Church worker, music teacher, married couple, liar, woman rapist, Catholic Church, DoJ, Rose McGowan & Hollywood cesspool
Texas jury sentences child abuser
to life in prison
Midland Reporter-Telegram
A Midland County jury convicted Mark Odin Chambers, 42, to life in prison after finding the man guilty of continuous sexual abuse of a child in count I and aggravated sexual assault of a child count IV.
Midland County District Attorney Laura A. Nodolf reports that victims testified about sexual abuse that “began in Midland in 2008 and continued once the victims moved to the Dallas area in 2012.”
After finding Chambers guilty, the jury then assessed his punishment at life in prison in both counts.
The offense of continuous sexual abuse of a child does not allow for the defendant to be considered for parole, according to the press release.
Nodolf and Assistant District Attorney Bonita Tribble prosecuted the case before District Judge Rodney W. Satterwhite. Nodolf reports Chambers’ last residence was Granbury.
Former Prattville church employee charged
with child sex crimes
By WSFA 12 News StaffPRATTVILLE, AL (WSFA) -
A former Prattville church employee has been arrested on two sex charges, according to the Prattville Police Department.
Investigators, along with the U.S. Marshals Service, took 40-year-old John Edgar Harris into custody Friday around noon at his Cooper Avenue home.
Harris is charged with one count of first-degree sexual abuse and one count of facilitating the travel of a child for an unlawful sex act. He's being held on bonds totaling $150,000.
Harris' personal website indicates he is involved in ministry work at Glynwood Baptist Church in Prattville where he lists himself as being the church's student minister and director of communications for more than eight years.
When contacted for reaction, officials with Glynwood Baptist Church would confirm Harris was at one time employed there but is no longer affiliated with the church after he voluntarily resigned on Sept. 3. The church has not confirmed the exact position he held.
The investigation is ongoing.
Florida Couple charged in Child Molestation Case
Blountstown, Fla. - A Blountstown couple is facing 40 felonies after they were arrested in connection to the sexual abuse of two young girls.
Abel Miranda, 43, is charged with 34 felonies including lewd or lascivious conduct, lewd or lascivious exhibition, lewd and lascivious molestation and sexual battery.
His wife Anabel Redondo-Miranda, 42, was also arrested and charged with six felonies following an investigation by the Blountstown Police Department and the Department of Children and Families.
East Syracuse music teacher indicted for sexually abusing child for 1 1/2 years
By Douglass Dowty
Syracuse, NY -- An East Syracuse private music teacher was indicted today on a charge accusing him of repeated child sexual abuse from January 2010 to July 2011.
Michael Waite, 42, of Mattydale, was owner of Mike Waite's Music Studio, 100 East Manlius St., East Syracuse. The studio taught drums, guitar, vocals and piano, according to its Facebook page.
The victim, who was under 13 years old, was not a student at the music studio, state police have said.
Waite was indicted on a charge of "course of sexual conduct against a child," which means he's accused of at least two acts of sex abuse over the 19 months covered in the indictment.
That's a Class D felony, punishable by up to seven years in prison. He's also facing a misdemeanor endangering the welfare of a child.
Waite is currently free on bail. He was originally arrested in July of this year.
Diary Leads To Child Molestation Arrest In Georgia
By Doug Gross (Patch Staff)
DALLAS, GA — A Paulding County man has been transported to North Dakota to face child molestation charges filed after authorities say his old diary recounting the crimes was discovered.
Timothy Sprenger, 31, is charged with one count of gross sexual imposition and one count of continuous sexual abuse of a child in North Dakota. He was transported there from Paulding County Jail last week.
In June, the sheriff's office says, Paulding County detective Sgt. Lenny Carr met with someone who showed him what appeared to be a diary written by Sprenger — who was living in Paulding County after moving from North Dakota.
Victims aged 6 months - 2 years
The diary, which had been torn into pieces and taped back together, appeared to contain passages in which Sprenger documented multiple instances of child molestation against children from ages 6 months to two years old, the sheriff's office said.
Investigators determined the incidents apparently happened years ago and were able to identify one of the alleged victims, now 12 years old, and locate the child's mother in North Dakota. They then notified the Minot Police Department in North Dakota.
Paulding Detective Krista Cousins identified and located the other alleged victim, also 12 years old now, who also lives in North Dakota. Carr then interviewed Sprenger and, according to the sheriff's office, Sprenger confessed to the crimes, as well as others not mentioned in the diary.
Investigators did not learn of any incidents that happened in Georgia, the sheriff's office said.
On Sept. 22, North Dakota issued criminal warrants for Sprenger's arrest. Paulding County deputies arrested him that day and, on Oct. 5, he was transported back to North Dakota.
He is currently being held on a $1 million bond in North Dakota.
El Paso woman arrested after falsely reporting
child abuse
by Lorena Sanchez Jamel Valencia
EL PASO, Texas (KFOX14) —
An El Paso woman was arrested and charged Wednesday for falsely reporting child abuse.
The charges resulted from a July 2017 investigation, said police.
Vanessa Macias, 33, persuaded a child “to participate in the false report of child abuse/sexual abuse” against another person, said police.
Macias reported to investigators that a child had been sexually abused.
Macias was booked into the El Paso County Jail on Wednesday on a $20,000 bond.
Iowa woman faces sex abuse charge
Lee Hermiston The Gazette
MARION — A Marion woman is accused of sexually abusing a 15-year-old boy in her home.
According to the Linn County Attorney’s Office, the victim said during a forensic interview at Unity Point-St. Luke’s Child Protection Center that Marcy A. Westphal, 60, of 9-F Chapelridge Circle, engaged in a sex act with the teen at her residence on Aug. 17. Authorities said the act was witnessed by another person.
Westphal was arrested this week and has been charged with third-degree sex abuse, a Class C felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Upstate NY man admits sexual abuse of child
By Freeman staff
KINGSTON, N.Y. >> A Kingston man has pleaded guilty in Ulster County Court to the sexual abuse of a person under the age of 11, the Ulster County District Attorney’s Office said Friday.
David Vega-Soto, 38, formerly of 82 Henry St., pleaded guilty Thursday before Judge Donald A. Williams to the felony of sexual abuse. He admitted that on June 25, “he subjected another person to sexual contact who was less than 11 years old,” according to the District Attorney’s Office.
Vega-Soto was arrested June 30 after an investigation by the Ulster County Family and Child Advocacy Center, which comprises members of the District Attorney’s Office, the state police, the Ulster County Sheriff’s Office and Ulster County Child Protective Services.
He initially was charged with the felonies of sexual abuse and criminal sex act and the misdemeanors of sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child. At the time, the District Attorney’s Office said Vega-Sota sexually assaulted two girls, ages 6 and 12.
Vega-Sota was indicted in July by an Ulster County grand jury on one felony count of sexual abuse.
Authorities did not say whether Vega-Soto knew the girls prior to the assaults.
The Catholic Church knew he was an abuser, but helped him get a job in public schools
Melanie Sakoda holds a sign as she participates in a demonstration with SNAP, the Survivors Network
of those Abused by Priests, outside of the offices of the San Francisco Archdiocese in 2010.
(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Rick Anderson
Time and again, the record shows, Brother Edward “Chris” Courtney was accused of child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic schools where he taught, and the church responded by moving him to another jurisdiction.
That makes his case similar to those of hundreds of other priests and brothers who committed sexual abuse before the problem exploded into national consciousness more than 15 years ago.
What sets Courtney apart is this: According to a lawsuit settled last week in Seattle’s King County Superior Court, he was ultimately shuffled off to a public school, where he continued to commit sexual assault.
Edward Courtney in an undated photo (Archdiocese of Seattle)
Courtney, now 82 and retired in Hawaii, was a member of the Christian Brothers religious order who has been accused of assaulting at least 55 boys during his three decades as a Catholic school educator in a variety of jurisdictions from New York to Seattle.
It was in Seattle, where he served as principal of a parochial school, St. Alphonsus, that his Catholic school career came to an end after allegations of groping. Catholic and Christian Brothers officials then wrote letters of recommendation to the state school system and, ignoring a legal requirement, never reported his history of sexual assaults. That omission allowed Courtney to obtain his license to teach in public schools, where the assaults continued, according to the lawsuit and criminal court records.
The Seattle Archdiocese agreed to pay $1.3 million to one of Courtney’s public school victims — an unidentified male who was sexually assaulted in the early 1980s at a now-closed Tacoma-area school. Archbishop J. Peter Sartain also issued an apology.
The church and the Christian Brothers’ congregation have now paid out an estimated $30 million in court settlements to Courtney's nationwide victims, 52 of them in one settlement alone that caused the congregation to declare bankruptcy in 2011.
In a news release, the Seattle Archdiocese pointed to changes it had made in the wake of the church scandal that began unfolding in 2001 with a Boston Globe investigation of abuse by priests. Now, criminal background checks are required for all archdiocese employees and volunteers who have unsupervised contact with children.
Courtney, however, did not have a criminal record until after he began teaching in the public school system and was convicted of assaulting a student at an Othello, Wash., elementary school.
Jason Amala, one of the latest victim’s Seattle attorneys, said in a statement this week that he was unaware of “another case where the defendant [the archdiocese] removed a known abuser from their private school system and then actively helped them get a job in the public school system.”
Mary Dispenza, leader of Seattle SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) praised the settlement and noted that a second, similar lawsuit accusing Courtney of molesting another public school student is currently moving through the courts.
Last year, the Seattle Archdiocese issued a list of 77 priests, brothers (including Courtney), deacons and a nun identified as sexual predators. The archdiocese has not provided any details of the alleged offenses.
Court files, though, lay out Courtney’s story.
Problems surfaced nearly immediately after the Seattle-born brother took his first permanent assignment in 1960, at age 22, at New York City's Sacred Heart School. Christian Brothers records state that he began to prey on grade school students and was transferred to Brother Rice High School in Chicago, where more problems soon arose.
He was moved to St. Laurence High School in Burbank, Ill., where he was also accused of abuse. The allegations continued after his transfer in 1968 to Brother Rice High in Birmingham, Mich. Two years later, he was sent to St. Leo High in Chicago, where — following more abuse allegations — he was transferred back to St. Laurence.
He was asked to leave St. Laurence following an allegation involving a freshman boy. This time, the church and congregation sent him far afield — to the West Coast, where he wound up at O'Dea High School in Seattle in the mid-1970s, records show.
Within two months, he was coaching intramural basketball at O'Dea and the complaints started again. One student said he was attacked by Courtney in a locked classroom. The boy's father later confronted school officials, who asked Courtney to make a public apology.
Courtney refused and was sent to a retreat in Canada for sexual deviancy treatment. When he returned to O'Dea, new abuse reports surfaced. He was moved to a Catholic elementary school and then to St. Alphonsus, where he was named principal.
It wasn't long before complaints surfaced from St. Alphonsus students, including two boys who said Courtney had groped them.
Courtney admitted to the youths' charges and agreed to resign. But with the archdiocese’s help, he ended up as a public school teacher in Seattle, Tacoma and central Washington. The Christian Brothers even paid Courtney’s way at Seattle University to earn accreditation so he could become a school principal.
When molestation accusations once again surfaced, Courtney took flight — aware this time that public school officials had alerted police.
Three years later, he was arrested in Nevada and returned to Washington. But with his past unknown to the court, he pleaded guilty in 1989 to one count of indecent liberties and was given a suspended sentence of 24 months and ordered to register as a sex offender — for one year.
The extent of his serial attacks began to come to light about four years ago following a $16.5-million agreement with the bankrupt Christian Brothers, when 52 of 400 U.S. abuse claimants named Courtney as their attacker, records show.
Courtney, who did not respond to phone messages at his home in Oahu this week, denied in a 2009 court deposition he committed any serious offenses over the years. He “improperly touched” some students, he said, but he was young and “I guess that’s maybe why I didn’t realize that these things bothered others as much. I don’t know.”
The DOJ Has Nearly Doubled Its Prosecutions
For Child Sex Crimes
Anders Hagstrom
Justice Reporter
Federal investigators nearly doubled the number of investigated sex crimes involving children between 2004 and 2013, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced Thursday.
Child sex crime cases include possession or production of child pornography and child sex trafficking, the BJS reported. Federal investigators took up 1,405 of these cases in 2004, compared to 2,776 cases in 2013. More than 70 percent of the prosecutions each year were for possessing child pornography, followed by those suspected of sex trafficking at 18 percent and those who produced child pornography at 10 percent.
The Department of Justice prosecuted a total of 36,080 child sexual exploitation cases between 2004 and 2013. Nearly 100 percent of the offenders were male; 97 percent were U.S. citizens; 82 percent were white; 79 percent had no prior felony convictions; and 70 percent were unmarried.
Those convicted of child sex crimes received prison sentences more reliably than any other major federal crime, with 98 percent of convicts going to prison. Prison sentences for these convicts also got more severe over the years, with the average prison sentence nearly doubling from 70 months to 139 months.
Of the 36,080 suspects, 60 percent faced prosecutors in trial, and 36 percent were never prosecuted. Of those who went to trial, 90 percent submitted a guilty plea.
Only four percent of those who didn’t plead guilty were convicted in trial.
What!!!??? 4%? That is abysmal!
Rose McGowan implores Jeff Bezos to
'stop funding rapists.'
Meanwhile, Amazon suspends studio head amid harassment claim
Meg James and Gus Garcia-Roberts Contact Reporters
The scandal enveloping Hollywood grew wider Thursday when actress Rose McGowan accused movie producer Harvey Weinstein of raping her, and then pleaded with one of America’s most powerful business titans — Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos — to end his company’s alleged involvement in a culture of exploitation and abuse.
“@jeffbezos I am calling on you to stop funding rapists, alleged pedo[philes] and sexual harassers,” McGowan said in a Twitter message directed to the Amazon billionaire.
“I love @amazon but there is rot in Hollywood,” McGowan wrote, just hours after Twitter lifted a 12-hour suspension that temporarily blocked the actress from posting.
In a separate development on Thursday, Amazon suspended Roy Price, the head of its studios, after “The Man in the High Castle” producer Isa Hackett told the Hollywood Reporter that he had repeatedly propositioned her and made lewd comments.
From fledgling actresses to Hollywood royalty, here's a full list of Harvey Weinstein's accusers and their allegations
“Roy Price is on leave of absence effective immediately,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “We are reviewing our options for the projects we have with The Weinstein Co.”
McGowan is one of a number of Hollywood stars, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Ashley Judd, who have said they were victimized by Weinstein. Last week, the New York Times reported that McGowan reached a $100,000 settlement with Weinstein in 1997 after an incident at the Sundance Film Festival. As part of the settlement, McGowan was not supposed to discuss the incident but she has become increasingly vocal as more women have announced that they also were victims of the co-founder of Miramax and Weinstein Co.
“We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg,” said Caroline Heldman, a college professor who has worked with sexual assault victims. “This is going to touch every major studio in Hollywood.”
McGowan, 44, previously has suggested on Twitter that she had been victimized and has used the social media platform to call out men, including Weinstein’s brother, Bob Weinstein, and actors Ben Affleck, his brother Casey Affleck, and Matt Damon for enabling the misconduct.
Harvey Weinstein gave Ben Affleck and Damon their big break, acquiring their breakout movie “Good Will Hunting,” which won the Oscar in 1998 for best original screenplay.
Best original screenplay... he just had to write the f... word 5000 times and fill in a few more. It's a pity the Academy supports such disgusting productions.
McGowan is best known for starring in the now-defunct WB network hit “Charmed,” but also appeared in Wes Craven’s 1996 slasher “Scream” — distributed by Dimension Films, the film label owned by the Weinstein Co.
In 1998 she starred opposite Ben Affleck in the horror film “Phantoms,” produced by Dimension and distributed by Miramax. She played dual roles in 2007’s “Grindhouse,” starring in both of the film’s two segments for Quentin Tarantino (“Death Proof”) and Robert Rodriguez (“Planet Terror”). The film was also distributed by Dimension.
Last year, using the hashtag #WhyWomenDontReport, she vented on Twitter, saying: “My ex sold our movie to my rapist for distribution.” She did not spell out who she meant as her “rapist,” but some Hollywood insiders speculated that it was Weinstein.
Weinstein’s spokesperson, Sallie Hofmeister, said in a statement: “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein.”
Then, last September at an IFP Film Week event in New York, McGowan announced that she had sold a show she had written to Amazon Studios. Some speculated that the project may have been inspired by McGowan's own childhood spent in the Children of God cult, which she fled with her family at the age of 9 after her father feared she might be subjected to child sexual abuse by cult members.
But a formal announcement from Amazon never materialized. On Thursday, McGowan shed more light on the project, tweeting: “I called my attorney & said I want to get my script back, but before I could #2 @amazonstudios called to say my show was dead.”
Her Twitter barrage included her — now very public claim — that Weinstein had raped her.
“@jeffbezos I told the head of your studio that HW raped me. Over & Over I said it. He said it hadn’t been proven. I said I was the proof,” she wrote.
“@jeffbezos I forcefully begged studio head to do the right thing. I was ignored. Deal was done. Amazon won a dirty Oscar,” she wrote, an apparent reference to Amazon’s movie, “Manchester by the Sea,” and its star Casey Affleck, who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman. Casey Affleck has denied the allegation.
Heldman, the women’s advocate, praised McGowan’s courage.
“Once again, Rose has been taking a lead in taking this to the next level — and holding to account other powerful men who have been complicit in covering up sexual violence,” Heldman said.
McGowan’s new accusations add another dimension to the controversy because it suggests that she took her allegations to other powerful players in Hollywood.
Ann Fromholz, a Pasadena attorney who has handled sexual harassment cases, said she believes McGowan’s latest salvo is part of a growing storm that will make it easier for sexual harassment victims in Hollywood and other industries to speak out.
“I expect that because of the publicity this is getting, because of the support the victims are getting, people likely will be more willing to complain when something like this happens in the future, with Weinstein or anybody else,” Fromholz said.
In addition to McGowan’s challenge to Bezos, Amazon is also facing other allegations.
Hackett, a producer for “The Man in the High Castle,” told the Hollywood Reporter that Price repeatedly propositioned her. She reported the incident to Amazon executives, who hired an outside investigator to look into her allegations.
Hackett’s legal representative, Christopher Tricarico, on Thursday confirmed that the statements attributed to Hackett in the Hollywood Reporter were accurate.
However, Hackett, he said, did not wish to comment further.
Tricarico said Hackett participated in the internal investigation at Amazon Studios but was never told if it was concluded or how it was resolved. She followed up with Amazon’s Human Resources department, but was told the findings were confidential, the attorney said.
“It was basically the company line, that they were doing what they needed to do internally but were not at liberty to give any details,” Tricarico said.
Amazon said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter that they “looked closely at this specific concern and addressed it directly with those involved.”
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