. . . Walter Chahwanda claimed to be a ‘man of God’ but was today told by a judge that he was ‘nothing of the sort’
A church pastor who claimed to be a “man of God” was told that he was “nothing of the sort” by a judge as he was locked up for subjecting a string of young women and girls to vile sexual abuse.
Walter Chahwanda, the founder of Sound of Dominion Church in Speke, was seen as a “charismatic” and “highly respected church leader”, as well as a being a male beauty pageant winner.
But he abused his position of power in order to satisfy his perverse secret “obsession of being exposed”, offering his victims McDonald’s food and cash to out his exploitative behaviour after bombarding them with unwanted explicit images. While the dad-of-two attempted to brush his crimes off as merely being “naughty role play”, he left one teenager suicidal after sexually abusing her during a musical rehearsal and “severely damaged” the lives of seven others.
David Watson, prosecuting, told Liverpool Crown Court today, Friday: “The evidence suggests that this defendant used his prominent role within the Apostolic Faith Mission Church to target young female members across the country by sending unsolicited indecent images of himself masturbating.
He was indiscriminate as to whether they were sent to young adults or children, aged 14 to 15 years old.
“The evidence suggested that the sending of images was bound up in the defendant’s well documented sexual obsession of being exposed online. Victims were encouraged, offered rewards and, one one occasion, threatened to disseminate those images.”
A trial previously heard that Chahwanda targeted victims as far afield as Manchester, South Yorkshire, the East Midlands and Kent over the course of more than three years after meeting them via the church, typically by sending unwanted intimate sexual images of himself. Most disturbingly, he was even said to have physically abused one young teenager during a music practice and “refused to stop, despite warnings from those within the church community”, although his position of power in the organisation “effectively allowed him to do as he pleased”.
Chahwanda contacted many of the girls and women via Snapchat and Instagram before engaging them in sexualised conversations.
These chats would then suddenly be peppered with the intimate pictures and videos, often showing him performing sexual acts upon himself, accompanying one such clip sent to another teenage girl with the message: “Did you like that?”
This would also bizarrely see him “goad” his victims into revealing his behaviour and imploring them to “expose him”, with the “thought of being caught appearing to be part of his sexual fantasies”.
He was even alleged to have offered a 16-year-old complainant cash in order to do so via a later deleted Snapchat account which he had set up under the guise of a fictitious woman and sought to bribe a 17-year-old girl with food from McDonald’s.
Chahwanda meanwhile seemingly set up a Twitter account entitled “Naughty Pastor” and an Instagram page named “All Coming Out Now” for these same purposes and, alarmingly, ordered the girl who he repeatedly sexually assaulted to write “I’m a little slut” in her diary, where she also penned a suicide note.
However, the musician and published author would ultimately be arrested in February 2024 when the father of one of the complainants reported him to the NSPCC and several others came forward to police.
But Chahwanda, who told the jury that he was a beauty pageant winning male model, denied the allegations under interview and dismissed his online activities as being “naughty role play”. The now 34-year-old continues to deny his guilt.
Chahwanda has one previous conviction for four offences, receiving a suspended prison sentence in 2022 for harassment and three counts of disclosing private sexual photographs.
He was also cautioned for outraging public decency in 2011 after “taking part in sexual activity in public with a partner”.
Richard Reynolds, defending, told the court: “There has been substantial time since a lot of this offending.
This man’s now proven predilection towards children was not the whole of his life. Much of his life has been doing good work and doing his best to promote things which he religiously believed were good.
“This was not a man who started as a paedophile and a man who went into a church to be a paedophile. Rather, that was where his predilection came into play.
“He has otherwise dedicated a substantial part of his life to doing good and helping others.—-liverpoolecho.
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