A new witness has emerged in the sex abuse allegations saga of Saint Sabina’s Father Michael Pfleger, who claims that he was unwittingly involved in an extortion plot against the beleaguered priest 43 years ago.
The plan was concocted in 1978 by at least one teen in a summer program at Saint Sabina, according to the witness, and involved setting Pfleger up for an extortion payday by taking the priest to a jazz club, smoking weed with him, sleeping over at the church, and then accusing Pfleger of sexually touching him the next day.
The witness, who for now is remaining anonymous, has told his story to the Archdiocese of Chicago, which is investigating sexual misconduct allegations against Pfleger, and to the Chicago Police Department.
He spoke exclusively with N’DIGO as well, shortly after meeting with police detectives. For anonymity’s sake, we will call the witness Mr. Jones.
His testimony is noteworthy because one of the three current accusers against Pfleger says that he went to jazz clubs with the priest, smoked marijuana and drank with him in the Saint Sabina rectory, and that at least on one occasion, Pfleger touched the accuser’s crotch through his clothing while the accuser pretended to be asleep.
This supposedly happened in 1979, the year after Mr. Jones found himself in the middle of a fledgling extortion plan that Jones believes ties all three accusers – and maybe more – together.
The Allegations
Pfleger, 71, has been the pastor of St. Sabina Church in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood near 78th and Racine since 1981. St. Sabina is Chicago’s largest Black Catholic parish. He has been a priest there since 1975.
On January 5, 2021, Pfleger was asked by the Archdiocese of Chicago to step aside from his ministry at St. Sabina and live away from the church after receiving an allegation the day before, on January 4, of sexual abuse by Pfleger of a minor decades ago.
On January 22, the original accuser’s older brother came forward with a similar allegation of sexual abuse by Pfleger over several years in the 1970s while he was also a minor.
Now 61 and 63 years old, the brothers, originally from the West Side of Chicago, currently live in Texas.
Supposedly, over the past 45 years, the brothers never told each other or anybody else about the alleged abuse until January. The two brothers have taken their actions anonymously and still remain so to the public.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the older brother didn’t know about his brother’s claim (all of his life) until the younger brother told him he had made the allegation days after filing it.
The older brother then revealed that he, too, had been victimized by Pfleger and filed his own allegation with the Archdiocese on January 22. Both claims filed with the Archdiocese are seeking financial compensation for the alleged abuse.
In late December of 2020, before the first accuser contacted the Archdiocese, he sent a letter to Pfleger asking for $20,000 “to help me move on in this troubled and confused time in my life.”
The younger brother has publicly acknowledged the letter asking Pfleger to give him $20,000, but said he planned to use the payment as proof that he was abused if Pfleger paid it.
On Tuesday, March 2, a third man gave an affidavit to the Archdiocese accusing Pfleger of misconduct in the summer of 1979 when he was 18 (and not a minor).
The 59-year-old former Chicagoan, who now lives out-of-state, alleges in the affidavit that Pfleger took him to jazz clubs with other adults. He said he “frequently drank alcohol with (Pfleger) at these jazz clubs, in his room at the rectory at St. Sabina, and elsewhere.”
The man said that in the summer of 1979 he fell asleep after smoking marijuana with Pfleger in his room at the rectory.
“I woke up and had a feeling that Mike did something that was inappropriate, but I did not witness anything,” he said in the statement.
A couple of weeks later, the third accuser says he smoked weed with Pfleger again and then pretended to fall asleep in his room.
“Mike came up to me and called my name a couple of times to see if I was asleep,” he said in the statement. “I did not move and then Mike grabbed my penis over my clothes. I did not consent for Mike to touch me in such a sexual manner. I then pushed his hand away.”
What Happened In 1978
Like Accuser #3, the new witness, Mr. Jones, is 59 years old. He grew up in Englewood, and in the summer of 1978, when he was 15 or 16, he had a strange and memorable encounter.
His friend and neighbor, Tommy (not his real name), called out to Jones to introduce him to his “cousin”. The three of them took a walk while a fourth young man Jones later found out was the guy’s brother, sat on Tommy’s porch.
Tommy told Jones that the guy wanted to buy a nickel bag of pot from the local weed house on the next block. Tommy couldn’t get it himself for whatever reason and asked Jones to.
As they were walking, the guy blurted out that he wanted some quaaludes (barbiturates) and ecstasy (psychedelic amphetamines).
“We both were surprised when he asked for such heavy drugs and I think that we laughed and said this guy is crazy,” Jones recalls. “I assured him that he had to go to the North Side for such drugs. He asked could I go with him to get them and I declined. Then he wanted to know about the strongest marijuana we could find.”
Jones said he asked what was up with the quaaludes and the guy hesitated, but said he was going to put it in someone’s drink; then he would give them a “shotgun” with the marijuana while the person was spacing out on the quaaludes.
“I asked why would you do that, and his response was to get money,” Jones says. He told the guy that he did not know how to get such drugs, but that the guy kept asking Jones to help him.
“He’s all over me because he thinks that I’m the hook up. I guess it’s because my boy Tommy brought him right to me and because of the way that I was dressed,” Jones says. “I was always sharp, sharp, sharp, even then like I am now. People confuse being a well-dressed Black man with being a drug dealer.”
He says they realized the guy was setting someone up. “This was the first time we’d ever heard of what he was trying to do and we were shocked at what this guy was talking about,” Jones says.
“And this kid would not stop. You know how you have one of those cousins that wants to be the center of attention, and they’re loud, and they know too much? He was that guy. It was obvious that he was irritated because I wouldn’t help him, but that loudness, that pompousness, was irritating me, too.
“Once this guy said what kind of drugs he wanted and I realized that they were not trying to put two dollars together each so that we could get something and sit on the porch and have a smoke, I wasn’t interested. I just wanted nothing to do with him.”
A Tense Night
The trio parted ways without buying the weed. But that wasn’t the end of it. In the summer of 1978, evenings were filled by many in Englewood with a nightly game of bid whist and later on this particular evening, Jones and Tommy were at one of their usual haunts playing the game when the cousin shows up again.
“We were both disappointed to see him,” Jones recalls. “He pulled up a chair and sat right between myself and Tommy. And he’s just talking, talking, talking, talking too much about nothing on the sidelines.
“But then he started saying these odd things, which gave us more insight into what he was planning. At first, he didn’t want to say who it was, what it was, but he started to bring up a minister every now and then.
“Then he said, if you ever go out and get too drunk or if you are stranded, he heard that the priest up at St. Sabina will get you a ride or pick you up and take you home so that you don’t get in trouble.
“Then he said he was going to make the priest smoke weed with him. My friend asked does the priest smoke weed and he said no…and Tommy and I fell out laughing at the thought!
“It was probably then that he said to me that the priest had a lot of money. I ignored him. Then he said he was going to take the priest to a nightclub and that’s when my boy stood up and started imitating Father Pfleger doing this dance called The Robot. Tommy said this is how the priest is going to dance. It was one of the funniest moments of my entire life, even to this day.
“So the kid says you guys are right. I’ll take him to a jazz club, not a nightclub. He started speaking low and told us his plan: ‘I will go to a jazz club, act like I’m drunk so that the priest can pick me up and give me a ride, and I will sleep at the church. That’s when I’ll put the drugs in his drink and blow him a shotgun with the weed while he is already tripping.’ He went on to say that the next day he will accuse the priest of touching him and make him pay.
“Tommy and I both told him that he couldn’t do that, and Tommy told him that he was going to jail. I told him you talk too much.
“First of all, you can’t talk about drugs and stuff like that openly in front of everybody, because others, if they even hear you talking about it, they will assume that you are involved in it, and we don’t invite stuff like that.
“So we were telling this guy to chill, you talk too much. We’re in a house full of people playing cards and smoking weed, and you’re talking about a minister. What are you talking about?
“He was offended by that and offended by the way we laughed about Father Pfleger smoking weed and doing The Robot. It’s possibly one of those laughs that annoyed the hell out of the accuser back then and he became furious and left the house.”
The Fight
But it still wasn’t over yet. When Jones left to go home and approached his house, the guy emerged from behind the hedges in front. “He asked me again if I was going to help him and I told him no again,” Jones says. “By this time, we’re both pissed. He swung at me and we started fighting.”
According to Jones, his older brother came home about that time and his father came out of the house. The other guy went down the street while Jones told his father, “I was fighting the young man because he is trying to buy drugs so that he can give them to the priest to extort him and he was angry that I would not help him.”
The father told the older brother to take Jones down the street to see what was going on and when they caught up to the accuser, the two started fighting again. That fight was broken up by Jones’ brother and the other young man who had been sitting on Tommy’s porch earlier, who turned out to be the guy’s older brother.
Jones’ brother explained why they were fighting, about the Father Pfleger plot, and Jones says the accuser’s brother was furious. He asked him who else was involved, and he told him the names of everyone associated with the plan.
“It was obvious that the accuser was afraid of his elder brother and feared him knowing about what he wanted to do to the priest,” Jones says. “It was then that we found out from the elder brother that the accuser and his buddies were all part of a summer program at Saint Sabina and that they did not live in Englewood. Two brothers were from the West Side.”
Jones says the elder brother asked him why he was willing to do such a thing to someone who was helping him (Pfleger), and he responded that it was not his idea. “The elder brother promised and guaranteed my brother that he would not only take care of the accuser and tell his mom, but that he knew the others and would talk to the other guys involved and talk to their parents as well, if he had to,” Jones says.
The next day, Jones’ brother made 50 or so index cards that read: MEMO: HANDS OFF FATHER MIKE! and the two distributed them around St. Sabina. His brother also told Jones to go up to the church while the summer program was going on so those guys whose names they took that were involved in the Pfleger scheme could see him and know that Jones and his brother meant business.
He did go up to St. Sabina on his bike and Jones says the kid he fought with was outside and saw him first. He pointed Jones out to four other teens; the group threw pop bottles at him and chased him for three blocks with bad intentions.
“I believe they were mad at me because I blew their game when it came to their attempt against Father Pfleger, and they probably feared that I was there to report them to the church,” he says.
Back To The Future
Jones got away and never saw the guys who chased him again. Forty-three years later, he hears a news report that an accuser says Father Michael Pfleger was in a jazz club, smoking weed, and sexually molested him.
“It was like an out-of-body experience,” Jones says. “I had to step back and look at it and check my cell phone. The Twilight Zone music started playing.
“I started laughing, but it was a disbelief laugh that came from 43 years ago. It was a triggered reaction. You find yourself in the middle of an extortion plot 43 years ago through no fault of your own, then all of a sudden you hear this again, the exact same thing again.”
Jones says he doesn’t really pay attention to the news and that this was the first time he had heard of the allegations against Pfleger. He didn’t know about the first two accusers.
After Jones finished the involuntary laugh, he says, “It kind of scared me a little bit, to the point that I was questioning what is happening to me. My first thought was, ‘Oh no, these guys are back?’ This was a Wednesday and I couldn’t sleep at all that night.
“The next day I had to sit down and remember what really happened…because everybody I needed to sit down with and reconfirm that this actually happened have passed away – my father, my brother, and Tommy.
“Then I checked out all the accusations looking for confirmation points and they were there. The brothers were from the West Side. We’re all the same age. Accuser #3 is familiar with at least one of the accusing brothers from a summer program at St. Sabina right around the time of my incident.
“When they said a jazz club on the news, I immediately flashed back to the image of my boy doing The Robot dance pretending to be Father Mike in the disco. Because it wasn’t the jazz club; the guy had originally said it would be a disco that he would take Father Mike to. But we laughed so hard at him about that that he said no no no, that’s okay, I’ll make it a jazz club. Because he thought that would be more believable, so he changed it to jazz club.
“There is no chance in one million that somebody else would come up with a jazz club thing connected to Father Mike,” Jones says. “Now 43 years later, because that kid talked too much, I am overly informed about something that I really wish I had nothing to do with.”
Jones is not exactly sure how it all fits together, but believes “there is a chance that accusers 1, 2, and 3 could very well be the same group of guys who pelted me with those bottles and chased me for three city blocks. Also, it was possibly one of them or one of their associates that my brother and I blocked from attempting to drug, setup, accuse, and frame Father Mike of sexual misconduct back in 1978 when we were all teenagers,” Jones wrote in his testimony to the Archdiocese.
Convinced that his story may affect the investigations into the allegations, Jones wrote his testimony and sent it to the Archdiocese and Father Pfleger’s attorneys on March 12. He interviewed with the police on March 25.
Lottery Odds
Jones notes that he first met Father Pfleger in 1976 as a young boy when the new Saint Sabina priest flagged down an ice cream truck and bought treats for the kids in the area. He thought it was a kind gesture and found it ironic to be confronted just two years later “with someone who wanted to bring harm to someone who did that.”
Since then, Jones says he may have shaken hands with Pfleger from being at the same event once or twice. He is not a member of Saint Sabina and has no ties to the man or that church.
“But right is right and wrong is wrong,” says Jones, who is a member of Trinity United Church of Christ. “And I couldn’t stand back and watch them try to crucify what I think is an innocent man. I am Englewood and I can tell you for sure that Father Michael Pfleger would not have survived out here for a second if there was ever a smell of child abuse or child molestation going on. Because if that could have happened, Father Mike would have come up missing.”
Jones said he has waited on going public until now for two reasons. One was to give the Archdiocese time to process his information and he’s sure now that his testimony is “on the table properly.”
Secondly, Jones is thinking that a fourth accuser might surface, since there were four or five in the original gang that he confronted. He may be right.
On March 31, Patch.com reported that the attorney for the three accusers told WLS-AM radio, “I’ve been in communication with the Chicago Police Department, a detective, who told me there is in fact a fourth victim who made a complaint to DCFS and it was turned over to the Chicago Police Department.”
Jones says he’s 80 percent sure of his story and that the other 20 percent depends on being able to identify the accusers. “Outside of my siblings, I’ve only had one fight in my entire life, and it was with this guy,” Jones says. “There’s no question that I’m not going to forget.
“I really believe that back in 1978, the blueprint was being laid for what is happening to Father Pfleger today in 2021. The tone and language of what is going on now is pretty identical to what happened back then. I’d take a loan from a big-time money shark to bet with the bookies on this one. The chances of these two events not being connected are lottery odds.”
(David Smallwood is the Editor of N’DIGO and a contributing writer.)
Excellent article/presentation! Thank you, sir!
From an Englewood Eagle and Englewood resident