Groomed to Obey: Understanding Sexual Abuse by Orthodox Clergy
- Hermina Nedelescu, Ph.D.
- 20 minutes ago
- 7 min read
At Prosopon Healing, we receive thousands of reports of sexual assault committed by Orthodox clergy [1], and it ranges from groping to rape, both of which are crimes. Some victims manage to escape the cycle of abuse before being raped. Others do not. And others are entrapped in a cycle of abuse and raped multiple times for years. We are still investigating how this happens and how some victims manage to escape while others “yield to the abuse” (words used by an attorney), but research supported by the Milgram experiment on obedience provides some insights into this question, which I will discuss later.
What is grooming?
“Grooming” can be challenging to identify. For those of us trained in behavioral models, patterns of grooming that emerge are identifiable, though even for experts, it is not immediately obvious because of the nature of grooming, which is essentially training the victim to comply – a form of conditioning.
First, victims of all ages and genders are susceptible to grooming. Grooming is a long-term process designed to create a compliant victim for multiple instances of abuse. Strangers do not “groom.” And a one-time event without prior conditioning is not “grooming.” Moreover, groomers are manipulative. They often use words, promises, and actions to gain the victim’s trust by becoming their closest friend or making the victim their closest confidant. Sometimes, they identify and fill a victim’s need, which is called the Chameleon effect.
As the cycle of grooming progresses, victims are isolate and separated from their support systems, such as their family, spouse, or friends. The abuser beings to take up more and more space in the victim’s life and thoughts [2]. Once all of this is achieved, the abusive groomer moves in and sexualizes the conversation. The relationship is now sexualized by the groomer, and the groomer insists on secrecy. They may say, “no one will understand our relationship” or “if anyone finds out, my ministry will be over,” or, for married clergy, they may say, “if my wife finds out, she’ll feel betrayed or leave me.”
The process of grooming is all about the groomer moving towards establishing and maintaining control over the victim(s). This is achieved through positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and/or punishment.
Positive reinforcement is when the groomer uses positive comments to encourage the victim to come to church with increased frequency, for example. The groomer may say, “you are very ‘special to me’” or “I set aside a special host today and prayed for you during liturgy.” These comments are not bad in themselves if the cycle of abuse does not escalate.
Negative reinforcement is more challenging to identify and is the dominant factor driving victims into a cycle of abuse. Negative reinforcement is not punishment, nor is it the use of negative comments. Negative reinforcement is the relief of agony—an agony that the clergy either finds out about through confession or an agony that he inflicts on the targeted victim. For example, the groomer may find out that the victim is having a challenging time. The victim may be either single and looking for a partner or in a bad marriage. The groomer learns this information, often through confession, and pretends to provide relief for the victim, either by making promises that he will introduce her to a man or by consoling the victim if she is in a bad marriage, even if the clergyman has no training in family therapy. In more egregious cases, clergy ask about the sexual relationship of the penitent and persuade them that they are either having too much sex or not enough. This is all to habituate the victim to talking about these topics. They pressure them by saying, “I am just trying to get the context, nothing more.” Some of the worst of these incidents have come from monasteries, but they also exist in local city parishes, where married priests in loveless marriages engage in these conversations with younger women.
Negative reinforcement, therefore, is the amelioration of a state of agony the victim may find herself in or may be placed there by the abusive clergy, who in turn capitalizes on this to induce the victim to become dependent on the clergy to relieve her agony. This type of reinforcement is very well known in addiction models, and my team has shown evidence for negative reinforcement being the dominant factor in driving dependence. Negative reinforcement was also present in the Odiong vs. The State of Texas trial, in which prosecutors presented evidence for the jury to find the priest guilty and give him a life-in-prison sentence [3].
Finally, punishment can also be used, and it can take the form of something as mild as stonewalling or ignoring the victim to get the victim to beg for the attention of the groomer, or it can escalate into serious threats, including being kicked out of the church, losing one’s community, or being threatened with death. These are the realities within the Orthodox Church today, and we must come to grips with and face them.
What to do about it if you identify signs of “grooming”?
People often don’t realize how common grooming is and how much we condition or influence each other as social beings. Grooming in itself is not necessarily bad. However, there is a difference when the groomer is grooming, training, or conditioning you for his own personal sexual gratification. This is sexual abuse.
Recognition is the first step. Once you recognize it, remove yourself from the situation. Most of the time, however, victims don’t realize they have been groomed until they have already been assaulted and thus become victims of sexual violence. If a crime, such as sexual assault, has occurred, this must be reported to the police. Since law enforcement often fails to also take appropriate action, with the exception of some police departments that are well educated in grooming dynamics, an attorney may be the best route to better guide you.
Spectrum of sexual assault and interruption by failure to comply with the abuse
It is okay to say no and reject the sexualized touch by a clergyman in the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church has a strong emphasis on obedience, and this often confuses the faithful. Victims become so groomed that they may be raped, and even raped multiple times.
It is helpful to think of sexual assault as a continuum rather than a single event. A condensed version is as follows: (1) Unwanted sexualized contact—brushing against, touching, or grabbing → (2) Sexual touching—breasts, buttocks, genitals, or other intimate areas → (3) Forced kissing / sexual touching → (4) Sexual contact involving restraint or force → (5) Forced oral sex → (6) Attempted sexual penetration → (7) Nonconsensual sexual penetration (rape). None of these are consensual because of the power differential between the clergy and the faithful.
The first time someone is brushed against by a clergy’s body may be confusing, and one may not want to jump to conclusions, dismissing the event as a mistake or the groomer accidentally tripping. But if it keeps happening or he brushes his penis against you, it is no longer a mistake (see Elizabeth Brandenburg, et al., Plaintiffs v Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North America, et al., Defendants, whereby “Father Makris brushed his penis against Brandenburg's hand”).
Sexualized touching, such as “groping” or “fondling” of the breast or other intimate areas, might be the signal that interrupts the abuse because the victim rejects the offender. However, in some cases, victims might have been entrapped to comply and yield further into performing oral sex on the clergy or giving up and yielding to sexual penetration.
Rape survivors often describe being in a negative state, and fighting would be too consuming, so they yield to rape. This is not consent, it is coercion. Some courageous survivors have also described the attention from the groomer as “feeling good,” which helps us researchers truly understand the dynamics of this insidious entrapment cycle of abuse and corroborates behavioral models of negative reinforcement. This too is coercion, and thus, nonconsensual.
For a further understanding of this process, I turn to the findings of Milgram, who conducted experiments on obedience. Milgram’s study of obedience, conducted by Stanley Milgram, explored the extent to which individuals would obey an authority figure, even when instructed to perform actions that conflicted with their conscience [4]. First, he habituated or trained his participants by pressuring them to deliver shocks with increasing intensities. He started low, not high. The experiment showed two states of behavior when people are in social settings: (1) autonomous vs. (2) agentic.
In the agentic state, people allow others to direct their actions and pass on the responsibility to the person in authority. Milgram’s study showed that this reduction in one’s autonomous agency requires the assumption that the authority figure will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions and that the person giving the guidance is perceived as a legitimate authority.
The experiment ended when the “participant” was no longer obedient. That’s when the experiment stopped. Likewise, the abuse stops when the victim rejects the clergy, and this is different for every victim. Some reject earlier; others reject after being raped and the clergy is being tried in a criminal case. Much of this has to do with many factors I will cover in future articles.
For now, a message to Orthodox Christians, especially converts: Study and understand the meaning of true obedience in the Orthodox tradition, and discern it from the abuse of power. This applies to other forms of clergy abuse, sadly rampant in the Orthodox Church of today.
To cite this article please use:
Nedelescu, H. (2026). Groomed to obey: Understanding sexual abuse by Orthodox clergy. Prosopon Healing.
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