Bay Area Houston

Seriously, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Jared Woodfill, according to his campaign website, is a “former Chair of the Harris County Republican Party, President of Conservative Republicans of Texas, Proud Member of the Second Baptist Church, and devoted husband, father, christian”. Today a sex abuse lawsuit against the Southern Baptist Convention has been settled. According to The Texas Tribune:

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 expanded victims’ rights in Texas, helped prompt a broader reckoning over child sexual abuse in evangelical churches and showed that a prominent conservative activist and Texas House candidate repeatedly downplayed abuse allegations.

Jared Woodfill is that House Candidate that repeatedly downplayed the abuse allegations and former Republican Judge Paul Dressler is the leader in the church. The details of the settlement have not been disclosed but the allegations are pretty damning. Here is the part about Woodfill knowing about the allegations from the Tribune:

In recent sworn testimony, Woodfill said he’d known since 2004 of an allegation that Pressler had sexually abused a child. Woodfill learned of those claims, he said, during mediation of an assault lawsuit filed against Pressler that he helped quietly settle for nearly a half-million dollars at the time. Despite his knowledge of the accusation, Woodfill continued to work with Pressler for nearly a decade — leaning on Pressler’s name and reputation to bolster their firm, Woodfill & Pressler LLP.
Rather than pay him a salary, Woodfill testified, the firm provided Pressler a string of employees to serve as personal assistants, most of them young men who typically worked out of his River Oaks mansion. Two have accused Pressler of sexual assault or misconduct.

SWEET HOLY MOSES! The Texas Tribune’s article is pretty damning in itself. Here is a snippet:

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 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. ….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. 

This truly is some fucked up sh*t but then again Woodfill represents the Republican Party pretty well. Of course Woodfill claims he has not settled the suit although his attorneys say otherwise. Maybe he is doing what republicans do best.

Lie. Go read the article.

While Harris County Democrats were busy passing a useless resolution admonishing the District Attorney and worrying about pronouns, one of the Democratic Judges has been deemed ineligible to run for re-election. Go figure.

Judge of the 333rd Judicial Court, Brittanye Morris has had her application for re-election rejected. Morris, in 2020, ran against a very well qualified and excellent Judge, Daryl Moore, and won in the primary and in the general election. Moore was an outstanding judge. Morris came out of no where, had raised very little money, and really had no good reason to challenge an incumbent but she did. And she won. And now she lost because she is not on the ballot.

Why she has been declared ineligible to run has not been disclosed. I am hoping it is nothing but a technical error that can be successfully addressed. We will see.

Until then Democrats need to stop being distracted on stupid shit and focus on what fucking matters.