(TX)
Meidas Touch News [Lawrenceville, GA]
September 18, 2026
By Aaron Parnas
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has spent more than a decade cultivating a political alliance with Paul Pressler, the once-revered Southern Baptist power broker who was accused by at least eight men of sexually abusing them, and with the two men most closely tied to covering for him. Even after the allegations became public, Paxton kept taking their money, kept using their endorsements, and kept standing by them.
Pressler was one of the architects of the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the late 20th century and a mentor to a generation of Texas Republicans, including Ted Cruz and Paxton himself. But behind that reputation, according to Texas Monthly’s investigation, “abundant suspicions” about his relationships with young men circulated for decades, beginning in the late 1970s when he was quietly pushed out of a church youth ministry after an alleged incident at his home. Those suspicions became public allegations in December 2017, when Duane Rollins filed a lawsuit claiming Pressler began raping him in 1979, when Rollins was 14 and Pressler was a sitting justice on Texas’ 14th Court of Appeals, and continued abusing him two to three times a month for the next quarter century. According to the Houston Chronicle, the suit alleged the abuse took place in Pressler’s home study with his wife, Nancy, “usually on the premises.” At least seven other men came forward with similar accusations once the case was filed.
Paxton had already built a close political relationship with Pressler well before any of this became public. In November 2013, Paxton’s campaign touted Pressler’s endorsement as coming from a “respected conservative icon” across Texas, and Paxton personally said he had “admired and respected” the judge “for so many years.” A year later, after winning his race for attorney general, Paxton named Pressler to his transition advisory team.
The relationship didn’t end when the allegations became public. Campaign finance filings with the Texas Ethics Commission show Pressler and his wife donated to Paxton’s campaigns in 2016, 2017, and again in 2018 and 2022, the latter two coming after Rollins’ lawsuit was filed and receiving national attention.
Nancy Pressler also gave to Paxton’s campaign in 2022 and to the “Stand with Paxton” PAC set up to defend him during his 2023 impeachment. In total, records show the Presslers gave Paxton roughly $1,600 across the two accounts.
The lawsuit against Pressler was ultimately settled in December 2023, with the Southern Baptist Convention, its Executive Committee, and First Baptist Church of Houston all named as defendants alongside Pressler himself. In a statement announcing the confidential settlement, attorneys for the SBC cited “the horrendous nature of the abuse allegations” as a chief reason for resolving the case rather than going to trial. Weeks later, the SBC’s own outside counsel, Gene Besen, went further, calling Pressler a “monster” and a “dangerous predator” whose “actions are of the devil.” Pressler died in June 2024 at 94, his death covered by the Associated Press and by the New York Times under the headline “Paul Pressler, Disgraced Christian Conservative Leader, Dies at 94.”
Paxton’s ties didn’t stop with Pressler. In 2022, the Texas Supreme Court voted 5-2 to allow the Rollins lawsuit to proceed, rejecting an attempt to kill it on a statute-of-limitations technicality. Two justices recused themselves because their own former law firm represented Rollins. Justice John Devine did not recuse himself, despite having worked directly for Woodfill and Pressler’s small Houston law firm years earlier, with his time there overlapping the period when Rollins, then working as Pressler’s personal assistant, says he was being abused. A Texas Tribune investigation found Devine was listed as an attorney or guardian ad litem for the firm at least 27 times between 2002 and 2008, including in nine cases filed while Rollins worked there. Devine told the Tribune he had “no basis” to recuse because he had “no personal knowledge of the facts.”
When Devine’s primary opponent used that record against him in the 2024 Republican primary, accusing him of “trying to help Woodfill and Pressler out,” Paxton didn’t distance himself. He kept his endorsement in place and, according to the Tribune’s reporting, showed up at a Houston fundraiser for Woodfill where he “without prompting praised Devine and blasted what he said were smear attacks” against him.
That fundraiser was for Jared Woodfill, Pressler’s longtime law partner and, according to Rollins’ lawsuit, the man who enabled the abuse for over a decade. Woodfill testified under oath that he learned in 2004 that Pressler had been sexually inappropriate with Rollins as a child, yet the firm continued paying a rotating cast of young male personal assistants to work out of Pressler’s home rather than giving Pressler a salary directly, an arrangement that a Texas Tribune report on a newly surfaced email shows continued until at least 2017. That email, sent to Pressler’s family by one of those assistants, described Pressler bragging about being naked with young boys and pressuring a young, financially desperate man into giving him a nude massage.
None of that stopped Paxton from standing by Woodfill either. In a 2023 campaign ad for Woodfill’s run for the Texas House, Paxton praised him as someone who “has defended religious liberty, opposed mask and vax mandates, and is challenging election fraud in Harris County,” declaring “true conservatives need to take control of the House” and that “Jared Woodfill can lead the way.” In February 2024, weeks after the damaging email became public, Paxton appeared in person at a Houston reception for Woodfill’s campaign and released a video calling him “an amazing conservative fighter” he’d known for “over a decade.”
The relationship ran both directions. When Paxton faced impeachment in the Texas House in 2023 over separate corruption and abuse-of-office allegations, Woodfill became one of his most active defenders. He was part of a political action committee organized to defend Paxton during the trial and was among the small group of Paxton “loyalists” who watched the proceedings from the Senate gallery, according to the Texas Tribune. Woodfill also represented plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the gag order the Texas Senate imposed during the trial, arguing it violated lawmakers’ First Amendment rights, a case covered by the Houston Chronicle. Paxton was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.
Taken together, the record shows a pattern spanning more than a decade: Paxton built his political career in part on the backing of a man later called a “monster” and “dangerous predator” by the Southern Baptist Convention’s own lawyer, kept accepting money from that man and his wife well after the allegations were public, and kept his political relationships intact with both the judge who declined to recuse himself from Pressler’s case and the law partner accused of supplying Pressler with victims for over a decade. Neither Paxton’s office nor Woodfill has publicly addressed why those relationships continued after the allegations became known.