Strange clerical sex scandals have been around a long time...

This is from a review in the New York Times of a book about a clerical sex scandal from Kant's home town Konigsberg (which happened in the early to mid 19th century, decades after he died, so no chance he was involved in any way!):

As a longhaired, charismatic figure with markedly progressive notions about gender relations, Ebel had become a trusted confidant to his women parishioners, sometimes to the annoyance of the powerful men in their lives. One of these men, the incredibly named Count Finck von Finckenstein, accused Ebel of causing the death of two girls by excessive arousal.

“These are the dangers that threaten all girls who join the Ebel group,” Finckenstein declared. “And this is why only women or male hermaphrodites are interested in joining it.” Diestel, coming to the aid of his friend Ebel, sent a furious letter to Finckenstein, calling him a “miserable lying brat” whose “disgraceful libels can only have been fabricated in the latrine of a disgraceful worldview.”

Soon the two preachers were on trial for sexual misconduct, breach of duty and founding an illegal sect. Clark emphasizes that the accusations of sexual depravity had no grounding in reality. The most fervent of Ebel’s detractors were “men with a reputation for moral waywardness,” as Clark puts it. Finckenstein accused Ebel of instructing him to have sex in Ebel’s presence, which turned out to be a matter of sheer projection: Finckenstein had previously told his wife that he wanted Ebel present when he made love to her. Another anti-Ebelian, a doctor, had a “propensity to press unwanted intimacies upon the women in his care.”

Clark proposes a number of reasons that Ebel became a target, including the “queerness of his persona.” For Ebel’s detractors, his manners and sensitivity were an unacceptable assault on the rigid binaries of the patriarchal order. The gentle Ebel was married with children, but his critics cast him as a fey home-wrecker who plied his lady parishioners with dangerous ideas. Finckenstein described him as a “hermaphrodite.”

 The book is relatively short apparently, as is the review, and the origin of it is given as this:

In the 1990s, he came across some files detailing a sex scandal that rippled through the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) between 1835 and 1842. Two Lutheran priests were brought to trial and sent to prison, though they were exonerated of the most salacious charges. 

In a prefatory note, Clark suggests what drew him so insistently to this particular micro-historical moment was how these priests were victims of scurrilous rumors long before the advent of mass communications and social media. He goes on to emphasize the episode’s “fabular power,” adding coyly, “Resemblances to present-day persons and situations, though not intended, cannot be ruled out.” 

The difference with today, of course, is the speed with which false rumours spread via technology, and (I wonder?) perhaps the difficulty of dislodging a rumour with later truth.