NEW ORLEANS — Two women let Roman Catholic priest Anthony Odiong become close to them because they believed he would provide them with spiritual advice they could use to confront difficult times in their lives.
Odiong previously ran into similar issues as a popular priest at a Catholic church in Luling, Louisiana and was dismissed from his pastoral duties here.
But rather than simply minister to them, Odiong abused his position to have sexual intercourse with one of the women, police now allege. And he allegedly managed to pressure the other woman into letting her husband sodomize her despite her faith-based objections to that kind of encounter – while also successfully urging her to relay her experience to him.
Those graphic details were revealed in warrants obtained by Waco, Texas, police on Thursday that charged Odiong with two counts of violating a state law which criminalizes sexual activity between clergymen and adults who emotionally depend on their spiritual advice.
Problems appear to have started in Texas then parish in Luling
As sworn probable cause statements filed with the warrants note, Waco investigators began scrutinizing Odiong – who had previously worked in Texas and south-east Louisiana – after a report from the Guardian in February highlighted how at least three other women acquainted with the clergyman had publicly accused him of misconduct ranging from sexual coercion and unwelcome touching to financial abuse.
The allegations had led the Catholic diocese of Austin – which is in charge of church institutions in Waco – as well as the archdiocese of New Orleans to suspend Odiong from working in their regions in 2019 and this past December, respectively.
But police had not meaningfully investigated Odiong, 55, until a woman with the pseudonym Mary Doe printed out the Guardian’s February article, handed it to a detective at Waco police headquarters and described having sexual intercourse with the clergyman while he gave her “spiritual direction” from 2008 until 2011.
“Mary said she felt she could not revoke consent or say no to [Father] Odiong due to his authority as a Catholic priest,” the lead investigator on the case, Bradley DeLange, wrote under oath.
Investigation into complaints by women led to images of children
DeLange’s ensuing investigation then brought him into communication with a woman given the pseudonym of Jane Doe. She alleged that Odiong would plant open-mouth kisses on her, grope her and ultimately ordered her to submit to sodomy with her husband to heal her troubled marriage while counseling her in about 2010.
Jane Doe said she had religious reasons for avoiding that act in particular – but she did it and then recounted it to Odiong because he was her priest, according to DeLange’s sworn statements.
Ultimately, DeLange secured judicial permission to search Odiong’s iCloud data storage account. DeLange subsequently wrote under oath that he discovered illicit images depicting “a clearly prepubescent [disrobed] child” that had been saved to the iCloud account in September 2020.
DeLange said there were also two more images of who is apparently another child with an unclothed body part being grabbed by someone who appeared to be an adult.
A judge signed off on a warrant for DeLange to arrest Odiong on a count of child abuse imagery possession. On Tuesday, authorities arrested Odiong on that warrant at his home in Ave Maria, Florida.
Waco police that day issued a statement asking anyone else “victimized by Anthony Odiong anywhere in the United States” to call DeLange.
A total of at least eight accusers had come forward to DeLange with sexual misconduct allegations against Odiong by Thursday. They included a woman from the Louisiana community of Luling, about 20 miles (32km) from New Orleans, who described going to Odiong for guidance “during a traumatically difficult time in life” sometime after he arrived there in 2015 – yet he eventually met her with kissing and breast fondling, including under her clothes.
Odiong “expressed a desire and pressured her to continue escalating the sexual contact, but … she declined to go further repeatedly”, DeLange’s sworn statements said.
The number of accusers against Odiong cleared the way for Waco police to charge him on Thursday with sexual assault. Texas deems filing deadlines known as statutes of limitation irrelevant if a “defendant has committed the same or similar sex offense against five or more victims”, according to the state’s laws.
Odiong remained in custody in Florida without any bail set as of Friday. It was not immediately clear when he might be transferred to Waco to face the child abuse imagery and sexual assault charges pending against him.
Odiong was ordained into the Catholic priesthood in the diocese of Uyo, Nigeria, in 1993. He was allowed to work within the diocese of Austin in 2006 by the then bishop Gregory Aymond.
And about six years after he became the archbishop of New Orleans in 2009, Aymond invited Odiong to work in Luling.
Odiong built a reputation for himself by hosting so-called healing masses after which some congregants reported recovering from significant medical maladies, boosting church attendance along with his popularity among church-goers and his superiors.
Places where Odiong was stationed over the years included the St Peter Catholic student center on the outskirts of Baylor University’s campus in Waco as well as Luling’s St Anthony of Padua church.
Odiong’s recent criminal charges came after a social media account under his name published an open letter dismissing all claims against him as a “false, salacious, one-sided smear campaign”.
His charges also constituted a fresh scandal for the New Orleans archdiocese, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020 as it struggled to contain the fallout of the worldwide church’s decades-old clergy abuse crisis.
In April, Louisiana state police troopers served a search warrant on the archdiocese in April as part of an investigation into whether the church and its local leadership had run a child-sex trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported to law enforcement”.
It was unclear on Friday whether the troopers spearheading that investigation intended to speak with Odiong about his time within New Orleans’ archdiocese.
