Paul Pressler

Paul Pressler, a former Houston appeals court judge who spent decades helping conservatives gain control of the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, only to become an embarrassment to its leaders after as many as seven men accused him of sexual abuse, died on June 7 2024. He was 94. Judge Pressler died four days before the Southern Baptist Convention held its annual meeting in Indianapolis, where nothing was said about the death. In 1989, Judge Pressler was President George H.W. Bush’s choice to head the Office of Government Ethics. But he was removed from consideration after the Federal Bureau of Investigation, conducting a routine background check, found what it described only as “ethics problems.” Abuse allegations first emerged publicly in 2004 He went to Phillips Exeter when he was 16 and earned an undergraduate degree in government at Princeton in 1952. In 1959, he married Nancy Avery, who had just graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts, In Houston, he was a district judge from 1970 to 1978 and served on the Texas 14th Court of Appeals from 1979 to 1992, when he retired and returned to private practice. He switched his party affiliation to Republican in 1982. Judge Pressler’s survivors include his wife; their two daughters, Jean Pressler Visy and Anne Pressler Csorba; a son, Herman Paul Pressler IV; his brother, Townes Garrett Pressler; seven grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.