Two women accuse former Mississippi counselor of sexual attacks
By Jerry Mitchell | Originally published by Mississippi Today
One woman in Hattiesburg and another in Louisiana have reported to law enforcement that former Mississippi counselor Wade Wicht sexually assaulted them, records show.
In July, Wicht’s former patient, Kimberly Cuellar, filed her complaint with the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office, accusing him of raping her at her family’s home in Louisiana in 2023. She previously told Mississippi Today about the alleged assault.
On Tuesday, one of Wicht’s former co-workers filed a sworn statement with the Hattiesburg Police Department, accusing him of sexual battery. Mississippi Today does not identify victims of alleged sexual assault without their permission.
Cuellar and two other women reported alleged assaults to Mississippi authorities, but no indictments came. The complaint filed Tuesday is a fourth woman.
Wicht did not respond to email, text and phone call requests for comments. He is no longer being represented by his former attorney, and that attorney said he does not know whether Wicht has new representation. Wicht has previously declined to comment on the women’s allegations.
Cuellar told Mississippi Today she still suffers from flashbacks and trauma.
“He’s living free while his victims are paying for everything he did,” she said. “He’s living out his dream while we’re probably going to have therapy the rest of our lives. It’s just not fair he’s getting away with all this crap he put us through.”
She is one of three former patients who have accused Wicht of manipulating them and sexually abusing them.
In the time since those allegations became public, these women have pushed for legislation that would make it a crime in Mississippi for mental health professionals to have sexual contact with their patients.
More than half the states have already done that. The American Counseling Association has long banned sexual or romantic counselor-client relationships.
In 2023, the Mississippi House passed a bill that would have made it a crime for therapists, clergy, doctors and nurses to have sexual contact with those they treat or counsel. But the bill died in the Senate Judiciary B Committee after some senators questioned the need for a law.
This year, lawmakers introduced bills that would have made psychotherapists’ “sexual misconduct with a client” a crime, but both died in committee.
“Each year, if it can make more progress, that’s something,” said Jenny Green, another former patient who has accused Wicht of abuse.
“Without consequences, the behaviors aren’t going to change,” she said. “We see it with the Jeffrey Epstein case. We see it when teachers are allowed to sleep with their students or bosses with their employees. In the end, everybody’s going to get hurt, including the perpetrators, who are often suffering from a deeper wound that hasn’t healed.
The Mississippi Board of Examiners for Licensed Professional Counselors, which oversees and licenses counselors, bars sexual contact between a counselor and a former patient for five years.
In 2022, after Wicht admitted he had sex with Cuellar and another former patient, he surrendered his license to the board.
“What I did was wrong, and I disclosed this behavior to my wife just two weeks ago,” he wrote in a letter to the board. “I have also disclosed (this) to my family, church, and counseling staff.”
In an April 2022 letter, he admitted to “moral failures and ethical violations in my personal and professional life.”
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In 2019, Cuellar, then 26, said she went to see the 44-year-old Wicht for help because of the trauma she had suffered in a cult and an abusive relationship.
Instead of helping her, she said he used his power to groom her, touch her sexually and begin a sexual relationship with her — all while continuing to serve as her therapist.
“When you … started touching me, molesting me, I couldn’t believe it,” she wrote to him in text exchanges she shared with Mississippi Today. “It went on for so long. I could barely breathe.”
For the next several months, he continued to conduct therapy sessions with her, and he continued to have sex with her, she said.
After this, he stopped counseling her, she said, but the relationship continued because she said she remained under his spell.
By March 2023, she said she had repaired her family relationships, moved in with her mother and cut off her sexual relationship with Wicht, telling him that the only way they could have sex again would be if they were married.
Months later, he visited. That night at her mother’s home, she said she told him she was exhausted and going straight to sleep, only to wake up to “him on top of me.”
In text message exchanges, she told him she felt “very violated” and “if I was awake, you know I would have not said yes to that.”
He responded, “Omgoodness, what??!! That is horrific!!! I am so incredibly sorry that’s how you experienced it. … What you’re accusing me of is criminal, Kimberly!”
“You moved my shorts, and you absolutely tried to get inside me,” she texted him.
“I touched you with my fingers, and I was touching myself,” he responded. “That’s what went on. I was NOT trying to have sex with you while you were sleeping.”
She told him “no” multiple times and, when he refused to stop, she grabbed him, she wrote. “Did you really stop? Not really. You then touched me without consent while you ejaculated on my body after all the no’s I had given.”
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On July 2, Cuellar went to the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office and accused Wicht of third-degree rape on July 11, 2023. Deputies are investigating.
Under that law, rape occurs when the sexual act takes place without the consent of the victim or “when the victim is incapable of resisting” and “the offender knew or should have known of the victim’s incapacity.”
Anyone convicted “shall be imprisoned at hard labor, without benefit of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence, for not more than 25 years,” according to the statute, which allows victims a decade to seek charges.
On Tuesday, Wicht’s former co-worker wrote in her sworn statement to Hattiesburg police that despite repeatedly telling him she never wanted anal sex, he “penetrated me anally on at least eight occasions” between 2017 and 2021. “Wade characterized the anal penetration as accidental,” she wrote. “I tried to believe him.”
Another of Wicht’s former patients, Jennie Cade, worked for him at his Hattiesburg business, Alley Cats Axe Throwing Co. She said after Cuellar told her that Wicht had raped her, she confronted Wicht.
Cade said she asked him if Cuellar was lying, and Wicht replied no. Cade said he corroborated Cuellar’s story, including that he had touched her sexually while she slept.
When he downplayed all of what happened, saying he was “overcome with love,” Cade said she replied, “You need to call this what it is — rape.”
After those words, “he shut down hard,” she said. “I quit after that. I had to get out of there.”
On Thursday, Cade said a detective for the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office questioned her about her conversation with Wicht.
Cuellar, Cade and Green have previously accused Wicht of sexually abusing them in Mississippi, but grand juries didn’t indict him.
Green recently ran into one of the grand jury members, she said. “With tears in his eyes, he told me he believed me.”
He expressed sorrow that the two-year statute of limitations on sexual assault had expired. What made the situation frustrating for Green is she had filed her criminal complaint with Hattiesburg police a month before the time ran out, records show.
Green said she can’t understand why the timeline to report sexual assault is so short when it takes so long for victims to deal with such trauma. “This legal loophole helps predators and hurts victims.”
The timeline makes even less sense, she said, when one realizes that rape has no statute of limitations in Mississippi.
Victims preyed on by these monsters typically get peppered with questions by authorities, she said.
“If I called 911 about a burglary at my house, the police wouldn’t say, ‘Well, your door was unlocked. Don’t you think you were inviting them in?’ Or if I called, saying my house was on fire, the firemen wouldn’t enter and say, ‘You were cooking on your stove. You asked for it,’” she said. “I don’t understand why we are the one victim who is questioned.”
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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