BishopAccountability.org
	Jury Pick for Priest's Rape Retrial By Nancie L. Katz Daily News March 10, 2004 A visiting Nigerian priest goes on trial again this week on charges he raped and sodomized a parishioner who sought his advice on annulling her marriage. Jury selection was scheduled to begin today in the retrial of Rev. Cyriacus Udegbulem. Last June, a Brooklyn Supreme Court jury deadlocked after failing to agree on whether Udegbulem, 39, had consensual sex with the woman or forced her to have sex against her will. Back then, the mother of three sobbed on the witness stand, telling jurors she was sexually attacked by the priest in the rectory of Our Lady of Charity in Crown Heights on New Year's Day 2000. Udegbulem has admitted having sex with the woman, but said it was consensual. The woman's charges in early 2000 did not surface beyond the church until widespread media reports two years later that Catholic leaders were covering up sex crimes committed by priests. The woman told jurors she informed church leaders she had been raped in the days after the attack, but shame and embarrassment prevented her from reporting it to police or family members. The Diocese of Brooklyn let two years pass before reporting the allegations to cops, keeping quiet until April 2002, when the diocese handed authorities the names of priests accused of sex crimes. A diocesan spokesman said then that the church counseled the woman to go to police, ordered the priest to return to the Diocese of Orlu in Nigeria and alerted the bishop there. However, Udegbulem was found and arrested in Texas in June 2002, and it was unclear whether he ever went back to his native country. On Jan. 1, 2000, the woman said she visited Udegbulem after he offered to advise her about a marriage annulment. She said he molested her after she tried to escape a second-floor office. "I was struggling, trying to get away from him," she testified. "I'm telling him, 'No, don't do this, you're a priest.' " Udegbulem faces first-degree rape and sodomy charges. If convicted, he faces up to 25 years in prison.
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