Manhattan federal prosecutors charged on Wednesday that the leader of a Mexico-based church that claims more than one million followers led a criminal enterprise that for decades sexually abused generations of church members and then destroyed the evidence.
A federal racketeering conspiracy indictment unsealed in Manhattan charged that the church leader, Naasón Joaquín García, 56, and five associates used the La Luz del Mundo Church to sex-traffic women and children and produce and distribute child pornography, among other crimes. His 79-year-old mother was among those charged Wednesday.
Mr. García is already serving a 16-year, eight-month state sentence after pleading guilty in California in 2022 to three felony counts of sexual assault involving three different minors.
The federal charges allege that the wrongdoing went far beyond Mr. García himself, and that the church that his grandfather founded a century ago in Mexico became an international system for preying on vulnerable women and children.
In a statement, Mr. García’s lawyer categorically denied the charges and said those accusing him had ulterior motives.
“We reject the grotesque portrait painted by the government and its allies,” said the lawyer, Alan Jackson. “In this country, every defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That principle cannot be eroded simply because the government chooses to smear a church and its leaders with accusations it cannot prove.”
After his arrest in the California case in 2019, the new indictment says, Mr. García’s associates, including one posing as a lawyer, pressured witnesses and victims not to cooperate with law enforcement and directed pastors of the church to deliver sermons calling victims who had come forward liars.
“They exploited the faith of their followers to prey upon them,” said Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office is prosecuting the federal case against Mr. García and his co-defendants. “When they were confronted, they leveraged their religious influence and financial power to intimidate and coerce victims into remaining silent about the abuse they had suffered.”
The government, in a letter to a Manhattan federal judge on Wednesday, said that as recently as Wednesday morning, the authorities searched residences in East Los Angeles belonging to Mr. García and his mother and found more than $1 million in cash and evidence of sex crimes. These included straps used as a sex swing, as well as a sex toy consistent with those seen in child pornography images and videos created at Mr. García’s direction, prosecutors said.
According to the indictment and the government’s letter to the judge, the church is based in Guadalajara, Mexico, occupying a compound that includes a large temple and living quarters for Mr. García’s family, other church leaders and servants. The church also has locations throughout the United States, including in California, New York, Nevada, Texas, New Jersey, several other states and Washington, D.C.
In the letter to the judge, Loretta A. Preska of Federal District Court, the government wrote that Mr. García’s exploitation of the church and its members followed “a deeply disturbing tradition” established by his father and his grandfather.
Each leader, calling himself the “Apostle,” took advantage of his position of power and control over the church “to sexually abuse, exploit and rape its congregants.” The abuse occurred over generations, the government said.
As a result of this decades-long cycle of abuse, the government added, many of the victims of Mr. García’s father were mothers of girls and women abused by Mr. García.
“Each leader manipulated girls and young women by conveying that they could earn a special ‘blessing’ by serving him, which often ultimately included sexual activity, including oral sex, manual stimulation and, ultimately, penetrative sex,” prosecutors wrote.
The government said that at Mr. García’s direction, various co-conspirators “identified and primed girls and boys as young as 13 years old” for Mr. García’s abuse.
The government said that the church’s doctrine, propagated and later abused by its leaders, is that members can obtain eternal salvation only by following the Apostle’s teachings. “God will punish and eternally damn anyone who doubts the Apostle, fails to follow the Apostle’s teachings or defies the Apostle,” prosecutors wrote.
Benjamin Weiser is a Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly.
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