Ex-Maplewood priest: sex predator or victim? Jury hears case

By Emily Gurnon
Pioneer Press
December 02, 2014

http://www.twincities.com/crime/ci_27054402/ex-maplewood-priest-sex-predator-or-victim-jury

Mark Andrew Huberty (Courtesy of Ramsey County sheriff's office)

As the criminal sexual conduct trial of the Rev. Mark Huberty began Tuesday, attorneys portrayed the priest in starkly different terms -- as the innocent victim of a possessive Jezebel or as a scheming sexual predator.

Huberty, 44, faces charges of fourth- and fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct in Ramsey County District Court. He is accused of having sexual contact with a married woman from his parish, Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Maplewood, at the time he was providing religious or spiritual counsel to her. He also is accused of nonconsensual sexual contact.

He has maintained his innocence.

Attorneys for the defense and prosecution presented opening statements Tuesday after a jury was picked.

Prosecutor Therese Galatowitsch exhorted the jury to look at Huberty's true nature.

"You will need to accept this defendant for who he really is, not what he hides behind," she said.

Huberty detected the woman's vulnerability and exploited it, she said.

The woman first came to see him after a traumatic death in her family, Galatowitsch said. She began doubting her faith and stopped going to Mass.

He counseled her; she listened. Over the next several years, she brought religious questions to him and revealed her private struggles, Galatowitsch said.

By January 2013, he was a "regular fixture" in the woman's home. It was then that he made a request that seemed odd: He asked if she would be his friend.

"The victim did not know what to think," Galatowitsch said. She told her husband and her therapist. They both said it raised red flags.

Huberty began to pull her closer during hugs, she alleged. On one occasion, he slipped his hand under her waist to massage her buttocks, the prosecutor said.

"She did not consent to that touch," Galatowitsch said.

Their sexual contact progressed to "make-out sessions" in Huberty's car. In private, he removed his pants and had the woman masturbate him, the prosecutor alleged.

"She was dependent on his approval," Galatowitsch said. "She thought if she did not (comply), she would lose him as a friend."

To the very end of the relationship, in April 2013, Huberty provided religious and spiritual advice, Galatowitsch said.

But defense attorney Paul Engh told the jury that Huberty was the victim in the relationship, "just as vulnerable" as the woman and an unwitting object of her troubled fixation.

He recited emails the woman had sent to her friends: "I desire, want and need to be alone with him," she wrote in one. She went to daily Mass not out of religious devotion but, she wrote, because, "This way, Father Huberty has to keep seeing me."

She was "aggressively pushing the physical" aspect of their relationship, Engh said. The priest did not know what to do with her advances. When he finally put an end to things in April 2013, she felt rejected.

"That's when she began consulting civil attorneys," and, a month later, filed a police report.

Huberty did not subject her to unwanted sexual touch, and he was not providing her with religious counsel, Engh said.

"It was a mistake for him to be her friend, but it is not a crime, ever," he said.

Huberty appeared in court in his clerical collar, as he has for all his hearings.

Galatowitsch, an assistant Hennepin County attorney, is handling the case for Ramsey County to avoid a potential conflict of interest; Ramsey County Attorney John Choi attended high school with Huberty.

Testimony continues on Wednesday.