A United States jury in Waco, Texas, has convicted 57-year-old Nigerian-born Roman Catholic priest, Father Anthony Odiong, for weaponizing his religious status and exploiting devout female parishioners. The jury, composed of eight women and four men, found Odiong guilty on Friday of one count of first-degree sexual assault and two counts of second-degree sexual assault. These convictions stemmed from his illicit sexual desires, which he pursued under the guise of offering “spiritual direction” to vulnerable women, who provided harrowing testimonies during the trial. Odiong, who sat motionless as District Judge Thomas West read the guilty verdict, is now facing a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. He was subsequently cuffed by sheriff’s deputies and led to a high-security detention facility, with his sentencing scheduled for Monday.

The criminal network operated by Father Odiong began to unravel following an investigative exposé published by The Guardian in February 2024. This publication unmasked how the Nigerian priest ran a system of sexual coercion, unwanted groping, and abusive financial control over female worshipers, initially 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 explicitly 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. She revealed that Odiong had subjected her to an aggressive, non-consensual sexual relationship for three years, commencing in 2008, a period when she was undergoing a traumatic divorce and raising seven children. During the trial, the jury heard a shocking testimony detailing how Mary Doe’s teenage son walked into his mother's bedroom after a family party and caught Father Odiong actively engaged in 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 providing 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 then demanded that she return to describe the graphic bedroom details to him.

The prosecution, led by Ryan Calvert and Liz Buice, effectively dismantled Odiong’s defense by presenting airtight DNA evidence. This evidence demonstrated 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 such an act as rape, American authorities maintained that the child serves as living, breathing proof of Odiong's calculated pattern of using his cassock to target and exploit vulnerable women. During cross-examination, prosecutor Calvert mocked the defense's attempts to portray Odiong as a holy man, pointedly asking a character witness if he knew that "Father Anthony was *really* Father Anthony," insinuating his biological fatherhood. The witness reportedly mumbled, "Just what I read in the paper. Yes."

In a desperate attempt 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." Attorney Truesdale aggressively questioned the court, asking, "Is this man a cult leader? Did this man put them in a compound? There is a responsibility on the women as well." Prosecutor Calvert fiercely countered this argument in his closing statement, 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. "His weapon was faith. Devout faith. Sincere faith."

Anthony Odiong, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was originally ordained into the Catholic priesthood in 1993 in Nigeria before being transferred 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 concealed this 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 spill 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 significant impetus to an ongoing international debate within the global Catholic Church regarding the urgent need to expand the definition of a "vulnerable adult."