LOS ANGELES, (Reuters) – The head of a Mexico-based evangelical megachurch that claims about 5 million followers worldwide was sentenced yesterday in a Los Angeles courtroom to 16 years and eight months in prison for sexually abusing three girls. Naason Joaquin Garcia, leader and self-styled apostle of the Guadalajara-based church La Luz del Mundo (Light of the World), pleaded guilty last Friday to two counts of forcible oral copulation involving minors and performing a lewd act on a child.
Garcia, 53, entered his plea three days before he had been due to stand trial on 23 felony counts of sex crimes against children, including multiple charges of rape, conspiracy to engage in human trafficking and child pornography.
Two other church associates charged with Garcia have reached separate plea deals.
Several of his accusers, each identified in court only as Jane Doe and who are now young adults, decried the plea agreement as too lenient, saying they were not consulted in the deal that Garcia reached with the California attorney general’s office.
The church, which has publicly stood by Garcia, issued a statement on Twitter reiterating its support, saying, “our confidence in him remains intact with full knowledge of his integrity, his conduct and his work.”
It said Garcia accepted a plea deal because he believed he could not get a fair trial, and that evidence in the case “had been “suppressed, withheld, doctored and altered.”
In return for his guilty plea, prosecutors dismissed the majority of the charges he faced, including the most serious offenses, in a case that originally stemmed from allegations of five victims dating from mid-2015 to early 2018.
