Louisiana passes anti-grooming law championed by clergy abuse survivor

Louisiana’s legislature has voted to outlaw attempts to gain children’s trust with the intent to sexually abuse them – an anti-grooming proposal that was championed by a survivor of Catholic clergy molestation, his wife and her father, who is a state lawmaker.

The law was primarily authored by Louisiana state senator Pat Connick at the suggestion of his daughter, Sarah Gioe, whose husband – Tim Gioe – was in grade school in the 1990s when he was abused by a priest who had befriended him and his family.

After gaining final, unopposed passage in both of the state’s legislative chambers on Tuesday, the bill for the first time made it illegal in Louisiana to pursue “an intimate relationship with a child under the age of 17 by means of seduction, emotional manipulation, threats, promises, coercion, enticement, isolation or extortion with the specific intent to commit a sex offense … against the minor”.

It applies in cases where offenders are at least four years older than those being groomed, and authorities can act even in instances where no abuse took place.

Connick said in a statement that his bill’s ratification was “a huge step in safeguarding our children from the insidious threat of grooming”, to which his son-in-law was subjected before his childhood abuse. “This law is not just a policy change,” Connick added. “It’s a promise to every parent and guardian in Louisiana that we will not tolerate the manipulation of our most vulnerable.”

Pat Connick, a member of Louisiana’s state senate. Photograph: Provided to the Guardian

Louisiana joined about a dozen other US states with anti-grooming laws nearly two years to the day after Pat Wattigny pleaded guilty in June 2023 to charges that he had previously molested two children whom he met through his work as a priest for the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans. One of those children was Tim Gioe.

As the Guardian and its reporting partner WWL Louisiana have previously reported, officials took up the molestation charges against Wattigny in 2020 after learning that he had been sending inappropriate text messages to a third person: a Catholic high school student who was underage. But investigators ultimately could not prosecute Wattigny for those messages because they were considered grooming, which was not illegal at the time, rather than abuse.

Experts have generally defined grooming as behavior that is meant to establish an emotional connection with a vulnerable person, such as a child, and frequently precedes sexual assault.

Tim and Sarah Gioe have said they could not believe that authorities essentially had to wait until they confirmed Wattigny had molested someone before they could move against him. If a grooming law had been in place, they reasoned, Wattigny may have been prosecuted for the inappropriate texts detected in 2020, and he may have received a harsher sentence than the one he got after his guilty plea: just five years in prison, which leaves him eligible for parole as soon as 12 June.

Tim and Sarah Gioe. Photograph: Courtesy of Tim and Sarah Gioe

The Gioes also suspect that Wattigny may never have dared to give a young Tim baseball cards as presents while he successfully sought to ingratiate himself with the boy and his family – and then exploit the ensuing closeness to abuse the child.

Ultimately, while running a psychiatric nursing practice as well as raising four children with her husband, the 36-year-old Sarah Gioe took it upon herself to research anti-grooming laws in Texas and Mississippi, she previously told the Guardian. She noted how cases other than that of Wattigny – including multiple ones outside a religious context – highlighted Louisiana’s lack of an anti-grooming law.

Sarah Gioe forwarded her research to her father and in late March sent him a text asking: “Can grooming become illegal?”

Connick, who joined Louisiana’s state senate in 2020 after spending the prior 12 years in its house of representatives, said he regarded his daughter’s idea as a “no-brainer”. Within two days of Sarah’s text, he had drafted an anti-grooming bill. And he submitted it for consideration days ahead of the 2025 Louisiana legislative session, which began in April.

Forty-six of Connick’s colleagues across the state senate and house – both fellow Republicans and Democrats – signed up as co-authors for his bill. Both of the legislature’s chambers approved Connick’s bill by a combined vote of 135-0, sending it to the desk of governor Jeff Landry to sign into law.

The law is set to go into effect on 1 August.

Tim Gioe, 40, said he hoped his, his wife’s and his father-in-law’s legislative efforts inspired the remaining states without an anti-grooming statute to eventually adopt one.

“It’s not going to affect my case or put [Wattigny] in jail longer,” Tim Gioe said of the law that resulted from his abuse. “But it could very well prevent my children, their children or their friends from ever having to experience what we have gone through.”