He's a priest. She was a 17-year-old dancer. He paid her to stay quiet. She refused.
Heather Jones has now revealed years of manipulation by Father Bob Sullivan
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When Heather Jones was 17, she was struggling. Her birth mother had neglected her. She didn’t have solid mentorship from any adults, which made it harder to stay in a job or pursue a formal education. So she started dancing at a club near Birmingham, Alabama. (That club let her work there despite her being underage.)
Before long, she met a customer named Bob Sullivan, who promised to change her life. They soon began what some would describe as a “sugar daddy” relationship. where he paid for clothing and restaurants… and, in exchange, she gave him “private companionship.” Sullivan said he was doing it because two people loved her: him and Jesus Christ.
He communicated with Jones on a phone he bought her, and over the years, as she became depressed and emotionally unstable, he paid for her to go to rehab. No expense seemed too lavish because he was a doctor. Or at least that’s what he told her.
She soon discovered his actual identity. He wasn’t Dr. Bob Sullivan. He was Father Bob Sullivan, and in 2023, he began working at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Homewood, not far from Birmingham, after stints at other churches in the area.
Jones, who’s now 33, worried that “others may be vulnerable to the same type of manipulation and exploitation” that she experienced.
But before she could say anything publicly, Sullivan tried to purchase her silence for $273,000. Earlier this year, Jones told the Guardian, he and his attorney sent her a non-disclosure agreement—and the money was sent to her account shortly afterwards. That came after Sullivan sent her $120,000 (via Venmo, in over 125 separate payments) in the year prior.
Where that money came from is anybody’s guess.
Jones then asked for $100,000 more:
She said the agreement “heavily favored his interests and offered no meaningful protection, healing or justice” for dealings with Sullivan she had come to regard as “exploitative and predatory”.
He never responded.
A few weeks ago, Jones, having kept all the receipts—including bank records, an email sent to her from Sullivan’s church email address, and the NDA—informed the diocese what she had been through.
Jones said she recently began law school and defied the NDA mentioned in her statement about Sullivan to the Birmingham diocese—which has an estimated membership of roughly a quarter of a million Catholics—because she was confident it would not hold up in court.
She also wrote that she considered it vital to speak out about Sullivan because “behind closed doors, his behavior toward me was not in alignment with the values he teaches”.
Earlier this month, Sullivan, who’s now 61, told the congregation he was going on “personal leave” from his position, and a week later, a local bishop named Steven Raica took over that position. In Raica’s first message to the congregation, shortly after the Guardian’s article was published, he told everyone that the allegations were being taken seriously.
He said the allegations had already been reported to local law enforcement since they involved someone who was a minor at the time it all began. But the Alabama Department of Human Resources said there was nothing they could do about it since the age of consent in the state is 16. (Not that Sullivan and Jones had a pastor-parishioner relationship, but there’s also no law in Alabama banning sexual relationships between clergy members and anyone under their purview.)
Raica added, however, that they weren’t just letting that be the end of the story. They have informed the relevant people in the Catholic hierarchy, who will decide Sullivan’s ultimate fate. After all, even if everything he did was legal on paper, the ethical problems were obvious. Plus, priests are supposed to be celibate. Plus, the Church insists it takes sexual abuse seriously, and this was clearly a relationship fraught with abuse in different forms. Sullivan won’t have any role in public ministry until the investigation has completed.
As for Jones, the Church reached out to her too:
Voicemails the diocese left with Jones—and which she shared with the Guardian—offered her free therapeutic counseling.
I’m assuming she rejected that offer.
According to additional news reports, this isn’t the first sex-related scandal involving this particular church. In 1989, the pastor was kicked out after several male victims credibly accused him of sexual abuse. (He died in 2017.)
Sullivan himself was ordained in 1993 and gave a rather interesting interview at the time:
In an interview with The Birmingham News published the day before his ordination, Sullivan said he understood and supported the church’s strict rules on celibacy for priests and teaching that sex outside marriage was a sin.
“I know what’s expected of me going in as a priest,” Sullivan said. “If I feel I’m going to be at odds with that, then I have no business going on.”
If the timeline is correct, he met Jones in 2009.
At its core, the story reveals hypocrisy at the heart of a Catholic leader’s moral authority. Sullivan weaponized his faith to manipulate and exploit a vulnerable teenager, then continued to exert power over her through their age difference and his bank account. You have to wonder how he rationalized all this hypocrisy.
Jones courageously spoke out against his actions—even using her real name to boost her credibility—and she reminds us that people placed on a moral pedestal can often hide the most disturbing secrets.
Once more, with feeling: Not. A. Drag. Queen.
Celibacy was instituted to address the problem of various institutions within the church having become hereditary fiefdoms. No legitimate heirs, no entitlement. It may have solved a problem in the eyes of the church, but it turned the priesthood into a gathering spot for pedophiles and deviants. I can only imagine what happened in all the years before these horrors began to be taken seriously by the media and civil authorities. I walked away from the church over half a century ago, never looked back, and never regretted the decision.