Priest accused of sexually assaulting security guard after she caught him watching hardcore gay porn
George Rutler allegedly sexually assaulted a security guard after she caught him watching gay porn (YouTube)
A priest with a history of making explosive anti-LGBT+ comments, George Rutler, allegedly sexually assaulted a woman after she caught him watching hardcore gay porn.
Rutler, a Catholic priest at the Church of St Michael in Manhattan, has been accused of sexually assaulting a security guard who filmed him watching gay porn.
Ashley Gonzalez, 22, told News12 Brooklyn that she was working as an overnight security guard on 4 November when Rutler walked into the room, sat down at an office computer, and began watching hardcore gay porn.
“He looked at me with a smile, looked away, and he put his hand inside his pants and he was playing with himself,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez began filming him and claimed that he assaulted her when she tried to leave the office. The security guard, who was in the midst of her second day on the job, said he slammed the door shut when she tried to get out.
“He aggressively threw himself on me, and grabbed me sexually, aggressively, and I was fighting him off me,” Gonzalez said.
“It was like a monster… I was raised to respect [priests] and look up to them, and now I’m disgusted,” she said.
The allegations are being investigated by the Manhattan District Attorney. The Archdiocese of New York has said that the priest “denied acting inappropriately” with Gonzalez, but said he had “voluntarily stepped aside form the parish and is not currently serving as a priest” while the investigation is ongoing.
Rutler has also been suspended from Eternal Word Television Network, where he hosts a popular religious programme, until the investigation is concluded.
Father George Rutler has a history of making anti-LGBT+ comments
The priest’s alleged enjoyment of gay porn may come as a surprise to some, due to his anti-LGBT+ views.
Rutler has a long history of making anti-LGBT+ comments. He has said that the only way people can have safe sex is by having “real sex” – which is, in his view, “sex done for the procreation of life.”
“If people want to engage in aberrant sexual activities, well, by all means then they are free to do so,” he said in an interview 30 years ago.
He has also hit out at “abortionists and sodomites”, and said both groups have a “dislike for God”.
Furthermore, Rutler has made offensive remarks about gay people and HIV, saying: “When homosexualists are infecting each other lethally, and abortionists are killing unborn children, they are united in a commitment to death and to self-destruction.”
In 2019, he came under fire when he said Ireland’s former gay leader Leo Varadkar was “living in perverse contempt for the sacrament of holy matrimony”.
Rutler is considered to be one of the most famous conservative priests in the United States, and has published more than 30 books.
He insisted that the allegations against him were untrue in a letter to his parishioners, written on 20 November, according to The Daily Beast.
“I strongly deny this allegation, which I maintain is incoherent and painful to my reputation and inconsistent with how I have conducted myself in 50 years of ministerial service without any accusation of misbehaviour,” Rutler wrote.
