SPOKANE (WA)
InvestigateWest [Seattle WA]
October 13, 2025
By Kelsey Turner and Daniel Walters
Spokane Diocese points to “overwhelming evidence” — but parishioners question Bishop Thomas Daly’s motivations
Emily Chapman could feel a pressure rising inside her. In the gym at Our Lady of Fatima, the Catholic church where she works, the Spokane Diocese was recapping how a leader of the parish, Father Miguel Mejía, had allegedly abused his powers as a priest to have “consensual and nonconsensual sex” with multiple women.
They said he stalked a woman. That he gave money and gifts to women in exchange for sex. That he paid to have phone sex with a woman in jail — potentially misusing parish funds to do it.
At least five women had come forward about the priest’s behavior. Eight members of a review board tasked with looking at sexual abuse cases within the Catholic Diocese of Spokane had concluded that “overwhelming evidence” backed the women’s accounts.
Chapman was one of those women.
The crowd that September night wasn’t convinced. Chapman heard a woman near her mutter “supposed sexual allegations” every time the misconduct was mentioned, she said.
“We’re not here to listen to what you have to say,” shouted a parishioner with a bristly gray mustache named Larry Randall. Another church member chimed in, decrying what he called the “obviously totally inappropriate, totally indefensible interrogation of Father Miguel.”
Chapman hit a breaking point. From the very back of the church gym, she stood on top of the gym risers and yelled out.
“If you would like, sir, I could fill you in on a victim’s standpoint,” she said. “Would you like a victim’s standpoint? I will give you mine.”
It was the first time that Chapman, the church’s maintenance director, had publicly identified herself as one of the alleged victims. She says she fought Mejía off one day after he grabbed her with the intention, she believes, of sexually assaulting her. Another woman who worked at the church later told InvestigateWest that Mejía sexually touched her, typically in return for church donations, despite her pleas to stop. But as the presentation began and the crowd’s objections continued, Chapman’s offer to give firsthand testimony was ignored.
The allegations against the priest highlight a widening rift within the Spokane Diocese in a time of political division in the Catholic Church — and raises questions about how a church still haunted by its history of covering up sexual abuse can forge trust with both parishioners and survivors of abuse.
Bishop Thomas Daly has taken unusually public steps to disclose the nature of the allegations against Mejía and to brief parishioners on evidence of sexual and financial wrongdoing, a level of transparency rarely seen in the Catholic Church. Yet his openness has divided the faithful.
Some hail it as long-overdue candor after nearly a half-century of secrecy bankrupted the diocese two decades ago. Others see it as a politically or personally motivated purge — an effort by a conservative bishop to oust a popular priest whose warm, pastoral style clashed with Daly’s more hard-line approach. Even among advocates for abuse survivors, opinions are split: They welcome Daly’s swift action but question why this case — and this priest — are being handled so publicly when others were not.
The diocese first shared its findings of Mejía’s alleged sexual misconduct at a parish meeting in June. The second meeting in September was about the priest’s mishandling of church funds, though the diocese told parishioners that the two investigations were connected. A financial investigator hired by the diocese revealed about $97,000 in questionable bank and credit card charges by Mejía over the last six years — from personal expenses like a flight for his nephew to charges that the diocese suspects could be related to his alleged sexual misconduct, such as money sent to inmates, gifts to women without supporting documentation, and hotels in Spokane.
Daly said another allegation is still being investigated — that Mejía sent a photo of the “backsides of probably seventh or eighth grade girls” wearing volleyball uniforms, taken in what appears to be the very same church gym where these meetings were held, to an incarcerated woman, possibly with the intent of engaging in phone sex.
The Spokane Police Department is conducting a “very comprehensive” criminal investigation, Detective Tim Schwering told the parish. Mejía is barred by the diocese from preaching publicly and continues to receive a salary paid by parishioners — though Daly said Mejía was photographed violating the terms of his suspension by celebrating a Mass in El Salvador.
Mejía didn’t respond to multiple phone calls and texts from InvestigateWest, but Heather O’Keefe, a former church bookkeeper and personal friend of Mejía, said he was advised by his attorney not to talk to the press because of the criminal investigation.
“He has essentially now ceased communication,” Daly said.
Mejía’s defenders continue demanding proof that the priest they trusted could have exploited women. They refuse to believe that the review board’s conclusions and the financial investigation by a certified public accounting firm were truly independent of Daly’s influence.
“We want it done properly,” said longtime parishioner Steve Blewett, who’s on an informal committee of about six churchgoers with “serious questions” about how the investigations were conducted. “This is our home. Our parish.”
Caught in the crossfire of the community rift are the alleged victims. Although the diocese promised to keep their identities anonymous, the women have faced heavy scrutiny from fellow church members who’ve rallied to the defense of their former priest.
InvestigateWest reached out to six women who have come forward about Mejía’s alleged sexual misconduct. Apart from Chapman and her former co-worker, they all declined to speak on the record or didn’t respond, with one woman saying she was concerned about backlash from the church community.
“That level of disregard and just disbelief and whatever — that’s not right,” said Chapman, 41. “There’s something fundamentally wrong with Christian people if they’re going to sit there and go ‘prove it.’”
‘No one will believe’
For many Our Lady of Fatima members, Mejía entered their church 11 years ago like a breath of fresh air. While other priests struck them as officious and uptight, Mejía — then 40 years old from a town west of Mexico City — seemed approachable and open. He had a knack for remembering parishioners’ names, visited people in hospitals, preached to inmates, had coffee with homeless people and high-fived kids at the Catholic school.
But it was precisely this disarming nature that enabled him to build trust with the women whom he then allegedly exploited, according to the review board.
“It’s almost a prerequisite to grooming that the person in power is liked,” Angela Velasco, a review board member and licensed mental health counselor, told the parish in June.
Grooming involves secrecy, Velasco added. “Sometimes it’s, ‘I am special. I know this man in a way that nobody else does.’ It can also range to the guilt and the shame that they experience of ‘No one will believe.’”
Chapman worked with Mejía for about a decade, nearly as long as he preached at the church. While her interactions with him started off friendly, she said they grew uncomfortable as Mejía began inquiring about her divorce and her sex life.
If she asked him a question, like how to replace the broken church vacuum cleaner, he would answer only after asking a question of his own, Chapman said. “And it was usually a sex-related question.”
But she didn’t feel like she could speak out. “I was more worried about keeping my job than trying to report or do anything,” she said.
Then, one day while they were sitting in the parish office, it escalated. She remembers him grasping her neck. Then he moved his hand down her chest. When she tried to shake him off, he grabbed her leg, and stopped only when she stood up.
Chapman decided to report him to the diocese last spring after learning that someone else had come forward about his behavior.
“It felt like the thing I needed to do,” she said. “Like it was something I should have done before.”
Another woman told InvestigateWest that she initially had a consensual sexual relationship with Mejía but he later ignored her pleas for him to stop.
The young mom remembers meeting Mejía 10 years ago while bartending at a local dive. She was 21 and struggling to make ends meet. He was nearly twice her age.
She introduced herself as Karma, the name she went by at the bar. He said his name was Miguel and that he worked at Catholic Charities — a national organization that helps the needy, where Mejía later served on the local agency’s board of directors. She didn’t realize he was a priest until years later, said Karma, who asked to go by her nickname for this article.
Their interactions quickly became sexual, according to Karma. At first, it was a consensual exchange. They would have sex, and he would pay for her living costs — her electric bill, meals, vehicle expenses.
She stopped seeing him for a few years when she entered into a more serious relationship, she said. Then in 2023, her apartment caught fire. With nowhere to go and five kids to care for, she asked Mejía for help.
This time, she told Mejía she was seeing someone and didn’t want things to be sexual, she said. Mejía arranged for Karma to work in maintenance at the church, in exchange for the church paying for her rent.
“That’s when it started feeling predatory,” Karma said. “Before, we had an arrangement going on. After, I said, ‘That’s enough.’ It didn’t stop.”
She remembers sitting in a parking lot one night after getting dinner, when Mejía put his hands down her pants, even as she told him to stop. Another time, when she went to pick up her check from him in the parish office, he asked what color her underwear was. He also would try to kiss her, not taking no for an answer, she said.
“I was trying really hard to set boundaries, but I also really needed his help at the time. That’s where I feel like he used his resources to take advantage of my situation,” Karma said. “I told him no, and it didn’t stop nothing. And so all I could do was want to crawl out of my skin.”
He started stalking her, she said. Mejía would casually mention to her that he knew where she’d gone during the day, even when she hadn’t told him. He would tell her that he drove past her by the grocery store, or that he saw her boyfriend at a bar, in an area of town where Mejía wouldn’t otherwise go.
“At first, I was getting paranoid. I thought there was like a tracker on my car or something,” she said. “He’s driving around looking for me on this side of town. Watching.”
‘He had problems before’
In some respects, the allegations against Mejía — although shocking and upsetting to many parishioners — are nothing new. In 2004, Spokane became the third Catholic diocese in the nation to file for bankruptcy due to clergy sexual abuse claims, leading to a $48 million settlement paid to more than 100 victims molested by priests. The diocese’s list of credibly accused sexual abusers has now reached 30 clergy members.
This also isn’t Mejía’s first time facing sexual misconduct allegations within the diocese. While serving at a church in Othello, a city southwest of Spokane, in the mid-2000s, Mejía became involved with a married woman, a violation of his priestly vow of celibacy, according to Daly. By February 2007, Mejía had been removed from that parish, according to Othello Rotary Club Board meeting minutes. He then went to a treatment center for priests with behavioral and psychological concerns to learn how to be faithful to his vows, Daly said, before ultimately being assigned to Our Lady of Fatima.
“Clearly, he had problems before,” Daly said. But despite his behavior in Othello, the diocese allowed him to continue counseling women on their marital issues in Spokane.
The women’s allegations share certain similarities, according to Daly. Mejía began texting them late at night, giving gifts, questioning their happiness in relationships and asking “probing questions of a sexual nature.” Mejía was “grooming” vulnerable women, Daly said.
The bishop chose retired Spokane Police Department Detective Craig Brenden to investigate the women’s claims. Brenden’s 20-year career with the department ended in January 2007 — just two months after the Spokane City Council agreed to pay $125,000 to a woman who sued Brenden for falsely accusing her of forgery and lying throughout the investigation. Brenden declined to talk to InvestigateWest about the sexual misconduct investigation and didn’t respond to requests for comment about the federal lawsuit.
Brenden spoke with the women and various witnesses. He flew to Seattle to interview Mejía.
“Father Miguel met with me willingly,” Brenden told parishioners in June. “When we got down to very specific questions, he would just get quiet, stare at his knees and refuse to answer.”
But some church members weren’t convinced.
“Just like Jesus Christ, when he was being interrogated, he refused to answer,” one woman interjected as Brenden described Mejía’s interview. “So how was that admission of guilt?”
Daly told skeptical parishioners that while accusations can be subjective, accounting issues are not. He also noted that Mejía was given the option to have another priest with him as an advocate during the interview, but didn’t take it.
The diocese, citing efforts to protect victims’ privacy and the police investigation, hasn’t elaborated on the details of the “nonconsensual sex” allegations. The ambiguity has left parishioners questioning what exactly their priest is being accused of.
But to Daly, the accusations of Mejía’s misconduct were incredibly convincing.
“Women were able to describe physical characteristics of Father Miguel that no one would know, except perhaps a doctor or a nurse who’s in the room during a physical,” Daly told InvestigateWest. Karma said she described the priest’s penis and a surgical scar on his abdomen to investigators.
At the meeting in September, church members heard another laundry list of allegations. A forensic accounting principal flagged tens of thousands of church dollars spent by Mejía against church policies or without proper documentation — like car washes, Starbucks orders, tickets for athletic events, a $900 drone and “thousands of dollars” of alcohol purchases.
One Walmart receipt showed a purchase of lentils, a Monster Energy drink and — in a notably suspicious transaction for a celibate holy man of the cloth — a six-pack of Reebok Women’s Seamless Thong underwear. They were coded as “liturgical supplies,” a category reserved for the conduct of sacred worship.
The priest used over $9,000 in Fatima funds to help a parishioner with an automobile expense. Instead of going to the bank and getting a cashier’s check, he withdrew the entire amount in cash, according to Eric Hansen, who conducted the financial investigation. Daly said investigators believe the vehicle was used as “a gift for one of the women he was in a sexual relationship with.”
Karma said the vehicle was purchased for her. So was the Reebok thong underwear. She laughed when InvestigateWest told her it was paid for with church funds. “I needed gym clothes, and that’s the one he picked.”
The financial investigation also uncovered a GPS tracking device purchased by Mejía with church funds. Mejía claimed it was for an expensive projector in case it got stolen. But Fatima staff were unable to track it down, according to Hansen.
Before she started working at the church, Karma said she and Mejía used to go to hotels in Spokane to have sex, and she later introduced him to other women who would do the same — possibly explaining some of the hotel charges flagged by the financial investigator.
The investigation also found transactions with women in jail, potentially supporting the phone sex allegations.
“You might say, ‘Well, yes, that’s Fatima. We like to help out. We’re helping inmates get back on their feet.’ Well,” Hansen said. “I have seen the documentation of communication with Father Miguel and inmates. And it is not business-related.”
But even the hard numbers didn’t convince some parishioners. O’Keefe, a former church finance council member who is one of Mejía’s staunchest defenders, asserts that there was no financial fraud occurring at Our Lady of Fatima. Church leadership fired O’Keefe in June, along with nearly the entire volunteer finance council.
All of the irregularities can be explained, O’Keefe said. She claims, for example, that Mejía sent money to inmates as part of his prison ministry; that Mejía texted the photo of the girls in volleyball uniforms in reply to a friend asking what he was up to; that the alcohol purchases were gifts for people who invited him into their homes.
O’Keefe knew that the rent and vehicle payments were for Karma, she said. But she never noticed anything sexually inappropriate between them.
“(Karma) actually spent a significant amount of time around the parish, volunteering, because that was Father’s deal with her, right? Not just handouts,” O’Keefe said.
Karma agrees that there were no handouts. In her experience, he expected sexual favors in return.
Like Chapman, Karma decided to report Mejía after learning that there were other victims. But part of her regrets saying anything, now that she’s seen the community’s response.
“The pro-Miguel (people) are painting me in a light like I was manipulating,” she said. “I’m like, if I was using him for a car, wasn’t he using me for sex?”
Suspicions, suspensions and speculations
Steve Blewett started going to Our Lady of Fatima in the 1970s, before there was even a church building to worship in. He attended Mass in a school gymnasium, awaiting the long anticipated opening of a permanent building.
In November 2004, the opening was indefinitely delayed by the diocese’s bankruptcy filing amid mounting sexual abuse claims. But churchgoers rallied for their parish, and the building opened just two months later — complete with stained glass windows contributed by Blewett’s late wife.
Blewett, now 83, asked several pastors over the years if he could put a plaque in the chapel acknowledging his wife’s contribution, he said. Each told him no.
“The minute I asked Father Miguel if he would approve of it, he said, ‘Absolutely, yes,’” Blewett said. “That was the kind of person he was.”
Mejía was appointed to Our Lady of Fatima by Spokane’s previous bishop, Blase Cupich, in 2014.
“One of the things that one of the victims said that Miguel would say was, he was very good friends with Cardinal Cupich,” Daly said.
Daly suggested that the perception that Mejía had “friends in high places” helped him take advantage of women.
Cupich, now archbishop of Chicago, represents a progressive faction of bishops in a moment of intense division within the Catholic Church. He has spoken of lowering the temperature on issues like abortion and gay marriage, and infuriated conservative Catholics last month when he sought to present an award to a pro-choice Democratic senator for his work on immigration.
When Daly took over as bishop of Spokane in 2015, his more conservative approach hit the diocese like a shock of ice water. Daly made national waves in 2019 by declaring that Catholic politicians who support abortion should be denied Holy Communion. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he announced that he would not enforce a statewide teacher vaccine mandate within Catholic schools. Last year, he threatened to confront Catholic hospitals that provided children with gender-transition surgeries and hormone therapy.
His approach antagonized some of Our Lady of Fatima’s more progressive members.
“This bishop is not a collegial bishop,” Blewett said. “He is basically a dictator, and he’s gonna have things his way.”
Daly speculates that some parishioners’ dislike of his “conservative law and order Catholicism” has spilled over into their refusals to believe the accusations against Mejía. But the bishop said he’s at peace with how the allegations have been handled, noting that people “don’t have to like me.”
Parishioners bring up an additional incident that colors their perception of the current allegations: In 2018, the diocese launched a financial investigation that led to Mejía’s temporary suspension, the facts of which are still debated.
According to Daly, Mejía was caught in the chancery office behind the secretary’s desk where he should not have been. Other church members say that Mejía simply went to get a candy bar off the secretary’s desk — “which people did all the time,” according to Blewett.
A financial audit found Mejía did not steal anything from the office, Daly said, and the priest was reinstated. But the investigation did uncover issues with the church’s financial controls and recordkeeping, leading the bishop’s office to impose stronger financial oversight.
“It was coined a witch hunt,” Chapman said. “That they were just after him because of the color of his skin, and that he was different.”
When the sexual misconduct allegations came out last spring, some parishioners thought it was another attempt by the bishop to remove a priest whose style of preaching butted heads with his own.
“Except now there was a good handful of us that knew better,” Chapman said.
Credibly accused
Daly has spoken out publicly about the Catholic Church’s need to root out the “evil” of clergy-perpetrated abuse.
In 2018, when the Vatican barred U.S. bishops from taking action on sexual abuse until after an upcoming global summit, Daly criticized the delay. “It makes it look like we don’t care,” he told the Wall Street Journal. He reiterated his commitment to the issue in 2020 after he caught former Spokane pastor Theodore Bradley — credibly accused of child sexual abuse in the 1990s — continuing to present himself publicly as a priest.
Yet Daly has also aggressively pushed back against external attempts to force greater church transparency.
In May, Daly, along with the archbishop of Seattle and the bishop of Yakima, sued Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson over a new state law requiring priests to break the seal of confession if admissions of child abuse are made — potentially violating the kind of confidentiality the Catholic Church deems particularly sacred. The Trump administration backed up the bishops, calling the law “anti-Catholic.” On Oct. 10, the state Attorney General’s Office conceded — reaching an agreement that state and county prosecutors will not enforce reporting requirements for information learned through confession, formally known as the sacrament of reconciliation.
The state Attorney General’s Office is also investigating the three Washington dioceses for potentially using charitable funds to cover up alleged child sexual abuse by clergy. The attorney general sent subpoenas to the Seattle, Spokane and Yakima dioceses for records pertaining to the alleged abuse, but the dioceses only sent information that was already public, according to the office.
“It turns out that the bishops were stonewalling him and were not turning over anything,” said Tim Law, a Seattle attorney and co-founder of the global coalition Ending Clergy Abuse. The state Court of Appeals is now deciding whether the subpoenaed documents should be made public, after a King County judge ruled that they are protected by a religious exemption.
Law said he’s shocked that Our Lady of Fatima parishioners wouldn’t believe the women given the history of abuse within the Catholic Church.
“We know now that very rarely is there a false claim, because the blowback is so hard and so bad against anyone who makes a claim,” Law said. “And then if you have multiple cases from the same priest, that’s off the charts.”
But the sudden surge in transparency in this case, ironically, makes Law question Daly’s motivations. Bishops typically don’t volunteer so many details about alleged misconduct without strong public or legal pressure to do so, victim advocates say.
“That’s very suspicious,” Law said.
When it comes to Mejía’s case, the diocese has alternated between intense transparency and a legally defensive crouch. In addition to the public meetings about the allegations, Daly spoke with InvestigateWest for an hour and a half without any questions off the table, and agreed to share a presentation summarizing the financial investigation. But the diocese later refused to send the presentation, saying that the bishop “misspoke” and that the diocese must protect the “integrity of the investigative process and the individuals involved.”
The diocese said it will not discuss Mejía any further until the police investigation is complete.
With Mejía gone, parishioners gripe that church morale has plummeted. They say services feel more sterile and traditional. Church leadership fired the nursery staff that used to watch young kids during Mass.
The new priest administrator also replaced nearly all of the church staff. In September, they put Chapman’s position up for hire, too. She’s now training her replacement, she said.
“Of course, they told me this was all financial. And I’m like, ‘Well, this feels a lot like retaliation,’” Chapman said. “It doesn’t feel like support.”
She and the other alleged victims are waiting to see what comes next. The diocese offered them a handful of free counseling sessions as compensation. But accountability still feels tenuous. Despite assuring churchgoers that the women’s allegations against Mejía are credible, the Spokane Diocese has not added his name to its public list of credibly accused clergy. The diocese has added only three priests to the list since 2009, when it first became required to publish it as part of the terms of its bankruptcy settlement. Two of those priests were accused before Daly became bishop. Daly sanctioned the third, Otto Koltzenberg, in 2017 following a credible accusation that Koltzenberg raped an altar boy in the 1980s.
According to the diocese, the decision to add Mejía is over the bishop’s head, as the accusations must first go through the Vatican to be deemed credible under Catholic canon law. That process has not yet begun.
The criminal investigation, which has already been going on for a few months, could take upwards of a year, according to Detective Schwering. Although Mejía is currently suspended from ministry, a photo of Mejía celebrating Mass in El Salvador for a Spokane nun’s anniversary in May raises questions about how it will be enforced. Daly said he wrote Mejía a letter about the violation, although he’s unsure whether the priest is in El Salvador or back in Washington.
“If it’s done here in the United States, we could track it down more, but he was in a foreign country,” Daly said. “I think he wants to flee, leave the country, take his act on the road.”
Schwering declined to answer parishioners’ questions about Mejía’s whereabouts during the September meeting. O’Keefe, who said she’s still in touch with Mejía, said Mejía is currently in the U.S. and only went to El Salvador temporarily for the nun’s anniversary.
For Daly, one of the biggest concerns now — apart from helping the victims — is how to heal the parish, he said.
“The people very much want a good pastor. They want a father,” Daly said. “And when it goes astray, it’s like a family. The family starts falling apart.”
Kelsey Turner
Kelsey Turner is an investigative reporter at InvestigateWest. Her reporting has stretched from her home state of New Jersey to Illinois, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. View profile
Daniel Walters
Daniel Walters is the democracy and extremism reporter at InvestigateWest, where he’s written about everything from brawls involving white nationalists in Portland to secretly recorded conversations between politicians and lobbyists in Boise. He joined the organization through Report for America.