Woodfill led the Harris County Republican Party from 2002 to 2014 and has for years been at the helm of anti-LGBTQ and other hardline conservative movements in Houston and Texas. In 2004, leaders of First Baptist Church of Houston delivered this letter to Paul Pressler, a prominent evangelical figure who’d been accused of sexual misconduct by another church member. Two have accused Pressler of sexual assault or misconduct.
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. 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. 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. In recent sworn testimony, Woodfill said he'd known since 2004 of an allegation that Pressler had sexually abused a child. "This 85-year-old man has never made any inappropriate comments or actions toward me or any one I know of," he wrote of Pressler at the time.īut new court records show that wasn't true. Woodfill - an outspoken anti-gay politician and prominent conservative activist 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 and indignation. In an email, a 25-year-old attorney from Woodfill's Houston firm said he'd recently gone to lunch with Pressler, who told him "lewd stories about being naked on beaches with young men" and then invited him to skinny-dip at his ranch.
In 2016, former Harris County GOP chair Jared Woodfill received an urgent warning about Paul Pressler, his longtime law partner and a Southern Baptist leader. Bob Daemmrich for The Texas Tribune Then-Texas GOP party chairman candidate Jared Woodfill at the 2016 state Republican convention in Dallas on May 12, 2016.
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