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Former Texas megachurch pastor and Trump adviser indicted for child sex crimes

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Republican accuses Texas GOP chair of ethics violation over threats

A Republican Texas House member is calling for the state party chair to be investigated, alleging that he illegally threatened and

intimidated lawmakers who are not supporting the party’s preferred candidate for House speaker.

In a complaint filed to the Texas Ethics Commission on Wednesday, Rep. Cody Harris, R-Palestine, alleges that Republican Party of Texas Chair Abraham George violated numerous ethics rules — including those related to bribery — by threatening to send mailers or censure lawmakers who support Rep. Dustin Burrows for House speaker.

Burrows, of Lubbock, and his main opponent in the race, fellow Republican Rep. David Cook of Mansfield, have been in an increasingly acrimonious political standoff since late last year, when a majority of House Republicans voted to support Cook’s speaker bid. The same day, Burrows announced that he had enough bipartisan support in the 150-member chamber to win a majority and become speaker.

Burrows’ defiance of the House caucus, by continuing his campaign for speaker relying on Democratic support, soon prompted a pressure campaign from the Texas GOP. The party and George have since vowed to send negative mailers about Burrows supporters into their districts, and to censure any Republican who does not vote for Cook — a move that, under recently adopted party rules, would bar those lawmakers from appearing on a primary ballot for two years.

Harris cited those two moves in his complaint. He alleged that George’s threats to “expend funds on mail pieces” amount to an “economic benefit” for a primary candidate who might run against Harris, and thus constitute a bribe. Harris also took issue with the party’s new Rule 44, which was passed last year and prohibits censored Republicans from appearing on primary ballots for two years.

“While the constitutionality of amended Rule 44 is doubtful,” Harris wrote, “the rule in conjunction with the respondent’s threatening rhetoric amount to a violation” of the Texas government code’s section on legislative bribery.

George blasted the complaint in a statement posted by the party on Wednesday, accusing Harris of seeking to imprison George and calling it a “baseless complaint.”

“The delegates of the 2024 Texas Republican Convention adopted our rules and legislative priorities and I will continue to serve as a strong advocate of our party and our rule of law,” George said.

Harris’ complaint is the latest sign of intense and ongoing Republican infighting. For years, tensions had simmered between the party’s farthest right wing and its more moderate, but still deeply conservative, faction. The acrimony exploded into all-out war in the wake of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s 2023 impeachment and acquittal by the Texas Senate, and led to the ouster of dozens of incumbent House Republicans by far-right challengers during the 2024 midterms.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/09/texas-house-speaker-abraham-george-republican-party-ethics-complaint/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

TX's biggest purple county offers glimpse inside the far right’s plan for local governing

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Reporting Highlights

No Compromise: Tim O’Hare’s leadership in Tarrant County, Texas, gives a glimpse of far-right priorities: cutting programs for at-risk youth, targeting elections and stifling dissent.
The Last Battleground: Tarrant County, home to 2.2 million people and the city of Fort Worth, is the most significant political battleground between Republicans and Democrats in Texas.
Winning Elections: O’Hare has pushed to end free bus rides to the polls for poor residents and close polling locations on college campuses, which GOP leaders said would help the party.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

Over the past two decades, Tim O’Hare methodically amassed power in North Texas as he pushed incendiary policies such as banning undocumented immigrants from renting homes and vilifying school curriculum that encouraged students to embrace diversity.

He rode a wave of conservative resentment, leaping from City Council member of Farmers Branch, a suburb north of Dallas, in 2005 to its mayor to the leader of the Tarrant County Republican Party.

Three years ago, O’Hare sought his highest political office yet, running for the top elected position in the nation’s 15th-largest county, which is home to Fort Worth. Backed by influential evangelical churches and money from powerful oil industry billionaires, O’Hare promised voters he would weed out “diversity inclusion nonsense” and accused some Democrats of hating America. His win in November 2022 gave the GOP’s far right new sway over the Tarrant County Commissioners Court, turning a government that once prided itself on bipartisanship into a new front of the culture war.

“I was not looking to do this at all, but they came after our police,” he said in his victory speech on election night. “They came after our schools. They came after our country. They came after our churches.”

In Texas and across the country, far-right candidates have won control of school boards, swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs. O’Hare’s election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the schoolhouse to county government, offering a rare look at what happens when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over municipal affairs in a closely divided county.

Since he was elected county judge — a position similar to that of mayor in a city — O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an uncompromising approach. He has led efforts to cut funding to nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights. And he has pushed election law changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.

O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies continue to align with once-fringe figures while targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically. In July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for speaking eight seconds over his allotted time. Days later, O’Hare appeared onstage at a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace Christian nationalism. The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull out of the event.

“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like, and at the lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,” said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies political extremism. “The goal is to capture local Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party, turning it to more extremist goals.”

Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative evangelical beliefs.

O’Hare declined multiple interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions emailed to him. His spokesperson instead touted a list of eight accomplishments, including cutting county spending and lowering local property tax rates.

With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans. When the county voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020, many political observers suspected the end was nigh for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.

Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County leader in decades. After two years under O’Hare’s leadership, voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of O’Hare and their Democratic opponents. The election of both Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.

The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s Republican predecessor, Glen Whitley, who served as Tarrant County judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022. Whitley said O’Hare has implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been mainstreamed on the right.

“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley, who recently endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Texas in the U.S. Senate race. “You either vote with these people 100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”

Political Rise

In 2005, when O’Hare initially ran unopposed for a seat on the City Council in Farmers Branch, a small town just outside of Tarrant County, his platform included plans to revitalize the public library and bring in new restaurants. In 2006, however, O’Hare began taking positions that were outside of the Republican mainstream at the time. He pushed for the diversifying town to declare English its official language, ban landlords from renting to residents without proof of citizenship, and stop publishing public materials in Spanish.

“The reason I got on the City Council was because I saw our property values declining or increasing at a level that was below the rate of inflation,” O’Hare said at the time. “When that happens, people move out of our neighborhoods, and what I would call less desirable people move into the neighborhoods, people who don’t value education, people who don’t value taking care of their properties.”

Hispanic residents mobilized and sued to block the rental ban’s implementation. O’Hare doubled down: He pushed for Farmers Branch police to partner with immigration enforcement authorities to detain and deport people in the country illegally, and urged residents to oppose a grocer’s plan to open a store that catered to Hispanics, arguing it was “reasonable” to prefer “a grocery store that appeals to higher-end consumers.”

O’Hare was elected as mayor in 2008. Foreshadowing moves he’d make as Tarrant County judge, he abruptly ended a public meeting after cutting off and removing one resident who criticized him. He led opposition to the local high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and fought against a mentorship program for at-risk high school students that included volunteers from a Hispanic group that opposed his immigration resolution.

Meanwhile, the city continued to defend the immigration ordinance after it was repeatedly struck down by federal judges. As costs for the seven-year legal battle ballooned, Farmers Branch dipped into its reserves, cut nearly two dozen city employees and outsourced services at the library that O’Hare had campaigned on improving during his City Council run. “At the end of the day, this will be money well spent, and it will be a good investment in our community’s future,” O’Hare said after the town laid off staff in 2008.

O’Hare stepped down as mayor in 2011. Three years later, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the city’s appeal, Farmers Branch stopped defending the ordinance. It was never enforced, but the related lawsuits cost the town $6.6 million, city officials said in 2016.

After leaving office, O’Hare moved his family a few miles away to Tarrant County, where demographic changes have dropped the share of white residents from 62% of the county’s population in 2000 to 43% in 2020.

Home to some of the nation’s most influential evangelical churches and four of former President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisers, the county is an epicenter for ultraconservative movements in Texas, including those that call for Christians to exert dominance over all aspects of society. In 2016, O’Hare was elected chair of the Tarrant County GOP. Under him, the party distributed mailers that listed the primary voting records for local candidates — breaking with the longstanding nonpartisan tradition of county elections.

In 2020, following a series of racist incidents at the mostly white Carroll High School in Southlake — including one viral clip in which white students chanted the N-word — O’Hare co-founded a political action committee that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to oust school board members who supported the Carroll Independent School District’s plans for diversity and inclusion programming. The dispute helped catapult the small Tarrant County suburb into the national spotlight amid Republican panic over critical race theory and “gender ideology,” and created a blueprint for right-wing organizing that was copied in suburbs across America.

In 2021, O’Hare launched his campaign for Tarrant County judge, squaring off in the GOP primary against the more moderate five-term mayor of Fort Worth, whom he painted as a RINO, or “Republican in name only.” O’Hare rode a wave fueled by backlash to COVID-19 mandates, baseless election fraud conspiracy theories and opposition to what he called “diversity inclusion nonsense,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. O’Hare’s campaign was condemned by moderate Republicans, including Whitley, the outgoing judge, who accused him of trying to “divide and pit one group against another.” O’Hare won the primary by 23 percentage points.

Whitley and other longtime Republican leaders declined to endorse O’Hare in the 2022 general election. It didn’t matter; by then, he was backed by a coalition of far-right megadonors, pastors and churches. His top campaign donors included a PAC funded by Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. The two west Texas oil billionaires have given tens of millions of dollars to candidates and groups that oppose LGBTQ+ rights, support programs that would use public dollars to pay for private schools, and have led efforts to push moderates out of the Texas GOP.

O’Hare received another $203,000 from the We Can Keep It PAC. The PAC’s treasurer is an elder at Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth, whose leaders have endorsed multiple GOP candidates, including O’Hare. The church’s pastor has claimed Democrats can’t be Christian and dared critics to complain to the IRS that the church was flouting federal prohibitions on political activity by nonprofits.

Transforming Elections

O’Hare took office in early 2023, as Republicans continued to question President Joe Biden’s razor-thin win in Tarrant County two years earlier. A 2022 audit by Texas’ Republican secretary of state found no evidence of widespread fraud and that Tarrant County held “a quality, transparent election.”

Despite that — and while saying he had no proof of malfeasance — O’Hare immediately set out to prevent cheating he claimed was responsible for Democrats’ steady rise in the long-purpling county. Soon after taking office, he helped launch an “election integrity unit” that he’d lead with the county sheriff who had spoken at a “Stop the Steal” rally in the days after the 2020 presidential election.

No Democrats were initially on the unit. Nor was the county’s elections administrator, Heider Garcia, who by then had faced three years of harassment, death threats and accusations of being a secret agent for Venezuela’s socialist government by election fraud conspiracy theorists. Garcia opted for radical transparency — making himself accessible to answer questions about the election process and earning praise from across the political aisle for his patient public service.

But Garcia lasted only a few months under O’Hare: In April 2023, he resigned his position, citing his relationship with O’Hare in his resignation letter. “Judge O’Hare, my formula to ‘administer a quality transparent election’ stands on respect and zero politics; compromising on these values is not an option for me,” Garcia wrote. “You made it clear in our last meeting that your formula is different, thus, my decision is to leave.”

Garcia, now the Dallas County elections administrator, did not respond to an interview request.

One day after Garcia resigned, O’Hare told members of True Texas Project — a group whose leaders have sympathized with a white nationalist mass shooter and endorsed Christian nationalism — that he was encouraged by the potential for low turnout in that year’s upcoming elections, which he said would help Republicans win more local seats. (O’Hare previously served on True Texas Project’s advisory team, according to a 2021 social media post by the group’s CEO, Julie McCarty).

In June 2024, the election integrity unit reported that, over the previous 15 months, it received 82 complaints of voter fraud — or about 0.009% of all votes cast in the 2020 presidential election in Tarrant County — and that none had resulted in criminal charges. Meanwhile, O’Hare has proposed a number of changes to the election system that Tarrant County GOP leaders have said were intended to help Republicans or hurt Democrats.

In February, O’Hare and fellow Republicans cut $10,000 in county funding to provide free bus rides to low-income residents, a program that Tarrant GOP leaders decried as a scheme to “bus Democrats to the polls.”

O'Hare said he opposed the funding on fiscal grounds. “I don’t believe it’s the county government’s responsibility to try to get more people out to the polls,” he said before the vote.

A few months later, commissioners prohibited outside organizations from registering voters inside county buildings after Tarrant County GOP leaders raised concerns about left-leaning organizations holding registration drives. Democrats and voting rights groups assailed the moves as attempts to lower voter turnout.

In September, O’Hare proposed eliminating voting locations on some college campuses that he called a “waste of money and manpower.” But this time, his Republican allies on the Commissioners Court said they could not go along with the vote and joined Democrats to defeat the measure. Tarrant County Republican leaders condemned the recalcitrant commissioners in a public resolution that made it clear they saw the effort to close polls on college campuses as a move that would help them in November. The GOP commissioners, the resolution claimed, “voted with Democrats on a key election vote that undermines the ability of Republicans to win the general election in Tarrant County.”

Manny Ramirez, one of those Republican commissioners, said in an interview he thinks the GOP should try to win college students with their conservative ideas rather than limit on-campus voting.

“We’ve been providing those same exact sites for nearly two decades,” Ramirez said. His role as commissioner, he added, is to provide “equal access to all of our citizens.”

Targeting Youth Programs

Less than a year into his term, O’Hare began targeting long-established nonprofits whose websites and social media accounts contained language the county judge considered politically objectionable on issues of gender and race.

In October 2023, he moved to block a $115,000 state grant to Girls Inc. of Tarrant County, for its Girl Power program offering summer camps and mentoring to help participants focus on stress management, hygiene and self-esteem.

About 90% of the youth served by Girls Inc. of Tarrant County are people of color and come from families making less than $30,000 a year, according to the organization’s website.

Four months earlier, the national Girls Inc. group, which has chapters across the country, had tweeted out its support for abortion rights and LGBTQ+ pride, which conservative media and activists seized upon.

“Girls Inc. is an extremist political indoctrination machine advocating for divisive liberal politics,” Leigh Wambsganss, the chief communications officer of Patriot Mobile, told commissioners. Patriot Mobile is a Christian nationalist cellphone company whose PAC has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of far-right candidates across Tarrant County, including O’Hare.

Local leaders of Girls Inc., who did not respond to requests for comment, said at the time their chapter is independent of the national organization. They told commissioners they were reviewing their affiliation with the parent organization.

In denying the funds, O’Hare told the Commissioners Court the government shouldn’t support “an organization that is so deeply ideological and encourages the children that they are teaching to go advocate for social change.”

Commissioners killed the contract on a 3-2 party-line vote.

Six months later, O’Hare raised questions about another local nonprofit, Big Thought. It provides youth in the Tarrant County juvenile detention system with summer and after-school programs aimed at helping them get their lives back on track through music, acting and performance arts. Big Thought has had a contract with the county for the past three years and says on its website that youth who go through its programs reoffend at a lower rate than those who don’t, potentially saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in juvenile detention costs.

At an April meeting of the Tarrant County Juvenile Board, O’Hare raised questions about the program’s advocacy for “racial equity” after reading the organization’s website, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. (The board’s meetings are not streamed or recorded).

Asked about O’Hare’s concerns, a Big Thought spokesperson said in an email that the organization focuses on the realities facing at-risk youth in Tarrant County. “Young people in our communities experience challenges like economic inequality, racism, and more, and it is our responsibility to provide a safe place to build the skills they need so they can thrive,” said Evan Cleveland, Big Thought’s senior director of programs.

The county’s juvenile probation director, Bennie Medlin, who has not responded to requests for comment, told board members the program had not had any “negative results” during the partnership, according to minutes of the meeting. Members of the board were not swayed and voted not to renew the program.

Three months later, at the juvenile board’s July meeting, O’Hare and a district judge proposed ending a contract with the Pennsylvania nonprofit Youth Advocate Programs after probing the nonprofit about the position it had taken in briefs to the Supreme Court, its opinion on school choice and police in schools, and whether “they work to eliminate systemic racism,” according to minutes of the meeting.

Board members voted to cut ties with the nonprofit, which had worked with the county for over three decades to provide mentoring, job training and substance abuse counseling as alternatives to detention.

Gary Ivory, the organization’s president, said that a week after the July vote, he met with O’Hare for about a half-hour in O’Hare’s office. He said O’Hare questioned him about his personal views on the LGBTQ+ community and “hot-button cultural war issues." Also during that meeting, O’Hare pulled up Youth Advocate Programs’ website, Ivory said, and asked him why the group takes funding from Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control.

“They are saying if anybody is too woke in Tarrant County, we are going to put them in the dustbin of history and they won’t exist anymore,” Ivory said.

On Oct. 1, Tarrant County commissioners voted to sign a similar contract with another nonprofit. At the meeting, O’Hare denied pushing to kill Youth Advocate Programs’ contract “because of a phrase on a website.” Instead, he claimed Ivory told the juvenile board that 15% of the money Tarrant County gives the program goes to lobbyists and to “law firms to file amicus briefs against many of the things the people in that room that voted disagree with.”

Ivory said that is incorrect. “I said generally 85 cents on a dollar stays in Tarrant County and 15 cents goes to overhead,” he said. “And I made it clear that YAP doesn’t spend any of that 15 cents on the dollar for lobbying.”

Phil Sawyer, a longtime juvenile probation officer in Tarrant County who retired two years ago, said the program was well respected within the department and helped give badly needed services that the department could not provide. “It’s a shocker,” he said of the county’s decision to cut ties with the group. “Without them, it would just be insanity. There are things we can do as probation officers, but it’s not the same.”

Stifling Dissent

In recent months, O’Hare has taken aim at private citizens who disagree with him, ordering several political opponents removed from Commissioners Court meetings and calling for the firing of a local college professor.

As Ryon Price’s allotted three minutes of public comment during the July 2 Commissioners Court meeting expired, O’Hare issued a sharp warning to the man, a local Baptist minister who was a frequent antagonist of O’Hare’s at such meetings: “Your time is up.”

It’s not uncommon for residents to go over their allotted time during public comment sessions. But after Price continued criticizing conditions in the Tarrant County Jail for an extra eight seconds, O’Hare ordered sheriff’s deputies to step in: “He’s now held in contempt. Remove him.”

As Price was escorted out of the meeting, someone in the audience booed. “Was that you?” O’Hare snapped. “Well, try me.”

Price said that in the lobby, sheriff’s deputies handed him a trespassing warning that banned him from the premises. “I think it’s symbolic of a broader, more authoritarian shift” in Tarrant County government, Price said of his removal. “And I have to wonder if he really wants to govern this place, a place that splits red and blue evenly, or just please some higher-ups in his own party.”

Price appealed his ban to the Tarrant County sheriff’s department and said the appeal was granted in August, allowing him to resume addressing the court during public comment sessions.

Minutes after Price was escorted from that July meeting, Lon Burnam, a Democrat who served nine terms in the Texas House, approached O’Hare to confront him about his decision to cut off another commissioner who was requesting information about sheriff department policies. Burnam later received a trespass warning from sheriff’s deputies and said he is banned from public meetings until Jan. 1.

At their meeting two weeks later, commissioners amended public speaking rules as O’Hare warned residents that “refusal to abide by the Commissioners Court’s order or my order as the presiding judge or continued disruption of the meeting may result in arrest and prosecution under the laws of the state of Texas.”

O’Hare said the changes were needed to ensure civility in the meeting room. “This is not in any way shape or form attempting to stifle free speech,” he said during the meeting.

Also in August, O’Hare called for the firing of a Texas Christian University professor over social media posts from 2021 that called for police to be abolished. The professor, Alexandra Edwards, drew the ire of local right-wing activists after writing about them and the pro-Christian nationalism conference that O’Hare attended in July. Not long after, a local right-wing website published an article about her “antifa” views in which O’Hare called her a “radical” and said Edwards should be fired.

“The full force of the repression of the Tarrant County GOP and the various right-wing extremists kind of came down upon me,” Edwards said in an interview, adding that she was inundated with threats and harassment.

Such crackdowns are a sign that the local GOP has been taken over by extremists, said Whitley, the county’s Republican former judge.

“They’ve gone so far to the right that most folks who used to be adamant Republicans are not so much anymore,” he said, adding that some in the GOP are too afraid of retaliation by O’Hare to speak out publicly.

O’Hare’s term doesn’t end until 2027. But this year’s elections will decide which party controls the powerful commissioners court and, in some ways, will be a referendum on the first two years of his tenure in county government.

Whitley said he hopes it will be a unifying moment for voters from across the political spectrum. “I want us to be Americans, to be Texans and to not just care about parties,” he said. “I hope people will vote for the best person and not just vote for the party.”

Jodi S. Cohen of ProPublica and Juan Salinas II of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting. Dan Keemahill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune contributed research.

Former Southern Baptist leader accused of sexual abuse dead at 94

Paul Pressler, the monumental Southern Baptist leader and Republican activist at the center of a massive sex abuse scandal, died on June 7. He was 94.

It’s unclear what Pressler’s cause of death was, but a funeral service was held for him Saturday in Houston. Pressler was one of the most influential, if lesser-known, evangelical figures of the last half-century, having co-led a movement in the Southern Baptist Convention that pushed the nation’s second-largest faith group to adopt literal interpretations of the Bible, strongly condemn homosexuality and more closely align with the Republican Party.

His death came barely six months after he confidentially settled a high-profile lawsuit with a former member of his youth group who accused him of decades of rape. As part of the suit, at least six other men came forward alleging that they were abused or solicited for sex by Pressler in a string of incidents dating from 1978 to 2016. Pressler denied the allegations and was never criminally charged.

Monumental as Pressler’s legacy was, his death was largely kept quiet until Saturday, when a Baptist outlet first reported on the memorial service. Last week, the Southern Baptist Convention held its annual meeting, and it does not appear that any leaders made any remarks about his passing.

Herman Paul Pressler III was born in Houston in 1930 and attended New Hampshire’s exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy before attending Princeton University. After graduating from Princeton in 1952, he attended the University of Texas at Austin’s law school and, as a 27-year-old student, was elected to represent a Houston-based district in the Texas House. He was later appointed by Texas Gov. Dolph Briscoe to a powerful seat on Texas’ 14th Court of Appeals, where he served for 14 years.

While on the bench, Pressler helped plot and lead the SBC’s “conservative resurgence,” a 20-year power struggle in which Pressler and his allies drove more moderate Baptists from the denomination, successfully pushed for bans on female pastors and solidified white evangelical support for the Republican Party.

Pressler was also an early member of the Council For National Policy, a secretive network of powerful business, religious and media elites that has pushed the GOP toward deregulation and to further infuse their conservative Christian views into public life. In 1989, Pressler was nominated to lead the Office of Government Ethics under President George H.W. Bush, though his nomination was later withdrawn.

From 2000 and onward — and with the battle for the SBC won — Pressler increasingly focused on Republican Party politics. In 2007, Louisiana College announced its plans for the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law, though the school never opened due to funding and accreditation issues. The school’s trustee board included Family Research Council leader Tony Perkins and David Barton, the Texas activist who has for years claimed that church-state separation is a “myth.” The school’s dean was Mike Johnson, who was later elected speaker of the U.S. House.

In 2012, as U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, a Mormon, led in the GOP presidential primary, Pressler gathered some of the nation’s most powerful Christians at his West Texas ranch, rallying them over two days to back fellow evangelical Rick Santorum. In 2013, the Texas House honored his service to the conservative, Christian cause in a resolution that was presented on the chamber’s floor. A year later, Pressler served on the advisory team for incoming Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. And Pressler was an early and key endorser of Ted Cruz in his Senate campaign and as he ran for president in 2015.

As Pressler continued to wield political influence, he also allegedly raped, groped or solicited at least six men, including one who says he was 14 when he was first sexually abused while a member of Pressler’s youth group. Those allegations were outlined in a 2017 lawsuit that also accused prominent Southern Baptist leaders and churches of concealing or enabling Pressler’s behavior, which they deny.

The lawsuit was the impetus for a major 2019 investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News that found more than 400 Southern Baptist church leaders or volunteers had been charged with sex crimes since 2000. The series prompted reforms in the SBC, as well as an ongoing Department of Justice investigation into the denomination’s handling of sex abuse complaints.

Pressler was a member of Houston’s First or Second Baptist churches for nearly all of his adult life.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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'War on white America': Texas GOP group hosting pro-Christian nationalism conference

An influential grassroots group with close ties to Texas Republican lawmakers is hosting a conference next month that encourages its attendees to embrace Christian nationalism and resist a Democratic campaign “to rid the earth of the white race.”

Billed as the 15th anniversary celebration for True Texas Project, a far-right activist group that got its start as a North Texas tea party organization, the agenda claims there is a “war on white America,” or elevate theories that white Americans are being intentionally replaced through immigration — a common belief among far-right extremists, including many mass shooters.

“It’s absolutely vital we remember that when they say ‘white supremacy’ or ‘white nationalism’ or whatever the most recent scare phrase is, they literally just mean your heritage and historical way of life,” reads the description for a session on “Multiculturalism & The War on White America.” “It’s a culture war, simple as that. Stop apologizing. Stop backing down. Start fighting back.”

The agenda for the event claims that “forced multiculturalism” and immigration are part of a global plot that has undermined American Christianity, and that xenophobia is “an imaginary social pathology” and term that has been used to discourage “love of one’s own people.” It also features a session that seeks to downplay the antisemitism and racism at the core of Great Replacement Theory, a once-fringe claim that there is an intentional, often Jewish-driven, effort to destroy white people through immigration, interracial marriage or the LGBTQ+ community.

The two-day event at the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens includes a birthday party for the organization complete with cake, a toast, music and a “meet-n-greet with some of our new, allied State Reps and elected officials.” It does not list which officials are scheduled to attend.

Speakers include prominent GOP donor and former state Sen. Don Huffines, retired U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, two prominent Christian nationalist authors, and Paul Gottfried, a far-right writer who has for years collaborated with white supremacists and mentored neo-Nazis such as Richard Spencer.

Experts on terrorism and extremism said the lineup is particularly concerning because it brings together mainstream conservative speakers with fringe figures who have close links to neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists.

“These are the type of people that I’m most concerned about from an extremism standpoint,” said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as a senior Department of Homeland Security official for three years under former President Donald Trump. “A number of them have been making arguments — some of them supposedly Biblical — that violence is okay, and that violence is justified by Scripture for the purposes of establishing a Christian nation.”

True Texas Project has for years been a key part of a powerful political network that two West Texas oil tycoons, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, have used to push the state GOP and Legislature to adopt their hardline opposition to immigration, LGBTQ+ rights and public education. Dunn and Wilks are by far the biggest donors to the Republican Party of Texas, and have used their influence to purge the party of more moderate lawmakers and survive a high-profile scandal last year over racists and antisemites employed by groups they fund.

Formerly known as the NE Tarrant Tea Party, True Texas Project was integral to the rise of the state’s ultraconservative movement throughout the 2010s, but rebranded after its founder, Julie McCarty, wrote on social media that they sympathized with the gunman who murdered 23 Hispanic people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 — one of many mass shooters who have been motivated by a belief in Great Replacement Theory.

“I don’t condone the actions, but I certainly understand where they came from,” she wrote.

“You’re not going to demographically replace a once proud, strong people without getting blow-back," responded her husband, Fred McCarty, who is also a True Texas Project leader.

Despite the McCartys’ well-publicized comments, True Texas Project continues to work with prominent elected officials, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Attorney General Ken Paxton, now-former Texas GOP chair Matt Rinaldi and U.S. Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Irving. Last week, the group also released a 90-minute podcast with a group of current and presumptive state lawmakers who are primarily funded by Dunn and Wilks, including Rep. Nate Schatzline, R-Fort Worth, and Mitch Little and Shelley Luther.

True Texas Project did not respond to a request for comment about the conference or some of the speakers' collaboration with far-right extremists. But in an email sent to supporters last week, Julie McCarty wrote that she was excited to talk about “edgy, controversial” subjects such as “white America and the Great Replacement Theory.”

“If you grew up in that wonderful America that you are now lamenting losing, what are YOU doing to curb the tide and bestow that blessing on others?” she wrote. “Much IS expected. Rise up.”

The conference was announced as Republicans continue to embrace once-fringe ideologies such as Great Replacement Theory and Christian nationalism, which claims that America’s founding was God ordained and that its laws and institutions should therefore be dictated by their fundamentalist religious views.

Recent polling from the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than half of Republicans adhere to or sympathize with pillars of Christian nationalism, including beliefs that the U.S. should be a strictly Christian nation. Of those respondents, PRRI found, roughly half supported having an authoritarian leader who maintains Christian dominance in society.

Neumann, the former DHS official and terrorism expert, said she was disturbed by the stated goals of some of the speakers listed for next month’s conference.

“This is not the version of Christian nationalism that wants to make change through votes and prayer,” she said of the conference lineup. “This is the version of Christian nationalism that wants to do it by force. … I don't see anything on [the schedule] about a legislative solution or a political solution. Everything is, ‘America is being invaded, and now what?”

She and other extremism experts noted that the conference schedule incorporates a variety of separate but overlapping ideologies that have been pushed by the far right, but rarely packaged together in one conference — let alone one that includes more establishment figures, and is being held by a group with direct ties to elected officials and influential donors. (True Texas Project is billing the event as “the first conference of this kind in America.”)

One of the sessions claims that there is a “war on white America” and that Democrats are trying to “rid the earth of the white race,” mirroring claims of a “white genocide” that have been cited for decades by overt neo-Nazis.

That session is followed by a discussion on immigration and questions such as: “Is the immigrant of today still arriving to tame the land and create something better, or are they just sucking off America’s teat?” The immigration session will be led by Todd Bensman, a Center for Immigration Studies fellow who was crucial to amplifying attention around Colony Ridge, the neighborhood outside of Houston that Texas lawmakers have argued is a hotbed for cartel and immigrant violence, despite pushback from local law enforcement. (The Center for Immigration Studies is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of its amplification of white nationalists, though the group disputes that label).

Another session will focus entirely on Great Replacement Theory, and claim that critiques of it as racist are part of an effort by “the progressive Left” to deny that American birth rates are declining at the same time that the foreign-born population increases.

“By tying the Great Replacement Theory to white-nationalist and anti-Semetic violence, the establishment condemns any recognition of ongoing demographic transformation as racist,” the session's description reads. The theory has been cited by a litany of far-right terrorists, including the El Paso WalMart shooter; the gunman who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York grocery store in 2022; the Australian man who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in 2019; the man who killed 11 Jews at a Pennsylvania synagogue in 2018; and Anders Brevik, a Norwegian man who killed eight people with a car bomb in 2011 before fatally shooting 69 people at a youth camp.

In an email exchange this week, the speaker for that session, Wade Miller, pushed back against claims that Great Replacement Theory is inherently antisemitic or racist, and said that he is “pretty vocal” in his “support for Israel and the right of Jews to defend themselves from terrorists and violent hate.”

Miller, a former chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, also provided a link to a paper he recently wrote for the Center For Renewing America, a group with close ties to former President Donald Trump where Miller is vice president. In it, Miller acknowledges and opposes the use of Great Replacement Theory as a tool for far-right extremists, but argues that liberals have linked the term to racism in order to distract from their attempts to “secure millions of new voters without any ties to the American constitutional order.”

Another session features the authors of two recent pro-Christian nationalism books, Stephen Wolfe and Andrew Isker. In Wolfe’s book — which has become a staple in Christian nationalist circles — he calls for America to have a "Christian prince" and laws that punish blasphemy and false religions, and claims that God is punishing the nation because of feminism — a “gynocracy,” as he calls it, that has destroyed traditional family values. He has previously written that Black people "are reliable sources for criminality” who need more "constraint" through policing, and that interracial marriage is sinful because "groups have a collective duty to be separate and marry among themselves.”

Isker, meanwhile, has for years maintained ties to antisemites. He co-authored his book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba, who founded the far-right social media platform Gab and has often collaborated with white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes. (Fuentes, an avowed Adolf Hitler fan who has called for a “holy war” and “total Aryan victory” against Jews, was at the center of a political maelstrom in Texas last year, after The Texas Tribune reported that he was hosted by the then-leader of Dunn and Wilks’ political action committee).

“Something changed after [World War II] where the love of home, hearth, and kin began to be denigrated and replaced with globalism,” reads the description of Isker's session at next month's conference. “This exchange has occurred in the context of mass immigration and forced multiculturalism. Now, love of one’s own people is regarded as xenophobia — an imaginary social pathology.”

In True Texas Project’s upcoming event, extremism experts see the culmination of a decadeslong push by fringe figures to mainstream their views by moving away from the overt racism and extremism that were espoused by their predecessors.

“They play a very long game, and we should not dismiss these groups because they are energetic and they are persistent, and that’s what’s required to move the narrative,” said Wendy Via of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “Some of these guys used to be fringe. But right now, what used to be fringe is about to run the country.”

Few people have been more instrumental in that push than Gottfried, a former humanities professor who has written dozens of books on political history. Gottfried is credited with coining the term “Alt-Right,” which describes a movement of far-right reactionaries, white nationalists and race scientists that sought to intellectualize their fringe views. Led by Spencer, the neo-Nazi who was mentored by Gottfried, the Alt-Right was crucial in mainstreaming extreme views in right-wing circles, but flamed out after its members played key roles in 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where tiki-torch wielding neo-Nazis and fascists marched before killing one counterprotester and maiming countless others.

Gottfried is also the founder of the H.L. Mencken Club, which holds an annual conference that has included some of the world’s most prominent extremists, including Jared Taylor, a eugenicist who claims it is unnatural for white people to live alongside non-whites; and Peter Brimelow, whose group VDARE has been crucial to spreading white nationalist writings and propaganda.

In an email to the Tribune this week, Gottfried downplayed concerns about the conference, its embrace of Great Replacement Theory and the comments by True Texas Project’s leaders in the wake of the El Paso WalMart massacre.

“I am going because I was invited to speak, as an octogenarian scholar who has published multiple books on political movements and European and American intellectual history,” he wrote. “If opposing our wide-open borders and the influx of eleven million illegals, including drug dealers and violent criminals, makes me an advocate of the Great Replacement, then I shall have to plead guilty.”

Disclosure: Southern Poverty Law Center has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Former TX House speaker claims GOP megadonor said only Christians should be in leadership

Former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus said on Thursday that Midland oil magnate Tim Dunn, one of the state’s most powerful and influential GOP megadonors, once told him that only Christians should hold leadership positions in the lower chamber.

Straus, a Republican who is Jewish, relayed the encounter in an interview with former Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. It appeared to be the first time Straus publicly confirmed the anecdote, which was first reported by Texas Monthly in a 2018 story that cited “Straus insiders.”

The alleged remarks came at a November 2010 meeting, shortly after Dunn’s political network had targeted many of the Democrats and moderate Republicans who had helped Straus ascend to the speakership the year before. With Straus poised to seek a second term as speaker the following January, he said he asked Dunn to meet in the hopes of finding common ground on “fiscal tax issues.”

But Dunn reportedly demanded that Straus replace “a significant number” of his committee chairs with tea party-aligned lawmakers backed by Dunn’s political advocacy group, Empower Texans. After Straus rebuffed the demand, the two began to talk about social policy, at which point Dunn allegedly said he believed only Christians should hold leadership posts.

“It was a pretty unsatisfactory meeting,” Straus said Thursday. “We never met again.”

Dunn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Straus’ confirmation of the comments comes as Dunn’s political empire continues to face scrutiny for its ties to avowed white supremacists and antisemites. In October, The Texas Tribune reported that Jonathan Stickland, the then-leader of Dunn’s most powerful political action committee, hosted prominent white supremacist and Adolf Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes at his office for nearly seven hours. The Tribune subsequently uncovered close ties between numerous other Fuentes associates and Defend Texas Liberty, the PAC that Stickland led until he was quietly replaced last year.

The reporting prompted Speaker Dade Phelan and 60 other House Republicans to call for the Texas GOP to cut ties with Defend Texas Liberty and Stickland. Dunn has not publicly commented on the matter, though Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Dunn “told me unequivocally that it was a serious blunder” for Stickland to meet with Fuentes. Patrick added that Dunn had assured him his political action committee and its employees would have no “future contact” with Fuentes.

Late last year, the state party’s executive committee narrowly rejected a ban on associating with Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis and antisemites — which some members said could create a slippery slope and complicate the party’s relationship with donors or candidates. After outcry, the Texas GOP’s executive committee passed a significantly watered-down version of the resolution earlier this year.

At the time of his alleged remarks to Straus, Dunn was a lesser-known political entity, using groups such as Empower Texans to push for libertarian economic policy and help fund the state’s nascent tea party movement. Groups and lawmakers backed by Dunn had been particularly critical of Straus, frequently attacking him as a weak conservative — a claim they’ve made against each of Straus’ successors, including Phelan.

Since then, Dunn’s influence on state politics has steadily grown. He and another West Texas billionaire, Farris Wilks, have poured tens of millions of dollars into far-right candidates and movements who have incrementally pulled the Texas GOP and Legislature toward their hardline, anti-LGBTQ+ and immigration stances. Dunn's allies have meanwhile pushed back against claims that he is antisemitic or adheres to Christian nationalism, which argues that America's founding was God-ordained and that its institutions and laws should thus favor their brand of ultraconservative Christianity.

Even after the Tribune’s reporting sparked a wave of backlash, Dunn emerged from last month’s primary perhaps stronger than ever, after his political network made good on its vows for vengeance against House Republicans who voted to impeach their key state ally, Attorney General Ken Paxton. Nine GOP incumbents were unseated by hardline conservative challengers and eight others, including Phelan, were forced into runoffs — mostly against primary foes backed by Dunn’s network.

The primary also paved the way for the likely passage of legislation that would allow taxpayer money to fund private and religious schools — a key policy goal for a movement that seeks to infuse more Christianity into public life. The push for school vouchers was spearheaded by Gov. Greg Abbott, who spent more than $6 million of his own campaign money to help unseat six anti-voucher Republicans and push four others into runoffs.

Straus, whose decade-long run as speaker overlapped with Abbott’s first term as governor, criticized Abbott’s spending blitz to take out fellow GOP lawmakers. He also accused Abbott of falsely portraying members as weak on border security even after they voted for the GOP’s entire slate of border legislation last year, pointing to Abbott’s ads attacking state Rep. Steve Allison, Straus’ successor in his San Antonio district.

“It’s too bad the governor took on all these members who are 99% with him,” Straus said.

Abbott has called the results “an unmistakable message from voters” in support of school vouchers. He recently said the House was two votes away from a clear pro-voucher majority and urged supporters to “redouble our efforts” during the runoffs.

Straus argued Abbott’s move to unseat anti-voucher incumbents “showed more frustration than political courage,” citing the governor’s failure to pass a voucher measure during the spring regular session and multiple special sessions.

“Persuasion failed, so he took on retribution,” Straus said. “I think it’s really unfortunate, and I think it just further diminishes the work of the Legislature and our state government.”

Abbott's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Straus, who served in the House from 2005 to 2019, announced he would not seek reelection in the fall of 2017, after concluding a months-long feud with Patrick over a bill that would have regulated which bathrooms transgender Texans could use. Straus opposed the measure, which never made it through the House.

Since Straus’ retirement, the Legislature has passed laws barring transgender minors from accessing puberty blockers and hormone therapies and restricting which sports teams transgender student athletes can join.

Straus said the array of recent laws aimed at LGBTQ+ Texans have left the community “borderline persecuted.”

“Where's the humanity in that? And why is it such an obsession?” Straus said. “Time and time again, they try to find some niche thing they think will play well in the primary when, in my view, it's rooted in just plain indecency.”

Straus largely demurred when asked to assess Phelan’s performance as speaker, quipping that he “really didn't appreciate former members pontificating about whether I was good or bad” during his run as speaker. He said Phelan has generally been a good speaker, though when asked if Phelan made the right move to impeach Paxton, Straus said, “history has made that questionable,” citing the primary results.

Still, he argued that it remains to be seen how the House will change next session, even with its apparent shift to the right last month and calls from hardline House members to align more with Patrick and the Senate.

"In my experience, the House has never been easily tamed," Straus said after the LBJ School interview. "And I think that if I were a betting man, I would bet that the House will want to protect its independence, that it'll want to protect its institution."

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Texas GOP leaders reverse course — and ban antisemites from party

The Republican Party of Texas’ executive committee voted Saturday to censure House Speaker Dade Phelan and passed a resolution stating that the party will not associate with antisemites — a reversal from December, when a similar measure was narrowly and controversially defeated following outcry over a major donor group’s ties to white supremacists.

The antisemitism resolution, which passed unanimously with two abstentions, came four months after The Texas Tribune reported that Jonathan Stickland, then the leader of Defend Texas Liberty, had hosted infamous white supremacist and Adolf Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes for nearly seven hours in early October.

Subsequent reporting by the Tribune uncovered other, close ties between avowed antisemites and Defend Texas Liberty, a major political action committee that two West Texas oil tycoons have used to fund far-right groups and lawmakers in the state. Defend Texas Liberty is also one of the Texas GOP’s biggest donors.

In response to the Fuentes meeting, Phelan and 60 other House Republicans called on party members to redirect any funds from Defend Texas Liberty to pro-Israel charities — demands that were initially rebuffed by some Republicans, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who later announced that he was reinvesting the $3 million he received from Defend Texas Liberty into Israeli bonds.

Nearly half of the Texas GOP’s executive committee also demanded that the party cut all ties with Stickland, Defend Texas Liberty and its auxiliary organizations until Stickland was removed and a full explanation for the Fuentes meeting was provided. Stickland was quietly removed as Defend Texas Liberty’s president in October, but is still the leader of an influential consulting firm, Pale Horse Strategies, that works with Defend Texas Liberty clients.

Defend Texas Liberty has yet to provide more details on its links to Fuentes or Fuentes associates — including the leader of Texans For Strong Borders, an anti-immigration group that continues to push lawmakers to adopt hardline border policies.

The tensions came to a head in December, when the Texas GOP’s executive committee narrowly defeated a resolution that would have banned the party from associating with antisemites, Holocaust deniers or neo-Nazis — language that some members of the executive committee argued was too vague, and could complicate the party’s relationship with donors or candidates.

The December measure was also opposed by Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi, a longtime ally of Defend Texas Liberty who was seen outside of the one-story, rural Tarrant County office where Fuentes was being hosted. Rinaldi later denied meeting with Fuentes and condemned him. Last month, the Tribune also reported that, at the same time that he was attacking critics of Defend Texas Liberty over the Fuentes meeting, Rinaldi was working as an attorney for Farris Wilks, one the two West Texas oil billionaires who fund Defend Texas Liberty.

After the measure was defeated in December, Patrick also put out a lengthy statement in which he condemned the vote and said he expected it to be revisited by the Texas GOP’s executive committee at its next meeting.

The executive committee did as much on Saturday, passing a resolution that stated that the party “opposes anti-Semitism and will always oppose and not associate with individuals or groups which espouse anti-Semitism or support for attacks on Israel.”

The resolution’s language is significantly watered down compared to proposals from late last year, which specifically named Stickland and Defend Texas Liberty or sought to ban those who espouse — as well as those who “tolerate” — antisemitism, neo-Nazi beliefs or Holocaust denial. Since then, Defend Texas Liberty’s funders have spun off a new political action committee, Texans United For a Conservative Majority, that has been active in this year’s primaries.

Separately, the executive committee also voted 55-4 to censure Phelan over, among other things, his role in the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton, his appointment of Democrats to chair House committees and for allegedly allowing a bill on border security to die in May. Phelan was not at the committee meeting.

Phelan’s spokesperson, Cait Wittman, slammed the censure on Saturday, as well as the executive committee’s previous failure to ban antisemites from the party and what she said was its delayed response to last year’s scandal involving Bryan Slaton, a Republican state representative who was expelled from the Texas House in May after getting a 19-year-old aide drunk and having sex with her.

“This is the same organization that rolled out the red carpet for a group of Neo-Nazis, refused to disassociate from anti-Semitic groups and balked at formally condemning a known sexual predator before he was ousted from the Texas House,” Wittman wrote on X. “The (executive committee) has lost its moral authority and is no longer representative of the views of the Party as a whole.”

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Email sheds new light on Texas Republican's role in Southern Baptist sex abuse scandal

In 2017, a Houston college student wrote to the family of Paul Pressler, warning them that the former Texas judge and Southern Baptist leader was a pedophile.

“There is a serious issue at hand,” he wrote in an email, adding that Pressler had recently touched him and bragged about being naked with young boys. “I do not think Paul should be around small children or have male assistance of any kind.”

Then, the young man said he was resigning as Pressler’s personal aide, and asked that Pressler’s former law partner, Jared Woodfill, stop paying him to work out of Pressler’s Houston mansion.

"My conscience dictates that I step away,” he wrote. “Please take me off the payroll. If I am to continue receiving paychecks from Woodfill in the continuing weeks, I will send them back."

The email was filed late last year in Harris County district court as part of a lawsuit that accused Woodfill and others of concealing decades of alleged rape by Pressler. It sheds new light on the role that Woodfill, a prominent anti-LGBTQ+ activist who is running in the Texas House with the backing of Attorney General Ken Paxton, played in providing Pressler with access to potential victims.

In March, The Texas Tribune reported that Woodfill had recently testified under oath that he was made aware of child sexual abuse claims against Pressler in 2004, when the two of them were law partners. Despite that, Woodfill continued to lean on the political connections of Pressler — who did almost no work for their firm but was compensated via a string of young, male personal assistants who worked out of his home. Three have accused Pressler of sexual assault or misconduct.

The newly-unearthed email shows that Woodfill continued to furnish Pressler with young aides until at least 2017 — 13 years after he was first warned that Pressler was a sexual predator, and less than a year after he was made aware of new sexual misconduct allegations.

Woodfill has denied any wrongdoing, and said in a text message this week that he had not read the aide’s letter, and does not know him or another man who said in 2004 that Pressler forcibly undressed and groped him. Pressler, 93, has not been criminally charged.

Woodfill is challenging conservative Houston Rep. Lacey Hull in the Republican primary with endorsements from Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and Paxton.

During Paxton’s impeachment last year, Woodfill co-led a group that raised funds for his defense and frequently defended the embattled attorney general’s Christian values. Paxton, who was acquitted by the Senate, has since returned the favor: In a December radio ad for Woodfill, Paxton attacked Hull — who was ranked as one of the state’s most conservative lawmakers last year – as a “Republican in name only” over her vote to impeach him. “True conservatives need to take control of the House,” Paxton said. “Jared Woodfill can lead the way.

Hull did not respond to a request for comment. Paxton and Miller also did not respond to questions about Woodfill’s relationship to Pressler.

Woodfill served 14 years as the chair of the Harris County GOP and, in 2015, he and Houston GOP powerbroker Steven Hotze played key roles in the defeat of an equal rights ordinance that would have made LGBTQ+ workplace discrimination illegal in Houston. During that campaign, Woodfill and Hotze compared the gay rights movement to Nazis and frequently painted members of the LGBTQ+ community as sexual predators and groomers.

If he wins his House race, Woodfill has said he will run for House Speaker against Rep. Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, who Woodfill has accused of working with Democrats to suppress conservative voices and attack Paxton.

Pressler, 93, is one of the most influential evangelical figures of the last half-century for his key role in the Southern Baptist Convention’s “conservative resurgence,” during which he helped push the nation’s second-largest faith group to adopt literal interpretations of the Bible, align more closely with the Republican Party, ban women from preaching and strongly condemn homosexuality. Before that, Pressler represented Houston in the Texas House and served for 14 years as an Appeals Court judge, and his endorsement has for years been sought by evangelical political candidates, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Pressler’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

'Tip of the iceberg'

A copy of the aide’s email was filed in Harris County district court last year as part of a massive lawsuit in which a former member of Pressler’s church youth group, Duane Rollins, accused Pressler of decades of rape beginning when Rollins was 14. Rollins also alleged that other defendants — including Woodfill, the Southern Baptist Convention and Pressler’s longtime church, First Baptist Church of Houston — of enabling or concealing Pressler’s behavior.

The lawsuit was settled late last year under confidential terms, and following six years of court fights that prompted six other men to come forward with allegations of sexual assault or misconduct by Pressler. The lawsuit was also the impetus for a major newspaper investigation into sexual abuse in the SBC.

The aide’s 2017 email was filed in court records not long before the case was scheduled to go to trial. In it, the aide — who was attending Houston Baptist University at the time — detailed a pattern of predatory behavior before imploring Pressler’s daughters and wife to cut off his access to young men.

“For as long as I can tell, Paul has fostered inappropriately close relationships to the young men who work for him,” wrote the aide, who the Tribune is not naming. “I have both heard stories of and personally witnessed Paul getting young men who work for him to give him full-body massages, with all present parties in the nude. Especially recently, a young man’s willingness to perform this act seems to be the main reason he hires them.”

The aide then detailed two recent incidents that he said were “just the tip of the iceberg.” Days before he sent the email, the aide wrote, Pressler had bragged about being in a hot tub naked with three boys under the age of 10 and their father.

“After bragging about this hot tub experience, Paul told me ‘you seriously need to get over your phobia of taking off your clothes with me,’ “ the aide wrote. “Paul then went on to say that ‘if the young boys were okay with getting naked in the hot tub with me then so you [sic] should be ok with it also.’ “

The day before the aide penned the letter, he said he was repeatedly caressed by Pressler, who told him that “I really need this.”” At the time, they were on their way to pick up a 20-year-old man who was nearly homeless and had called Pressler for help, the aide wrote.

The three of them then went to dinner, where Pressler offered the young man $100 for a massage before suggesting they both do so naked, the aide wrote. Presser also repeatedly kissed the young man, the aide wrote

They then went back to Pressler’s home, and Pressler took the young man into a locked room. When they emerged, Pressler allegedly told the young man that “next time I’ll massage you when you massage me.” The aide then warned that Pressler was a racist, sexual predator who should only be allowed an older, Black assistant who he’d be less likely to abuse.

“He talks way more about nudity, the male body, being naked in spas in Europe, being naked in general than God, or his Baptist background,” the aide wrote.

A pattern

The aide’s allegations are strikingly similar to allegations made by at least six other men, who say that Pressler used naked hot-tubbing or massage sessions to molest them or try to solicit them for sex. The alleged incidents span more than 40 years, beginning in 1978 when court records show that Pressler was removed as the leader of a church youth group after allegedly molesting a college student in a sauna.

In 2004, another young man said that he had been forcibly undressed and groped by Pressler. The allegations were detailed as part of a physical assault lawsuit that Rollins filed against Pressler that year. Woodfill represented Pressler in the lawsuit, which was settled for $450,000; he testified last year that, during mediation for the suit, he was told by Rollins’ attorney that Pressler sexually abused Rollns as a child.

Despite that, Woodfill did not cut ties with Pressler, who did almost no work for the firm but had valuable political connections.

“He may have gone to one hearing in his entire time with us, two at the most. Really, it was his name,” Woodfill testified last year as part of the Rollins lawsuit.“So he didn’t get a salary. He didn’t get a draw. He didn’t get a bonus. We paid for someone to come and assist him. That’s how he got compensated.”

Around 2015, Pressler allegedly solicited a Houston Baptist University student for sex, an incident that prompted the student to stop pursuing a career in ministry and attempt suicide, he wrote in a sworn affidavit.

In 2016, Woodfill was again alerted about sexual misconduct allegations — this time by a 25-year-old attorney at Woodfill’s firm, who said Pressler had told him lewd stories about being naked with men before inviting him to go naked hot-tubbing. The young lawyer detailed the incident in an email to Woodfill, court records show, and said that he had talked to a longtime employee of Woodfill's firm who made it clear that Pressler’s behavior was common knowledge.

The attorney resigned in May 2017, accusing Woodfill of failing to keep his former law partner away from young men at the firm.

Three months later, the aide announced his own resignation.

Pressler, he wrote, “must be stopped.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/23/jared-woodfill-paul-pressler-southern-baptist-state-legislature/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Southern Baptist Convention settles lawsuit that accused former judge of sexual abuse

The Southern Baptist Convention and others have reached a confidential settlement in a high-profile lawsuit that accused a former leader of sexual assault, ending a six-year legal drama that helped prompt a broader reckoning over child sexual abuse in evangelical churches, expanded victims’ rights in Texas and showed that a prominent conservative activist and Texas House candidate repeatedly downplayed abuse allegations.

In 2017, Duane Rollins filed the lawsuit accusing Paul Pressler, a longtime Southern Baptist figure and former Texas judge, of decades of rape beginning when Rollins was a 14-year-old member of Pressler’s church youth group in Houston.

Rollins claimed in court documents that the alleged attacks pushed him into drug and alcohol addictions that kept him in prison throughout much of his adult life. After disclosing the alleged rapes to a prison psychiatrist, Rollins filed the suit in Harris County against Pressler along with other defendants who he accused of enabling or concealing Pressler’s behavior — including the Southern Baptist Convention and Jared Woodfill, the former chair of the Harris County GOP and Pressler’s longtime law partner.

Rollins’ claims were a key impetus for “Abuse of Faith,” a 2019 investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News into sexual abuse in the SBC, the nation’s second-largest faith group. The series led to major reforms in the SBC, revelations that top leaders had routinely ignored or downplayed warnings about a sexual abuse crisis, and an ongoing Department of Justice investigation.

As part of Rollins' suit, at least seven other men came forward with their own allegations of sexual misconduct by Pressler in incidents spanning four decades. The suit also showed that Woodfill, a prominent anti-LGBTQ+ activist, was aware of allegations that Pressler was a sexual predator but continued to provide him with young, male personal assistants who worked out of Pressler’s River Oaks home. Three of the men have alleged sexual abuse or misconduct.

Woodfill is currently running for a Texas House seat against incumbent Rep. Lacey Hull, R-Houston, and has been endorsed by Attorney General Ken Paxton and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.

Pressler, 93, is one of the most influential evangelical figures of the last half-century, and is considered the co-architect of the SBC’s “conservative resurgence” that began in the late 1970s and prompted the faith group to adopt literal interpretations of the Bible, align more closely with the Republican Party, ban women from preaching and strongly condemn homosexuality.

Pressler — who formerly represented Houston in the Texas House and served for 14 years as a state appeals court judge — is also an influential figure in GOP politics. His endorsement has for years been sought by conservative evangelical politicians, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. In 1989, Pressler was nominated to lead the Office of Government Ethics under President George H.W. Bush, though the bid was later withdrawn; and Pressler is a founding member of Council for National Policy, a secretive network of conservative judges, politicians, media figures, megadonors and wealthy business owners that is currently led by Tony Perkins, head of the anti-LGBTQ+ Family Research Council.

Pressler denies the allegations and has not been criminally charged for any of the alleged abuses. An attorney for Pressler did not respond to a request for comment about the settlement, which is not public.

In a statement, legal representatives for the Southern Baptist Convention and its executive committee confirmed that they had “entered into a confidential settlement agreement” despite being “fully prepared” to proceed to a trial that was scheduled for February after being postponed twice this year.

“However, several factors ultimately made settlement the more prudent choice,” they wrote. “Chief among those factors was the horrendous nature of the abuse allegations, the likelihood that counsel for the SBC and Executive Committee would have to confront and cross-examine abuse survivors, the Executive Committee’s current financial condition, and the willingness of multiple insurance carriers to contribute to the terms of the settlement.”

Michael Goldberg, who represented Rollins along with a team of lawyers from Baker Botts, said Friday that they had resolved the matter with Pressler on "mutually satisfactory terms," and added that his team was "very proud of the settlement we reached against the Southern Baptist Convention and Jared Woodfill."

Woodfill has denied wrongdoing and said this week that he has not settled the case, though a Harris County judge signed off on a motion last week that said “all claims, counterclaims and controversies” in the suit were resolved.

"We are fighting the insurance company and oppose any payment,” Woodfill said in a text message on Thursday.

A pattern

The settlement almost never happened.

By the time that Rollins disclosed the alleged abuses to a prison psychiatrist in 2016 and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a “direct result of the childhood sexual trauma he suffered,” the statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit against Pressler had long passed.

Nevertheless, Rollins pushed forward with the suit, arguing that the alleged rapes by Pressler — a spiritual mentor who Rollins said weaponized religious language to justify his predations — were so traumatizing that he unconsciously developed a sort of Stockholm syndrome that, coupled with the drug and alcohol addictions he blamed on the trauma, made it impossible to recognize himself as a victim until decades had passed.

Thus, Rollins argued, his statute of limitations should have begun when he realized he had been abused, rather than when the last assault occurred. His lawsuit was initially dismissed on statute grounds. But Rollins appealed and, eventually, had the dismissal overturned by the Texas Supreme Court, which agreed with Rollins’ arguments. The court’s opinion was a major victory for sexual abuse victims and their advocates, who have for years pointed to research that shows child sexual trauma can remap developing brains and make it difficult for many survivors to come forward until after their 50th birthday, and after their standing to file lawsuits has elapsed.

Rollins’ lawsuit also uncovered a 40-year pattern of alleged abuses by Pressler. As part of the suit, a former member of Pressler’s youth group said in a sworn affidavit that Pressler molested him in 1977 while the two were in a sauna at the country club in Houston’s tony River Oaks neighborhood. The man was entering his sophomore year in college at the time; Pressler, meanwhile, was a youth pastor at a Presbyterian 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. Soon after, Pressler ramped up his involvement in Southern Baptist life.

Rollins said Pressler began sexually abusing him not long after. He said the rapes continued on and off for nearly a quarter-century, often while he was working as Pressler’s aide.

In 2004, court records show that a small group of leaders at the massive First Baptist Church of Houston were made aware of allegations that Pressler, a powerful deacon at the megachurch, had undressed and groped a young man at his home. In a letter to Pressler that was unearthed as part of Rollins’ lawsuit, the church leaders condemned Pressler’s "morally and spiritually" inappropriate behavior. They also feared that publicizing the allegations would damage Pressler's reputation in their church and the Southern Baptist Convention.

An attorney for First Baptist Church of Houston, which was a defendant in Rollins’ lawsuit, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday about the lawsuit settlement. The church has previously defended its handling of the 2004 incident, saying that there were differing accounts of what happened and that Pressler’s position on church committees and as a teacher were eliminated as a result.

The same year that First Baptist was made aware of those allegations, Rollins filed a lawsuit for non-sexual assault against Pressler that was quickly settled for $450,000. Woodfill, who represented Pressler in the matter, said under oath last year that he was told by Rollins’ attorney at the time that Pressler had sexually abused Rollins as a child. Despite that, Woodfill continued to lean on Pressler’s conservative reputation, connections and influence to bolster their law firm, providing him with young, male personal assistants despite Pressler doing almost no work.

“I can think of one or two cases that he brought in,” Woodfill testified as part of Rollins’ new lawsuit last year. “He may have gone to one hearing in his entire time with us, two at the most. Really, it was his name. … He got an employee that worked for him. So he didn’t get a salary. He didn’t get a draw. He didn’t get a bonus. We paid for someone to come and assist him. That’s how he got compensated.”

Woodfill similarly downplayed sexual misconduct allegations in 2016, after a 25-year-old lawyer at his firm alerted Woodfill that Pressler had told him “lewd stories about being naked on beaches with young men” and then invited him to skinny-dip at his ranch, court records show. The attorney said he addressed the incident with a longtime employee of Woodfill’s law firm, who made it clear that this was not the first time he’d heard such allegations.

“I discovered that this was not unusual behavior for Pressler, and that he had a long history of lecherous behavior towards young men. Even going as far as bringing scantily clad men and parading them through the office,” the attorney wrote in an affidavit that was filed as part of Rollins’ lawsuit.

Woodfill — who’d just played a key role defeating an equal rights ordinance for LGBTQ Houstonians — responded to the young man’s request for help with shock. “This 85-year-old man has never made any inappropriate comments or actions toward me or any one I know of,” he responded, court records show.

The young attorney’s claims are similar in detail to those from other Pressler accusers, who said he leaned on his stature and connections in conservative religious and political circles to try and coerce them into lewd massages, naked swimming sessions or sex. One accuser — a young Houston Baptist University student — said in a sworn affidavit that he stopped pursuing a career in ministry, frequently had panic attacks and attempted suicide as a result of Pressler’s alleged behavior.

Court filings also show that Pressler’s family was alerted about his behavior in 2017, when an aide claimed in a letter that he had “both heard stories of and personally witnessed” Pressler getting nude massages from “young men who work for him.” He also claimed that Pressler had recently bragged about skinny-dipping with three boys who were younger than 10, and that he had seen Pressler “manipulate” a 20-year-old into giving him a massage and then repeatedly kiss him.

“He talks way more about nudity, the male body, being naked in spas in Europe, being naked in general than God, or his Baptist background,” the aide wrote before announcing his resignation.

Pressler, he added, “needs to be stopped.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/29/southern-baptist-convention-sexual-abuse-lawsuit-settlement/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Robert Downen, Texas Tribune

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