Pennsylvania:

Episcopal Bishop Charles E. Bennison Jr.’s church trial on the ground that he long ago concealed his brother’s sexual abuse of a teenage girl ended its first day with the victim recounting how she had hoped Bennison would report the abuse to her parents and put an end to it.

“I wanted out,” the woman, now 50, told the special Court for the Trial of a Bishop yesterday in Center City. “I wanted someone to help me.”

But Bennison, who was then rector of her parish in Upland, Calif., remained silent, she said, adding that there was “no doubt in my mind he knew” that his brother, John Bennison, the church’s youth minister, was having sex with her.

She described how twice, when she was 15, Charles Bennison had walked in on them and found them disheveled and breathless, with John Bennison visibly aroused on one occasion.

Indiana:

Ex-youth minister sentenced Apologizing for his actions in a case where he was accused of having a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl, Nathan St. Pierre told a judge on Monday that he stood before the court “broken and contrite.”

On Monday, Vanderburgh Circuit Court Judge Carl Heldt sentenced St. Pierre, 26, to seven years in the Indiana Department of Correction, to be followed by 10 years as a registered sex offender…. He was accused of having a sexual relationship with a girl who was a member of Washington Avenue Baptist Church, where he worked as a youth choir director.

Georgia:

Had the case gone to trial, it would have involved the word of a former youth minister against a 15-year-old girl he counseled who claimed he molested her. In the end, Jeremy Patrick Gable, 31, reached a plea deal with prosecutors that kept him out of prison and allowed his accuser to avoid the ordeal of testifying at trial. Gable was originally charged with sexual battery in the April 2006 incident, but pleaded no contest to a charge of child abuse instead and was sentenced by Circuit Judge Gary Sweet to five years of probation. “I’m still claiming my innocence,” Gable said, adding the plea was in his best interest. He could have faced up to five years in prison on the charge.

Gable, who worked at First Baptist Church of Port St. Lucie and counseled the girl at her mother’s request, was accused of inappropriately touching the girl while they were painting his office at the church on Northeast Solida Drive. The girl claimed he also propositioned her for oral sex.