Ohio Priest Indicted on Child Exploitation, Child Porn, Sex Trafficking Charges

(The AEGIS Alliance) – CLEVELAND, OHIO – A priest with the Cleveland Catholic Diocese has been indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s office for child sex crimes.

40-year-old Robert McWilliams from Strongsville, Ohio is facing an eight-count indictment on charges that include sexual exploitation of a minor, sex trafficking of a minor, and possession of and transportation of child pornography.

Prosecutors said McWilliams posed as a female on social media apps, pretending to be someone he wasn’t, and he used the apps to make contact with his victims who were male minors, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. McWilliams knew some of the victims because they were young boys from parishes he served as a priest in, which the children and their families were affiliated with.

The minors were allegedly enticed by McWilliams to send him sexually explicit videos and photos, and at times McWilliams threatened the victims that he’d expose embarrassing details about them if they did not comply. McWilliams already knew the embarrassing information about his victims from serving as their priest.

According to an affidavit, McWilliams was allegedly in the possession of, had received, or was distributing around 1,700 child pornography images, and possessed about 150 child porn files in a cloud storage account on Dropbox.

In addition to the charges McWilliams is facing, he allegedly used the social networking app Grindr to come in contact with an underage male victim with the purpose of engaging in sex for commercial use. According to the Northern District of Ohio’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, McWilliams is alleged to have met up with the victim multiple times, and paid the victim in exchange for sex each time they met. FOX8.com initially broke the news about this case.

Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.