AUSTIN (TX)
Sahara Reporters [New York NY]
May 30, 2026
He hung his head in total shame as sheriff’s deputies cuffed him and led him out of the courtroom into a high-security detention facility ahead of his sentencing scheduled for Monday.
A United States jury in Texas has convicted a 57-year-old Nigerian-born Roman Catholic priest, Father Anthony Odiong, for weaponising his religious status and exploiting devout female parishioners to satisfy his illicit sexual desires under the guise of offering “spiritual direction.”
A jury comprising eight women and four men in Waco, Texas, found Odiong guilty on Friday of one count of first-degree sexual assault and two counts of second-degree sexual assault involving two vulnerable female parishioners who gave harrowing testimonies during the trial.
According to The Guardian, the cleric, who sat motionless as District Judge Thomas West read the guilty verdict, is now facing maximum life imprisonment.
He hung his head in total shame as sheriff’s deputies cuffed him and led him out of the courtroom into a high-security detention facility ahead of his sentencing scheduled for Monday.
The criminal network operated by Odiong began collapsing following an investigative exposé published by The Guardian in February 2024.
The publication unmasked how the Nigerian priest ran a system of sexual coercion, unwanted groping, and abusive financial control over female worshipers in Waco, Texas, and later in Luling, a suburb of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Under Texas state law, any sexual contact initiated by a religious cleric or spiritual leader leveraging their position of authority is classified as felony sexual assault.
Prompted by the media exposé, a victim code-named “Mary Doe” presented the investigative report to the Waco Police Department, revealing that Odiong had subjected her to an aggressive, non-consensual sexual relationship for three years starting in 2008, right when she was going through a traumatic divorce and raising seven children.
During the trial, the jury heard jaw-dropping testimonies of how Mary Doe’s teenage son walked into his mother’s bedroom after a family party and caught Father Odiong actively having sexual intercourse with her.
Another victim, code-named “Jane Doe,” testified that while trapped in an abusive marriage, she sought spiritual counseling from Odiong. Instead of offering holy counsel, the priest twisted her faith, compelling her to allow her abusive husband to engage in an agonizingly painful form of intercourse to “save her marriage”—and demanded that she return to describe the graphic bedroom details to him.
The prosecution, led by Ryan Calvert and Liz Buice, completely dismantled Odiong’s defense by producing airtight DNA evidence showing that in the spring of 2023, the priest secretly fathered a biological daughter with a third parishioner, “Presley Jones,” whom he was also guiding spiritually at the St. Anthony of Padua Church in Louisiana.
Although Louisiana state laws lack the specific spiritual-exploitation statutes enacted in Texas to prosecute the act as rape, American authorities maintained that the child is living, breathing proof of Odiong’s calculated pattern of using his cassock to hunt down vulnerable women.
During cross-examination, prosecutor Calvert mocked the defense’s attempts to paint Odiong as a holy man, asking a character witness if he knew that “Father Anthony was *really* Father Anthony”—insinuating his biological fatherhood. The witness mumbled, “Just what I read in the paper. Yes.”
In a desperate bid to shield the predator, Odiong’s defense attorneys, Gerald Villarial and Carolina Truesdale, tried to gaslight the victims by labeling the serial assaults as a normal “dating relationship.”
“Is this man a cult leader? Did this man put them in a compound?” attorney Truesdale aggressively asked the court. “There is a responsibility on the women as well.”
Prosecutor Calvert fiercely fired back, exposing the calculated wickedness of the Nigerian cleric.
“This wasn’t a guy who fell in love; these weren’t star-crossed lovers. This was a pattern. This was deliberate,” Calvert declared in his closing argument. “His weapon was faith. Devout faith. Sincere faith.”
It was gathered that Anthony Odiong, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was originally ordained into the Catholic priesthood in 1993 in Nigeria before being exported to the United States in 2006 under the supervision of Bishop Gregory Aymond.
Despite numerous early internal complaints from distressed female worshipers, Catholic authorities actively engaged in a systematic cover-up to protect the predator. By 2019, Austin church officials quietly suspended Odiong from ministering due to egregious misconduct with multiple women, but hid the information from the public and merely reassigned him to New Orleans under Archbishop Aymond.
It was not until late 2023, when the scandals threatened to boil over into the mainstream media, that the church formally stripped him of his public ministering powers.
Archbishop Aymond himself was forced into early retirement in February 2026 after the New Orleans archdiocese and its insurers agreed to pay a staggering $305 million in a bankruptcy settlement to thousands of survivors of Catholic clergy sexual violence and molestation scandals.
Odiong’s conviction has now added immense fire to an ongoing international debate within the global Catholic Church regarding the need to expand the definition of a “vulnerable adult.”
Progressive Catholic groups are demanding that the Vatican stop limiting the definition of vulnerability to disabled persons, and immediately update its global canon law to explicitly classify any adult under the spiritual direction of a priest who initiates sex with them as an abused victim.