Serial bigamist who posed as pastor had at least 10 wives he met in black churches

A man accused of serial bigamy in Houston, Texas, who posed as a pastor or bishop at small black churches around the country, was sentenced to three years in prison after he was found to have had at least 10 wives whom he married for financial gain. 

Vanessa Goussen, an assistant district attorney in Harris County, Texas, who prosecuted 51-year-old Orlando Coleman, told The New York Times that investigators believe his first marriage was in 2001 and he traveled to states including Delaware, Texas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Virginia and others to find his victims.

In an interview with KPRC 2 in December 2021, one of Coleman’s victims who asked not to be identified, said even though they never consummated their marriage, their relationship blossomed quickly. She said they got married within a month because she “thought he was a real man of God.”

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“I just thought he was a real man of God, that’s how he portrayed himself,” she told KPRC 2.

The marriage, however, did not last.

“He always wanted me to buy him stuff, but I had bills,” the woman said, noting that he also was not interested in sex with her.

“We slept in separate rooms,” she explained.

Goussen told The New York Times that after Coleman falsely introduced himself as a Protestant pastor or bishop to the women he targeted, he would then propose marriage to support his claim to be a member of the clergy.

Once the woman accepted his proposal, he would move in while the woman would be stuck paying for his housing, food and bills.

“That’s the only thing he had to offer and to validate his word — the proposal to marry — that was something big,” Goussen said. “Getting proposed to was a big gesture for these women, and that corroborated his guise that he’s a godly person.”

When Coleman left the women, some of them would file for divorce while others did not.

The fake pastor’s scheme began falling apart in 2021 when he married two women five months apart. After he left a woman he married in Virginia in 2021, he married another in Houston. According to court documents, Coleman’s wife in Houston discovered he was receiving money from the woman in Virginia and contacted her.

When she discovered they were both married to the same man, she contacted the Harris County Sheriff’s Office and they investigated and filed bigamy charges against Coleman.

In July 2023, Coleman pleaded guilty to bigamy which is a felony in Texas. He was sentenced to three years probation and the chance to have his record cleared. Two months after that, however, he was back to his con. He married a woman in Kentucky while still married to the woman in Virginia.

Prosecutors subsequently filed a motion to revoke Coleman’s probation and a judge agreed to impose the three-year sentence on March 11.

An analysis of Census Bureau data published last summer shows that black Americans were least likely to have ever married by the time they are 40.

Some 46% of black 40-year-olds reported that they had never been married, compared to 27% for Hispanics, 20% for white Americans and 17% for Asians.

While all unmarried women face the challenge of finding suitable marriage partners, one 2019 study, Mismatches in the Marriage Market, highlighted that this challenge is particularly acute for minority women and black women especially. Unmarried Women from both low socioeconomic backgrounds as well as those with high socioeconomic status also have an especially hard time finding suitable partners.

“High rates of incarceration and substantial out-marriage to white women, especially among black men, have also left many minority women without marital partners,” the study says.

Among Christian women and those of other faiths where women are expected to marry in order to pursue intimate relationships, one of the study’s authors, Joseph P. Price of Brigham Young University, said there might have to be a cultural shift from hypergamy — where women tend to marry up — to one of hypogamy — where they marry below their standards.

“Hypergamy is this pattern we observe in data in which women tend to marry men with a higher level of education. And given that women now constitute about 60 percent of the college degrees, what you’ll probably start to see in faith communities is an erosion of the hypergamy norm, in which case women are OK marrying a husband who has less education than her,” Price said. “That’s one solution to the problem within a faith community.”