17 “where the offender is at least four years older than the child”.
Connick said it would then head to the full house for consideration as amended. Assuming it gains approval there, it would head back to the senate for consideration in its updated form. The lawmaker said emphatically that there were no indications his bill may meet resistance as it continued winding its way through the legislative process.
Connick has been open about his devotion to his Irish Catholic heritage throughout his political career and belongs to one of New Orleans’s most famous families. He is a nephew of the late former New Orleans district attorney Harry Connick Sr, whose son is the Grammy award-winning Harry Connick Jr – adding contours to Pat’s family’s link to the Wattigny case.
Separately, Pat Connick is leading a plan calling for Jefferson parish’s government to spend $8m to buy and renovate an archdiocesan-owned orphanage named Hope Haven, which was shuttered after numerous children were abused there by clergymen, religious sisters and others.
The archdiocese, faced with hundreds of claims for clergy abuse-related damages over a period of decades, filed for federal bankruptcy protection in 2020. But the case is unresolved as the church has been unable to reach a settlement with survivors who filed abuse claims, including Tim Gioe.
Connick said one of the aspects of the orphanage transformation plan is to install a memorial to survivors of the clergy molestation scandal so that no one ever forgets the pain caused there as well as at other Catholic institutions. He said he hoped the proceeds of the property sale would eventually bring the church closer to settling with survivors ensnared in the bankruptcy while giving the site’s Spanish colonial-style buildings – landmarks for some locals – a chance to introduce a positive chapter to the place’s history by being converted into museums, an amphitheater or other community spaces.
Nonetheless, despite the New Orleans area’s tendency to tie his last name to Catholicism, Connick said he never hesitated to author the bill stemming from his son-in-law’s abuse. “I don’t want evil to win,” Connick said, “and I’m going to do whatever it takes to help my daughter, my son-in-law and my grandkids.”
Tim Gioe said he realized his father-in-law’s efforts had no chance of putting “Pat Wattigny in jail longer”. Yet, at the very least, he believed it signaled “there’s now people listening” to those who survived what he did – and perhaps the remaining states without anti-grooming laws will work toward ones of their own.
Sarah Gioe, for her part, said one of the things she and her husband have wanted from Wattigny’s superiors in light of his conviction is to be told “I believe you … I’m sorry … and we’re going to do everything we can to try to fix this”.
“I didn’t feel I ever got that from the church,” especially throughout the contentious New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy, Sarah Gioe said.
Struggling to contain her tears, she said: “But I feel I got it from my dad.”
