A Texas jury on Tuesday was expected to begin deliberating the sentence of a Roman Catholic priest who was convicted days earlier of criminal clergy sexual assault.
Anthony Odiong, 57, faces between five years and life imprisonment in connection with a first-degree sexual assault charge that he was found guilty of. He was also found guilty of second-degree sexual assault, which can carry between two and 20 years in prison.
Odiong’s sentencing phase began on Monday, with a series of witnesses describing sexual misconduct by him going back more than a decade. The defense, meanwhile, called witnesses who said Odiong would follow the rules of probation, even though he broke his priestly vows of chastity.
At the end of a four-day trial on Friday, the same jury in charge of Odiong’s sentencing determined he was guilty of first- and second-degree sexual assault by illegally exploiting his spiritual authority as a clergyman for sex with two devout female parishioners, whether directly or by proxy.
Odiong spent much of a roughly 17-year period beginning in 2006 ministering in a region including Waco and serving as the pastor of a Catholic church in the New Orleans suburb of Luling, Louisiana.
In late 2023, leaders of New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese confirmed to the Guardian and local reporting partner WWL Louisiana that they had removed Odiong from his role as pastor of Luling’s St Anthony of Padua church over clerical misconduct with multiple women.
The Guardian later published a February 2024 investigative report on a group of women who had accused Odiong of sexual coercion, unwanted touching and abusive financial control while – in his capacity as a priest – he provided them with what is known as spiritual direction.
That article prompted a woman whom the Guardian did not interview, eventually identified in court as Mary Doe, to bring a copy of the outlet’s reporting to Waco police and told them Odiong in their jurisdiction had also fostered a sexual relationship with her from 2008 to 2011 while providing her with spiritual direction.
Texas considers such conduct by a religious cleric in particular to be felony sexual assault. And Mary Doe’s police complaint induced an investigation which led authorities to arrest, charge and successfully try Odiong in connection with her as well as one of the Guardian’s interviewees, who would later be identified in legal proceedings as Jane Doe.
Accusers, defenders testify
Jane Doe maintained that the clergyman in Waco in 2010 compelled her to permit her then husband to engage in a form of intercourse she found overly painful as a desperate measure to save her marriage and to then convey details about the encounter to Odiong. Under Texas law, authorities maintained those actions, indirect though they were, qualified as assault by Odiong given his place in Jane Doe’s life as her spiritual director.
Furthermore, investigators secured corroboration from enough additional Odiong complainants meeting the legal standard of probable cause that they could charge him with assaulting Mary and Jane Doe without regard to how long ago the crimes those two women reported were.
Among those corroborating complainants was a woman who, authorities established, began receiving spiritual direction from Odiong after meeting him in Luling – and then had a child with him in the spring of 2023.
Sentencing-related testimony began on Monday with two women who were students at Waco’s Baylor University while Odiong was a priest at a ministry near its campus. Both testified that Odiong touched them inappropriately while in his capacity as a priest.
The first, a woman who spoke to the Guardian for its February 2024 report, said that after a confession Odiong touched her leg and gave her a “bear hug” where she could feel his erection. Odiong, she said, would not let her leave the office and caressed her arms and breathed sensually.
The second woman said he had nibbled her ear while giving her a hug on one occasion and lifted her from the ground by her buttocks on another. She also said that Odiong would share intimate details about other people in the community – the kind of details he only would have learned through confession or counseling.
A third woman from Odiong’s Luling congregation testified that he counseled her husband as he was dying from a long-term illness – then made sexual advances within months of her being widowed.
The woman said that after her husband died, she had traveled with Odiong and other Catholics to Medjugorje, a site in Bosnia which has attracted a million pilgrims annually since 1981, when six children and teenagers there said they had witnessed the appearance of the Virgin Mary.
She said that one evening, her and Odiong were alone discussing her future without her husband. She testified that she was crying when Odiong pulled her face to his and kissed her on the lips. When she pulled back, she testified, Odiong pulled her in for another kiss.
Later, in another episode just days before Odiong was arrested, the woman and a friend were staying at his home in Florida. The woman said she was startled awake in the middle of the night to find Odiong standing next to her bed. Odiong threw the covers over the woman’s body after she woke up and ran from the room, she said.
Odiong did not testify in his own defense at the trial which yielded a guilty verdict against him. His attorneys argued throughout the trial that Odiong’s actions came in the course of consensual dating relationships which may have violated Catholic priests’ promise of sexual celibacy but that he courted in his personal time.
During the sentencing portion of the trial, Odiong’s lawyers called a few former parishioners who said they did not witness any wrongdoing by the priest. They described Odiong as a caring and compassionate faith leader. Yet on cross examination, many agreed that the crimes he was convicted of on Friday did not befit a man of the cloth.
For instance, one man testified that he met Odiong in the Luling church while he was struggling with alcohol and drug addiction. That man, now a resident of Nashville, Tennessee, testified that he was possessed by demons – and that Odiong performed an exorcism on him. He said Odiong saved his life, and that he’s been a devout follower ever since.
When questioned by lead prosecutor Ryan Calvert, the man admitted that he doesn’t doubt that Odiong had sex with his parishioners, including to the point of fathering a daughter with one.
“I think that it’s very understandable if he has had intimate relationships with women because he is a human being,” said the man, who also pledged to financially support Odiong’s child and her mother. He then alluded to a past public remark of the late conservative political activist Charlie Kirk: “You play certain games, you win certain prizes – if you’re gonna go have sex.”
$24,000 worth of jail calls
Details of the case have prompted questions about how Odiong was handled by the Catholic hierarchy, including within New Orleans, whose archdiocese in December agreed to pay $305m to hundreds of survivors of the worldwide church’s decades-old clergy abuse scandal.
Church officials who were in charge of Odiong while he was in Texas have previously said they suspended him from ministering in and around Waco no later than 2019 because of the clerical misconduct complaints he accumulated. And those officials have said they timely, if privately, informed their New Orleans counterparts of that decision.
But on Monday, there was evidence suggesting Odiong may have been banned from ministering within the Waco area earlier than Catholic church officials have previously acknowledged. Notably, prosecutor Liz Buice asked a secretary of a church near Waco who was called as one of Odiong’s character witnesses whether she knew that the priest had actually been suspended from ministering locally in 2018.
The secretary said she indeed did know that. Nonetheless, other testimony elicited by Calvert and Buice established that Odiong was performing masses as a priest in and around Waco beyond 2018.
Also, one of the former Baylor students on Monday testified that she had alerted the local diocese twice before any action was taken. The first time, she contacted the bishop’s office directly but heard little in response. She reported the incident a second time in 2019 through a reporting system built for accusations of clerical molestation involving children because there was no such option online for adult clergy abuse.
New Orleans church officials in the meantime waited at least four more years before similarly suspending Odiong. His superiors had also put him under scrutiny because of his making homophobic comments from his pulpit around that time.
Odiong is a naturalized US citizen who gained ordination into the Catholic priesthood in his native Nigeria in 1993. He developed a following in part by holding prayer services after which some attenders reported healing from significant ailments.
In late 2024, then Waco detective Bradley DeLange testified at a bond hearing for Odiong that supporters of the priest were helping him build a luxurious home in Nigeria.
And other supporters testified that they were willing and able to contribute up to $25,000 to cover their priest’s bond, which was ultimately set at more than $5m, keeping him in custody for the duration of the court proceedings against him.
At Monday’s portion of Odiong’s sentencing phase, an auditor at the jail in Waco testified that the clergyman had spent more than $24,000 just on telephone calls at the facility since his July 2024 arrest.
