VATICAN CITY
New York Post
Reuters
VATICAN CITY – A woman charged with leaking Vatican documents denied on Wednesday that she had had sex with a priest, telling a court he revealed secrets about his private life to her in a hotel room while his mother slept.
Francesca Chaouqui, 35, a married public relations consultant, and the priest, Spanish Monsignor Angel Lucio Vallejo Balda, are two of the people on trial in the so-called “Vatileaks II” case.
The case centres on the publication last year of two books based on leaked documents that depict a Vatican plagued by graft and where Pope Francis faces stiff resistance to his agenda.
Vallejo Balda admitted during an earlier hearing that he leaked documents to journalists, but Chaouqui said on Wednesday that she had not given them anything more than press articles already in the public domain.
Vallejo Balda had told the court last month that his relationship with Chaouqui had been “clearly for me as a priest compromising,” and suggested that she had seduced him in a Florence hotel room.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.