A jury in Harris County, Texas, has found pastor Ralph Douglas West II liable for transmitting genital herpes to a woman whom he met through Facebook. West has been ordered to pay $2.45 million in damages.
West is the son of Ralph Douglas West Sr., who is the founding pastor of The Church Without Walls, a multisite church in Houston. As of Friday morning, the younger West was listed on the church’s website as the campus pastor of the location on Eldridge Parkway.
Several pages on the church’s website have since been made inactive, including the staff page.
According to the plaintiff, she contracted herpes after having unprotected se x with West in March 2018. The claims that West had the STD, knew about it, and didn’t tell the plaintiff about it until after she had contracted it are corroborated by the timing of the plaintiff’s positive test, as well as private communications between her and West.
Shaun Murphy, the plaintiff’s attorney, told Click2Houston, “She got an outbreak two or three days [after having s ex with West] and then went and got tested. From there, through the medical records, we were able to identify that he was the source of it, in part, because she hadn’t been with anybody else, she had a prior negative test.”
“When she asks, ‘Where did this come from?’ His response was, his son’s mother,” Murphy went on to say. “[West] never once denied that he had it or that he knew he had it.”
Incriminating emails between the two were offered as supporting evidence.
The jury ruled that West is required to pay $1,450,000 in compensatory damages and $1,000,000 in exemplary/punitive damages—adding up to $2.45 million in total.
The ruling came after a three-day trial and nearly seven hours of deliberation, according to Yahoo News.
Murphy said his client is pleased with the verdict, not only for the financial compensation but also because she wants to raise awareness about the need for accountability for people who knowingly infect romantic partners with se xu ally transmitted diseases.
“I suspect there are many people who don’t know that in every state in the U.S.,” Murphy said, “it is unlawful for a person who knows they have a se xua lly transmitted disease to communicate the disease to another person through sexual contact or to even have se xu al contact with another person unless they have informed their partner that they are infected with a se xua lly transmitted disease.”
Murphy added, “In fact, it is considered fraud to knowingly endanger another person in this way, which exposes the person who transmits the STD to potential civil liability for substantial monetary damages.”
Earlier this year, The Church Without Walls celebrated 20 years of West’s preaching at the church.
ChurchLeaders has reached out to The Church Without Walls for comment and will update this article in the event of its reply.