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Houston right-wing activist knew about child molestation accusations surrounding law partner [1]
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Date: 2023-03-29
Jared Woodfill may successfully make people vote against civil rights in Houston.
Jared Woodfill, a prominent lawyer and a former chairperson of the Harris County Republican Party, is known for his anti-LGBTQ activism. He was behind the successful campaign to defeat a Houston antidiscrimination ordinance back in 2015.
x Prop 1 has been defeated by the citizens of Houston. Houston rightly ignored Hollywood & the liberal elite. Voters are the real heroes. — Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) November 4, 2015
x Jared “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms” Woodfill Defends Guy in Bathroom Full of Women
https://t.co/G5BjpcKr3V pic.twitter.com/L0RWOk4k6W — Texas Freedom Network (@TFN) November 10, 2015
As conservatives are justifying transphobia in the wake of a deadly school shooting in Nashville, Woodfill recently testified under oath that he knew since 2004 about the allegations of law partner Paul Pressler committing child molestation. Pressler, a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention and a former Texas justice, ran Woodfill & Pressler LLP with Woodfill for at least a decade.
In 2016, former Harris County GOP chair Jared Woodfill received an urgent warning about Paul Pressler, his longtime law partner and a Southern Baptist leader. In an email, a 25-year-old attorney from Woodfill’s Houston firm said he’d recently gone to lunch with Pressler, who told him “lewd stories about being naked on beaches with young men” and then invited him to skinny-dip at his ranch. [...] Pressler is best known for his work in the Southern Baptist Convention, where he was instrumental in pushing its 16 million members and 47,000 churches to adopt literal interpretations of the Bible, strongly denounce homosexuality and align more closely with the Republican Party. And for decades, he was a high-ranking member of the Council for National Policy, an uber-secretive network of conservative judges, mega donors, media figures and religious elites led by Tony Perkins, head of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council.
Pressler has had numerous accusations of sexual misconduct.
Toby Twining, 59, now a New York musician, was a teenager in 1977 when he says Pressler grabbed his penis in a sauna at River Oaks Country Club, according to an affidavit filed in federal court. At that time, Pressler was a youth pastor at Bethel Church in Houston; he was ousted from that position in 1978 after church officials received information about “an alleged incident,” according to a letter introduced into the court file. Brooks Schott, 27, now a lawyer in Washington state, says in an affidavit that he resigned his position at Pressler’s former law firm after Pressler in 2016 invited Schott to get into a hot tub with him naked. He also accuses Jared Woodfill, Pressler’s longtime law partner and the head of the Harris County Republican Party until 2014, of failing to prevent Pressler’s sexual advances toward him and others, which Schott says were well-known among the firm, the documents state.
But Pressler is now under additional scrutiny thanks to an ongoing court case. Duane Rollins filed a lawsuit, stating that Pressler raped and molested him for decades, beginning when he was 14. Jared Woodfill, who previously stated that he had no knowledge of Pressler’s inappropriate behaviour towards young males, deemed the lawsuit to be an extortion attempt against the Southern Baptist Convention.
The new allegations came as part of an ongoing lawsuit in which Duane Rollins accuses Pressler of decades of rape and molestation beginning when Rollins was 14 and a member of the church youth group led by Pressler, who was then in his late 40s. Those alleged attacks, Rollins says in court documents, pushed him into years of drug and alcohol addictions that kept him in prison for much of his adult life. While in prison therapy sessions in 2015, Rollins says he uncovered repressed memories of sexual abuse by Pressler. He was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress as a “direct result of the childhood sexual trauma he suffered,” according to medical records filed in court. In 2017, Rollins sued Pressler, Woodfill and Southern Baptist figures and institutions that he says enabled and concealed Pressler’s behavior, arguing that, because of trauma and manipulation by Pressler, it took him decades to reconcile that he was sexually abused. Last year, after the defendants fought to have the suit tossed by arguing the assault claims were outside the statute of limitations, the Texas Supreme Court agreed with Rollins' arguments and allowed the lawsuit to go forward.
One may argue that Paul Pressler’s role in the Religious Right may be akin to Harvey Weinstein’s in Hollywood.
Pressler’s support has long been sought and touted by Republican political hopefuls, including Sen. Ted Cruz, who has known Pressler since he was a teenager. In 2012, Pressler hosted a retreat at his Texas ranch, where a group of prominent conservative leaders agreed to support Rick Santorum over Mitt Romney in the upcoming presidential election. “Obviously everybody knew who he was. He was a big name,” Woodfill said during his deposition. “A lot of people would come and ask for his endorsement.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/3/29/2160599/-Houston-right-wing-activist-knew-about-child-molestation-accusations-surrounding-law-partner
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