Miami jury finds American founder of Haiti orphanage guilty of sexually abusing boys there

Miami Herald

February 20, 2025

By Jay Weaver

At 73, Michael Geilenfeld could have cut a plea deal to reduce his potentially long prison sentence on federal charges of sexually abusing numerous boys in Haiti.

But the American founder of a Port-au-Prince orphanage gambled on a jury trial in Miami federal court — and lost.

The 12-person jury found Geilenfeld guilty, after deliberating for only five hours on Thursday, of six counts of engaging in illicit sexual contact with minors in a foreign place and one count of traveling from Miami to Haiti for that purpose. He faces up to 30 years in prison on each of the charges at his May 5 sentencing before U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz.

Before trial started with jury selection in early February, prosecutors told Judge Leibowitz that they made a plea offer to Geilenfeld but he rejected it, asking the judge to note that in case the defendant makes any appeals or attacks on his conviction.

Geilenfeld faced six of his accusers on the witness stand over the three-week trial.

The government opened with the testimony of a young man who had lived at St. Joseph’s Home for Boys. He testified that when he was 12, Geilenfeld brought him into his bedroom to help him learn a prayer. But instead, he said, Geilenfeld sat him down in a chair and kissed him on the mouth, fondled his genitals and tried to have anal sex.

“His pants were down and his penis was rubbing against my behind,” the 28-year-old man testified through a Creole interpreter, saying that he “pushed him” and “ran outside” the owner’s bedroom. Geilenfeld later told him “not to tell anybody else about this,” the man testified.

The man was among six Haitian boys who accused the orphanage founder of sexually abusing them while they resided at St. Joseph’s between 2005 and 2010, according to an indictment filed by prosecutors Lacee Monk, Eduardo Palomo and Jessica Urban. The boys, then between 9 and 13, are now in their 20s.

Preyed on the boys: Prosecutor

Prosecutors portrayed Geilenfeld as a predator who used his powers to prey on the vulnerable Haitian boys, who came from broken families or had no parents. Geilenfeld, who founded St. Joseph’s orphanage in 1985, offered the boys a life of shelter, schooling, meals, chores and prayers that turned into a “nightmare,” they said.

Defense attorneys Raymond D’Arsey Houlihan III and Jean-Pierre Gilbert argued that Geilenfeld abused no boys at St. Joseph’s, saying that the six minor victims named in the indictment were recruited and paid off with money and the opportunity of asylum in the United States.

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