Pope’s handpicked priest says he had sex with PR woman

By Tom Kington
Times (UK)
December 1, 2015

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/faith/article4628222.ece

A Spanish priest and a PR woman who are on trial for leaking Vatican secrets are engaged in a war of words amid accusations of seduction, sex and spying for the Italian secret services.

Francesca Chaouqui, a PR ­expert who was asked by the Pope to join a committee to monitor Vatican sleaze, said she was suing Father Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, her former fellow committee member, after he reportedly claimed she pushed him into ­having sex and boasted that she was a spy.

“Everything he has stated is false and I have sued him for ­defamation,” Ms Chaouqui said. “I doubt Father Vallejo Balda would have slept with me because he does not go for women.”

Ms Chaouqui, Father Vallejo Balda and his former assistant, Nicola Maio, face up to eight years in prison if they are convicted by a Vatican court. They are ­accused of leaking information about Vatican waste and mismanagement to two Italian investigative journalists. Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi, who published the leaks, are also on trial. A hearing was adjourned for a week yesterday after Ms Chaouqui, 33, appointed a new lawyer.

The Italian newspaper La ­Repubblica published a statement from Father Vallejo Balda, 54, yesterday in which he claimed Ms Chaouqui pressured him into handing confidential documents to the journalists and that she made sexual advances.

“I couldn’t give in,” he wrote. “I kept on seeing the Pope before me when he spoke of the sanctity of married women and marriage.”

Last December, the Spanish priest said he had had sex with Ms Chaouqui. He also claimed Ms Chaouqui had said she was working for the Italian secret ­services and that her marriage was a front.

“She sent me photos of Corrado (her husband) with another woman, his real wife,” he wrote.

Ms Chaouqui’s husband, ­Corrado Lanino, 38, denied the ­allegation yesterday. “I have been Francesca’s real husband for 11 years and we are happily expecting a child,” he said.

The priest’s lawyer has asked for psychological testing for his client, Italian media reported.

Describing the legal action she is taking against Father Vallejo Balda, Ms Chaouqui said: “At the trial he had better take all this back or I will leave him in his ­underpants.”

Pope Francis, who has been away on a visit to Africa, said on his return flight to the Vatican yesterday that the leaks scandal “has not kept me awake at night”.

“This isn’t the Lucrezia Borgia era,” he quipped in a reference to the daughter of Pope Alexander VI in the 15th century, who was accused of incest, poisoning and murder.