41-year-old Ohio priestRobert D. McWilliams has been sentenced to life in prison on sexual exploitation, trafficking, and child pornography charges.
As Cleveland.com reports, the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland priest was sentenced to life in prison for the alleged assault, abuse, and trafficking of minors. Prosecutors said that he utilized information from confession to blackmail underage boys into non-consensual sexual relationships, and had posed as a teen girl online among other fake identities. McWilliams also threatened others and solicited sexual photos and videos from minors online.
“Using his role in the Church, Mr. McWilliams violated the sacrament of confession to identify potential victims, and offered religious counseling to victims he extorted under alter egos he intentionally created to conceal his own identity,” said acting U.S. attorney Bridget M Brennan, per a statement from the Department of Justice. “He also used social media to target and entice young children into the exploitive world of juvenile sex trafficking, all after having already amassed a large collection of violent child pornography.”
Prosecutors on the case described McWilliams as “cunning, calculating, and extremely cruel.” He has been labeled a “sociopath” who “could accept the hospitality of a family only to disappear into another room to transmit images of a victim to his mother so he could witness the pain inflicted upon his hosts.”
McWilliams served as a priest at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Strongsville, Ohio. An indictment filed last year said that he engaged in the sexually abusive behavior from 2017 to 2019.
