Disgraced former Texas appellate judge and Southern Baptist Convention Vice President Paul Pressler, a far right leader in the Lone Star State credibly accused of sexually molesting at least six boys and young men over his long career in Evangelical politics, died earlier this month at the age 94 of undisclosed causes, the Texas Tribune reports after having found out his funeral was on Saturday.
No announcement was made by the Southern Baptist Convention of Pressler’s death which would make sense considering they paid out a settlement to one of his victims just six months ago.
Over the last year we picked up some of the Tribune’s quite excellent reporting on Pressler in the twilight of his life and were utterly shocked at the sheer hypocrisy and depravity of him and his law partner, the deeply homophobic former Harris County GOP chair Jared Woodfill. However maybe more eyebrow-raising was a 2015 Washington Post article titled “Long-time Texas conservative activist endorses [Senator Ted] Cruz for president,” which says “Pressler first met Cruz when the candidate was a teenager. They have stayed in touch though they are not particularly close.”
To be more serious, this guy was a fucking predator and, according to another young man who had worked as an intern out of Pressler’s house until he quit due to sexual harassment in 2017, the judge preyed upon a homeless 20 year-old man who had been caught stealing money from him, coercing the kid into massages and God knows what else. The witnesses’s account of the coercion was not graphic so much as downright revolting and heartbreaking so we don’t want to print it here.
There is however definitely one good thing about Paul Pressler that we can now write: He’s dead.