Fifty-six year old Jamaican Pastor Kenneth Blake will be sentenced on October 18 after he pleaded guilty Monday to having sex on several occasions with a 12-year-old child more than three years ago.
The Gleaner newspaper reported that for the last two years, Blake had f denied having sex with the child, who gave birth to a boy on November 30, 2017.
The pastor of the Harvest Temple Apostolic Church has now pleaded guilty to grievous sexual assault, having sex with a person under 16 years old and sexual touching when he appeared in the Home Circuit Court in downtown Kingston.
Blake was arrested and charged in August 2017 by detectives assigned to the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse and the charges were filed against him after the child gave investigators a detailed statement in which she complained that Blake had sex with her when she was 12 years old.
She said that the first sexual encounter occurred in 2015, when the pastor gave her older sister money to go downtown and “buy some things” . She said after the encounter, the pastor began giving her gifts to keep quiet about their sexual encounters.
But when she became pregnant in August 2017 she confessed to her mother, but Blake denied the accusations, even after two DNA tests found that there was a 99.9 per cent chance he could not be excluded as the father.
The second test was done at a private institution chosen by Blake after he complained that the first test, conducted at the Government Forensic Laboratory, was “tainted”.
He told the court then that the accusations were part of an extortion attempt by the child’s mother.
Independent Caribbean News 