Priest accuser hopes Texas conviction will keep him from victimizing others

The first woman to publicly accuse a Roman Catholic priest who was convicted by a Texas jury on Friday of repeated adult, criminal clergy sexual abuse has said she “can only hope he is kept from continuing to use faith as his net, his snare and a tool to manipulate current and future victims”.“I’m grateful to the jury for listening to the evidence and seeing the truth” about the convicted clergyman, Anthony Odiong, said the woman in a statement on Saturday, referred to in court proceedings by the pseudonym Hadassah Doe.The woman added that it was “heartbreaking” to learn of the testimony that led to Odiong’s conviction after a four-day trial on first- and second-degree sexual assault charges in Waco, Texas, in connection with two women given the pseudonyms Mary Doe and Jane Doe. She alluded to how church officials, including in south-east Louisiana – where the clergyman most recently ministered – “could have prevented a lot of suffering and pain” if they “would have listened” to her attempts to report him years earlier.As Hadassah Doe eventually recounted to the Guardian and reporting partner WWL Louisiana, she met Odiong in the spring of 2007 while he studied for a theological master’s degree from Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. She described how he positioned himself as her spiritual counselor and initiated a years-long physical relationship during which he persuaded her to perform sexual acts on him during the sacrament of confession, at private masses in her home and in at least one motel room – claiming she could ensure salvation by doing so.She also accused him of stealing money from her, and if she ever refused him, he would disparage her as crazy.Doe said she mostly cut Odiong off in late 2018, when he had transferred from clerical roles in and around Waco, Texas, to serving as pastor of the St Anthony of Padua church in the New Orleans suburb of Luling, Louisiana.In 2019, according to call logs and audio recordings, Doe contacted the New Orleans archdiocese’s telephone number for abuse claimants to report Odiong. The sheriff’s office that patrols Luling said that the woman also spoke with one of its detectives about Odiong.The investigator concluded that Doe was reporting what sounded like a personal relationship not outlawed in Louisiana. Neither the authorities nor the church in that state took action against Odiong.Hadassah Doe and her civil attorney, Kristi Schubert, shared those events with the public through the Guardian and WWL in December 2023, after the New Orleans archdiocese announced – without elaborating – that it had suspended Odiong over clerical misconduct with multiple women.An attorney who represented Odiong at the time met Doe’s story with a statement aggressively dismissing it as “categorically … false”. The statement also called the accusations “outlandish … and unworthy of belief”.Odiong himself published a social media post calling Doe “a mentally unstable woman”.Nonetheless, another woman who met Odiong in Waco in 2010 and would eventually be referred to as Jane Doe in court proceedings subsequently noticed Hadassah’s account. Jane Doe contacted the Guardian and vouched for Hadassah’s story as credible, saying she also had an abusive experience while Odiong ostensibly counseled her over marital problems she was enduring.She told the outlet that Odiong – among other behaviors – successfully directed her to submit to a form of intercourse, which she found painfully uncomfortable, to save her marriage, which ultimately failed.Furthermore, she revealed that Catholic church officials in charge of Waco-area clergymen had informed her that they banned Odiong no later than 2019 from ministering in and around there over misconduct allegations. Those officials said to her that they simultaneously and privately notified their New Orleans counterparts to that decision.Jane Doe’s story then was seen by another woman whom authorities would come to refer to by the pseudonym of Mary Doe. Mary Doe brought a copy of the Guardian’s reporting on Jane and Hadassah Doe to Waco police and told them Odiong had fostered a years-long sexual relationship with her.Mary Doe told then detective Bradley DeLange that the relationship started in 2008 after he began providing her with spiritual direction amid the fallout of a tumultuous divorce that left her with primary custody of seven children. It effectively didn’t end until after a family party in 2011, when her son walked in on them having sex and told a neighbor what he had seen. The neighbor, it would later emerge in court, reported Odiong to local church officials – but his career continued virtually unimpeded.Texas law considers what Mary Doe reported to be felony sexual assault. The ensuing investigation led authorities to Jane Doe. They also secured cooperation from enough Odiong accusers meeting the legal standard of probable cause that they could charge him in connection with first- and second-degree sexual assault of Mary and Joe Doe.They each testified at a four-day trial beginning on Tuesday at a courthouse in downtown Waco. Prosecutors Ryan Calvert and Liz Buice also established that Odiong had fathered a child in 2023 with a congregant to whom he provided religious counseling after meeting her in Luling.Calvert at one point seemingly addressed insinuations that his accusers may have unduly conspired to take him down, by asking Mary Doe whether she knew Hadassah Doe and others who had spoken to authorities about him. She said she did not know them.The eight women and four men on the jury took only about two hours to find Odiong guilty of the charges against him. That left Odiong facing up to life imprisonment during a sentencing phase scheduled to begin on Monday.Provided to the Guardian by Schubert a day after the verdict, Hadassah Doe’s statement said the prosecution was respectively “superb” and “succinct” in its strategy and case presentation. She said she would spend the coming days waiting to learn Odiong’s sentence.Hadassah Doe separately awaited the outcome of a pending claim for Odiong-related damages that she filed as part of a bankruptcy protection case that the New Orleans archdiocese filed in 2020 as it grappled with the ongoing aftermath of the worldwide Catholic church’s decades-old clergy molestation scandal.The archdiocese and its insurers in December agreed to pay $305m to hundreds of abuse survivors to settle the bankruptcy, though payouts as of Saturday were not expected to begin until the fall.In her bankruptcy claim, made under oath, Hadassah Doe summarized what her life had been like since Odiong entered and then departed it.“The abuse has completely ruined my life and self-confidence,” she wrote. “I have repeated nightmares [of] Fr Odiong abusing me.”