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	New Abuse Charges Filed against Priest Associated Press, carried in Contra Costa Times January 4, 2007 http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/state/16381085.htm Los Angeles - A defrocked priest already facing child molestation charges was accused Wednesday of sodomizing a second boy who was a parishioner in the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese in the 1990s. An amended felony complaint filed in Superior Court alleges that Michael Stephen Baker had sex with a boy from March 1996 to September 1998, beginning when the youth was 15 years old. "The priest allegedly sexually molested him in the church rectory" and sodomized him while he was unconscious during a weekend trip in the summer of 1996, said Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office. Baker gave the boy a cup of hot chocolate and sodomized him after he fell asleep, prosecutors contend. "Over the next two years, Baker allegedly visited him and sexually molested him," Robison said. Prosecutors contend that during a discussion in the rectory, Baker gave the boy a ring with a red stone emblazoned with a cross "as a symbol of their special friendship," then pricked and joined their bleeding fingers, telling the boy "that they were joined for life," according to a court document. A few minutes later, Baker fondled the boy, prosecutors contend. The boy, now in his 20s, did not come forward to make the accusations but was discovered during an investigation, she said. His name was withheld. Baker was scheduled to be arraigned today on the new charges, which include one count of oral copulation of a person under 18, one count of sexual penetration of an unconscious person with a foreign object and three counts of sodomy of a person under 18. A call to Baker's attorney seeking comment was not immediately returned. Baker, 59, already has pleaded not guilty to eight acts of oral copulation involving a boy over a period ending in 1995, while the priest was living at a Pico Rivera rectory. Prosecutors contend he molested the boy for more than a decade, beginning at age 7. The combined charges carry a sentence of 19 years in state prison. Baker was arrested in January when he returned from a vacation in Thailand. Baker's case is the latest involving allegations of clergy abuse that have tarnished the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation's largest. On Dec. 1, the archdiocese said it would pay $60 million to settle 45 lawsuits by people who said they were abused by priests, but as many as 485 suits are still pending.
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