ON CREDIBILITY
There needs to be just a huge amount of awareness that children who are troubled are troubled for a reason.
Associate Professor Carolyn Quadrio, psychiatrist, in her evidence to the Royal Commission
One of the things that has always bugged me a little by the response to the 7.30 story on Pell was that Tyack was the clincher. The part of the story that made people convinced that the Pell allegations were true. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, ‘That guy at the surf club was so credible’, ‘He’s got no reason to lie’, ‘That surf club man is what made me believe your story’, then I would have been able to buy myself a pretty fancy frock.
The reason it stuck in my craw was that the corollary of what was said about Tyack was that Lyndon Monument, Damian Dignan and Phil Scott were not, prima facie, credible. And that was because of their criminal convictions and their histories of substance abuse. People certainly pitied them and ultimately we had far more positive responses to them than negative—their community, for instance, embraced them after the story went to air. That was a great comfort to us, that they were not pilloried, given the leap of faith they took to go on our program. But the overarching response was that without Tyack (and also another deeply ‘credible’ witness, another ‘good man’, Darren Mooney), it would have been more difficult to get the public to believe them.
At the other end of the spectrum, Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt tried to use the perceived lack of credibility as part of an argument which accused the ABC of bias against Pell. He pointed to Monument’s criminal record and ‘history of psychiatric illness’ as evidence of why Monument’s claims were dubious. It was the same approach adopted by his newspaper during the Southwell Inquiry in 2002, after the private investigators acting for the Pell camp did their best work in exposing Scott with their ‘Altar Boy’s Life of Crime’ headline. But before anyone jumps to a conspiracy theory, it was also the same newspaper that broke the story that there was a police investigation at all.
Of course, I never sought to pretend that Monument didn’t have a chequered past—I declared it up front and urged him in our interview to go through the humiliation of telling me just how badly he had behaved. He did it willingly—didn’t give it a second thought. He professed he had nothing to hide. But as I wish to explore in this chapter, the fact that someone has had a criminal history tied to drug abuse and depression can in fact suggest probable childhood sexual abuse, rather than rule it out.
The fact that it is often used by criminal defence barristers as a way of trying to discredit complainants is all too convenient for their clients, the paedophiles, who have destroyed children’s trust and self-esteem. Child abusers who have condemned those kids to a life of trauma can tip their hats to silks who then exploit the effects of that trauma to devastating effect under cross-examination. Ballarat is full of people who have endured horrendous cross-examination. And that’s the people who have survived and haven’t become part of the suicide or premature death toll. The ones that the likes of Kevin Carson hasn’t had to scrape out of baths or cut down from nooses strung up in their rafters.
In May 2015, a psychiatrist called Associate Professor Carolyn Quadrio from the University of New South Wales gave evidence to the Royal Commission. Quadrio is perhaps the country’s most experienced practitioner on the impact of childhood sexual abuse throughout a victim’s life. The Commission had such confidence in Quadrio’s expertise, it devoted an entire day to her evidence. Quadrio was particularly well-qualified to explore what happens to a child’s mind and behaviour when the perpetrator is a member of the clergy. As far back as the 1980s, when clergy abuse was only first becoming a topic of discussion, she conducted a landmark study on a group of thirty-two men abused by the Christian Brothers at Bindoon in Western Australia.
I flew to Sydney to interview Quadrio in her Randwick office for the 7.30 Pell story and before I did, I read the transcript of her day of evidence. I read it open-mouthed. The trajectory she described could have been written about Lyndon Monument. It made me understand Monument and Dignan so much better. And remember that both men always allege that they were twice abused, by two adults they had trusted. Not to mention the beltings and humiliation they and their classmates have told me they routinely received at St Alipius too. It made me realise how utterly convenient it is for clergy abusers that their victims’ minds become so scrambled. It made me sad and angry for all the survivors that I know.
Quadrio says that when a member of the clergy abuses a child, it can be more profoundly unsettling for the victim than when it is an ordinary member of the community. She tells me that the trauma of betrayal itself can be more traumatic than the memory of the physical act of sexual abuse. ‘Little children obviously grow up seeing adults as being powerful and knowing right and wrong,’ Quadrio says. ‘They look up to them and that’s where children get their values and ideas from. That’s true of all children, but when the people you are looking up to are people in the Church, it gets another dimension again.’ In the case of someone like Pell, who was held up as a sort of princely figure in the town, that sense of awe and wonderment is compounded.
She explained to the Royal Commission that it’s the idea of clergy, to young and unsophisticated minds, as ‘god-like’ creatures. ‘Especially young children see a priest or a member of the clergy as someone who is close to God, really, and so, the sense of betrayal is particularly shattering because it’s kind of like, not just one bad person, but it feels like, well, maybe God’s bad. The loss of faith and shattering of the belief is really very damaging to a child. If a child grows up feeling, well, you can’t trust anybody and everybody’s bad, and even God’s bad, that’s what I mean about the profound characterological damage that can have.
‘So abuse by members of the clergy is very profound betrayal trauma,’ Quadrio says. ‘You can imagine that if perhaps one parent is abusing you, there is a lot of betrayal trauma involved in that, but you can console yourself that you’re just unlucky to have a bad parent and all the other people in the world are okay.
‘But if it’s a member of the Church, then that becomes something that’s even more profound because there’s a sense of “these are good people, these are the people who know right from wrong” … The child’s idea of right and wrong and trust and their world view, if you like, is completely shattered and that’s a really important part of your psychology—it’s like knowing that the sun will come up in the morning and go down in the evening.
‘When an infant cries and a parent appears and picks them up and cuddles them and feeds them and comforts them, they learn their sense of trust and that “there are people in the world who will take care of me, the world is a good place”.’ She says that the idea of ‘I’m okay, you’re okay’,—the trust in the goodness of the people responsible for a person, is ‘a very fundamental level of psychology’. ‘It’s the basic building blocks of the personality,’ Quadrio says. ‘If you don’t have that basic sense of trust in the world, then it’s really hard to build on that foundation.’
Quadrio makes the point that if a child’s family, or entire community—as in the case of Catholic Ballarat—is strongly affiliated with a religion and the clergy that represent it, often when they make disclosures they get a ‘bad reception’ and are ‘told they are lying, it can’t be true’. Such was the case with Dignan’s mother beating him around the face with the shoe. Monument saw children at St Alipius who were given savage beltings by their parents for disclosing rape. As he told me, some of those people are not here today. Wayne Brennan, beaten senseless by his father and not believed by his mother after he said Pell told them he was lying about sexual abuse, took it to his untimely grave. ‘The negative response from family and community can really compound the damage enormously,’ Quadrio says.
‘The child’s sense of the world becomes damaged,’ she says. ‘It becomes completely destroyed in an environment like that. It’s like, everyone’s living a lie. What’s true? What’s real? What’s reliable? What’s good? What’s bad? If everyone’s living a lie, a child’s view of the world is terribly distorted.’
I keep coming back to Monument’s overarching feeling that all he wants is for Pell to look him in the eye and admit what Monument says he did. To admit that like Monument, he’s made some mistakes, but just to own up to what Monument says are his lies. Or for Scott not being interested in a criminal prosecution, but just wanting Pell in the room, and man to man, to say ‘Sorry, I did this’. And then there is The Kid, who told me he had ‘trust issues’ and couldn’t bear to not know how I found him. The idea that someone had broken his trust was all too much for him because at a fundamental time in his development, his trust in the world was shattered.
Through her many years of practice and through coming to grips with the local and international research, Quadrio has discovered that there is a distinct difference between the way that little boys respond to abuse, compared with that of little girls. Little boys, she says, tend to ‘act out’ as a way of dealing with the trauma they are suffering, becoming ‘rebellious, naughty or defiant’, whereas, on the whole, little girls tend to cope by ‘being sad, upset, withdrawing’.
‘A little boy whose trust has been destroyed, who has learned to feel, well, “maybe I’m not such a good person and maybe I can’t trust the world and maybe the world is bad and maybe the world sucks”,’ she explains. The rebellion and defiance, often not linked with child sexual abuse because they have not disclosed it, is ‘very quickly labelled as “bad behaviour”’. ‘And you get this really unfortunate characterisation that little boys will suffer from, that they’re “bad”. Once the boy acquires that label, it becomes a snowball effect—the more he’s treated as bad, the angrier he gets.’ She says by the time these boys finish primary school, typically, their teachers, their parents, their community is pretty sick of them. Everyone has started to give up on them and they are just seen as naughty boys.
‘By the time a boy is about eleven and if he’s gotten big and angry, it’s very just for people to see him as bad and he gets propelled down that track and it’s really hard to turn it around …’ She says often the children are labelled as having, for instance, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or Oppositional Defiance Disorder. ‘And by teenage years, boys like this are seen as delinquents.’ She says the juvenile justice system is full of boys like this.
Quadrio believes part of the cause of this is the ‘macho’ culture, which demands that boys be ‘tough’ and cope with their problems and not show that they are upset—lest they be seen as ‘sissies’ or ‘sooks’. ‘And so, more and more, boys will be propelled along the path of being tough and maybe being aggressive and being violent. The older they get, the less sympathy they get, until you get to the prison situation, where you see huge numbers of men who have been seriously abused during their childhood but are now simply labelled as “bad”.’
Quadrio, who worked in prisons for many years, says the research and her own experience shows ‘60 to 80 per cent’ of men in prisons have been abused as children—whether it be physical or sexual abuse. ‘There needs to be just a huge amount of awareness that children who are troubled are troubled for a reason. There’s so much gobbledygook going on about this disorder or that disorder, or this allergy or that allergy or whatever, and sometimes it is, but an awful lot of child distress gets ignored or covered up.’
The common trajectory for little girls is different but also painful. On the whole, Quadrio says, little girls tend to internalise the abuse. And so in later years, they can become beset with, for instance, eating disorders, they will self-harm, they may make poor choices in life partners—often choosing dominant or abusive men—or may be drawn to prostitution; they will become oversexed or sexually insecure, they will develop borderline personality and anxiety disorders, and, like male survivors, they often have issues with substance abuse.
‘In our culture where, I’m afraid, substance abuse is seen as a way that we cope … it soon becomes a pattern,’ Quadrio says. While, she says, 20 to 40 per cent of survivors of childhood sexual abuse are, somehow, resilient and manage to keep their lives together—the Darren Mooneys of this world, for instance—60 to 80 per cent do not have this resilience. And for them, the big problems are depression, substance abuse and dysfunctional relationships. ‘And you see this very sad trajectory that people get on of getting into trouble because of substance abuse, dropping out of school because of substance abuse, not succeeding in employment, having dysfunctional relationships, having relationship breakdowns, having a trajectory which is downward, really.’
Mooney says to me that while he appears extraordinarily resilient and together, his survival is a day-by-day issue. ‘My wife says it’s something that’s there in my mind all the time,’ Mooney says. His particular way of coping with it is exercise—triathlons, for instance, and throwing himself into his work as a school principal.
Mooney and his friends from Brother Gerald Fitzgerald’s class at St Alipius in Grade 3 have a reunion every year. Many are struggling. The Grade 3 reunion often goes a bit pear-shaped as they drown their sorrows in alcohol. ‘It will never leave us,’ he says. He has friends who are not as resilient as him—some have turned to alcohol and drugs, and have had trouble with the law. Some of them, he says, are ‘train wrecks’. Some, like Craig Monument, are dead. But, Mooney says, inside, he feels just the same as them. It’s an eternal struggle.
Chris O’Connor is a retired policeman who was formerly detective senior sergeant in charge of the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Squad. He was at the vanguard of prosecuting clergy abusers after it first became apparent in the 1980s and 1990s that there was a huge systemic problem in the Catholic Church.
He says it was not uncommon for many of the people he came across who were involved in crimes related to prostitution, alcohol abuse and drug-taking to be survivors of childhood abuse. O’Connor says, ‘In my experience, all victims of this type of crime as children will have some aspect of their development adversely affected. It will obviously vary in degrees, but if nothing else, childhood innocence or developing concepts of trust are severely distorted.’ He would often encounter young people who either became abusive, challenging police to a verbal or physical confrontation, or disengaged completely and maintained a contemptuous silence.
The general assumption was that they reflected poor social skills and upbringings. But significantly, he says, it often transpired that many of these angry youngsters were victims of child sexual exploitation. ‘Remove the behaviour and layer of bravado and what you have got is this scared little child. But the bravado often introduces them to violence.’ While he says that sexual assault is often the initial catalyst for anti-social behaviour, as you age, you must also accept that you do enter ‘the realm of adult choice’.
‘What happened to these people is not something in isolation—what they are doing now can be relevant to what happened to them as children. In fact, it may be the cause. But they are still two separate issues,’ he says, arguing that alleged lack of ‘credibility’ cannot be imputed just because a child exploitation survivor has a history of drugs and crime.
However understanding O’Connor may be about the foibles of the child victims turned adult substance abusers he met in his work, they rarely receive the same compassion when it comes to finding themselves up against a seasoned silk in a courtroom. And the Catholic Church likes to stump up for a classy sort of barrister.
For example, Robert Richter, QC, who, it’s reported, has been engaged by His Eminence to defend the child sexual allegations against him. Richter pulled off the legal defence of the century by getting an acquittal for one Mick Gatto for the murder of Andrew Veniamin, during the underworld wars of the early 2000s. He is precisely what you want when you are accused of a very serious crime.
I remember speaking to a lawyer involved in Royal Commission proceedings, who said that he felt a sense of frustration when he saw complainants come into the Commission, because, he said, it ‘lulls them into a false sense of security’. ‘They think [if they have not already been through a court process] that this is what they are going to encounter, when in reality it is nothing like that. I feel like we’re throwing them to the wolves.’
‘When powerful people prolong legal processes,’ Quadrio says, ‘you can exhaust the victim. You exhaust them in terms of their resources, you exhaust them psychologically. Over time, their support systems break down. Everyone begins to suffer from fatigue and their resources are being drained and so people begin to give up.’
That’s precisely what happened to Phil Scott, the complainant in the Southwell Inquiry. When I went to see him at his home in inner Melbourne in May 2015, Scott answered the door politely. He smiled and asked me what I wanted. Even when I said I was a journalist, he did not seem bothered—which surprised me. But then it seemed to dawn on him. As the realisation skated across his face, it darkened, visibly. ‘Is this about Pell? I’ve got nothing to say about him. Or that. Nothing. Ever. You’re lucky my wife didn’t answer, you’d have a piece of her mind.’ Father Bob Maguire told me that reopening the wound of the public humiliation Scott suffered is just too painful. He vowed never to open it again. At Scott’s home, I scrambled and tried to explain to him that the other complainants had come forward, that I understood him, that he was not alone this time. But he glowered. The trauma of the Southwell Inquiry, the private investigators, the silks, the leaking to the Herald Sun had, as Maguire said, retraumatised him. As his solicitor Peter Ward, told me, ‘I think he built himself up, suffered the unfair disclosures in the media, went through that process, felt he had a moral victory [because Southwell said he believed both Pell and Scott] and does not want to go through any of it again.’
For Pell’s legal team, the rough and tumble was all part of the game. They won. I know some of them honestly believed Scott was making it up. They thought that because people do. They thought it for the same reasons that everyone thought Les Tyack was the clincher. People think someone who went off the rails isn’t credible. The Quadrio view, however well researched and however correct, is still not widespread and certainly was not in 2002.
Of course, through it all, Pell’s solicitor is Richard Leder. In one of those strange twists of fate, Leder was my former solicitor when I was at Channel Seven, with whom I’d worked long and hard; he was a lawyer who went above and beyond—calls after hours, good advice about even non-legal matters. I liked him very much.
When I contacted Pell’s media person in Sydney, Katrina Lee, to request an interview with the Cardinal for the 7.30 story, Leder became involved immediately. The media advisor initially came back to me, declining an interview. She wanted to know two things and two things only: when and where the incidents had taken place. She wanted exact dates. ‘Cast your mind back to your childhood,’ I said. ‘Can you remember exact dates on which things happened?’ She quipped that in the Royal Commission, some of the complainants had given exact dates. I answered that the complainants had only given Victoria Police approximate dates—the summer of 1978–79, for instance. I told Lee I would send her an email with a list of the dates. I did so. I heard nothing back by the deadline I had given, then suddenly a letter arrived from Leder, on behalf of the Cardinal, with a statement denying the allegations. This is what the statement said:
Cardinal Pell will not be giving an interview to the ABC 7.30 Report. He emphatically and unequivocally rejects any allegations of sexual abuse against him.
The Cardinal’s conduct has been repeatedly scrutinized over many years, including before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Organisations and according to leaked reports, by Victorian Police’s SANO Taskforce.
One of the claims dates back to the early 60s which was the subject of an exhaustive inquiry in 2002 by a former Supreme Court Judge Alec Southwell, who found the allegations were not substantiated.
The Cardinal does not wish to cause any distress to any victim of abuse. However, claims that he has sexually abused anyone, in any place, at any time are totally untrue and completely wrong.
He denies the allegations absolutely and says that they, and any acceptance of them by the ABC, are nothing more than a scandalous smear campaign which appears to be championed by the ABC. If there was any credibility in any of those claims, they would have been pursued by the Royal Commission by now.
Pause there for a moment. This last point is not true. As the Cardinal should have known, allegations about him—as an individual—offending, are outside the Royal Commission’s terms of reference. The Commission has no power to investigate them and it passes any allegations of this sort on to the appropriate state police—in Victoria, Taskforce SANO. The Cardinal’s statement continued:
In February this year media outlets carried stories of purported allegations against the Cardinal which were being investigated by the SANO Taskforce.
However, no request has been made to interview Cardinal Pell nor has he received any details of these claims from the police or anyone. In late May, the Cardinal was advised by the SANO Taskforce that there had been no change in the status of the investigation since the leaks were first reported.
When Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton was asked in June this year if there were any plans to speak with Cardinal Pell in Rome he replied ‘… it has not been put as necessary to me at this point in time’.
The Cardinal then returned to a tried and true formula—reminding the ABC of the fact that he was:
… the first Catholic Bishop to confront the evil of clerical child sexual abuse and implement the first program to assist victims when he introduced the Melbourne Response in 1996. He has apologised to victims of abuse on behalf of the Church many times and has met with many victims personally.
[The Cardinal] expresses regret that the sensationalist attention given to these unfounded and untrue claims might cause distress to genuine victims and he encourages anyone with any legitimate complaint to pursue it through the correct channels.
If there is any genuine victim who was caused distress by the story, I am yet to meet them. Every single one of the dozens of survivors and family members I have spoken to since the story went to air has congratulated me on it and most said it did not surprise them at all. One of the most common things said was ‘about time’. If Pell thinks he is at the vanguard of helping survivors of child sexual abuse, how come I can’t find any who agree?
When I received the statement that day, three primary things occurred to me. The first was they didn’t understand the Royal Commission’s terms of reference. That was telling and a bit odd. The second was that the only things they were interested in were the dates and the places. The reason for this, I can only assume, is that the Cardinal had been successful on previous occasions at proving or suggesting that he was elsewhere on dates provided.
A classic example of that was a man known to the Royal Commission as ‘BWE’ who alleged that Pell said in 1983 ‘Gerry’s rooting boys again’ (a supposed reference to Gerald Ridsdale) to another priest, Frank Madden, in the sacristy of Ballarat’s St Patrick’s Cathedral when BWE said Pell was concelebrating a requiem mass for a lady from Bungaree. The Cardinal, who was particularly affronted at this evidence, was able to show diary notes which he says showed he wasn’t there and there were no mass records saying the two priests had ever concelebrated mass. I have studied those diary notes carefully. There wasn’t a lady from Bungaree buried a few days before a football final, as BWE had alleged. Madden was by then stationed 200 kilometres away in Horsham. Ridsdale was in Sydney. BWE, who is a jumpy sort of fellow and prone to colourful language, was demolished in the witness box.
Having said that, I have been able to establish that there was a lady who was buried the Wednesday after the football final. The lady’s name was Gladys Pope. In her will, Gladys, a spinster, left a substantial estate to the administrator of St Patrick’s Cathedral. The recently departed administrator of St Patrick’s Cathedral was Madden. The administrator at the time was Father Hank Nolan—Pell’s first cousin. The Church stood to inherit a tidy sum. The funeral, advertised in the Ballarat Courier, was a requiem mass. Members of the Arithmaea Society, a Church group designed to fill out funerals when people have nobody, were ‘respectfully invited to attend’, so whoever celebrated that mass wouldn’t have had many witnesses to it. Gladys Pope’s people were from Bungaree. Pell was at that time based at the Bungaree parish.
Dates are weird things—they trip you up. On the date of Gladys Pope’s funeral, it says Pell had ‘class’ from 9 to 11. And there is an odd entry which says he was at a meeting in Melbourne and it has an arrow which indicates 2.30 to 4.30 pm. Except the 4.30 is crossed out. Why cross out the 4.30? Was it originally just 4.30? In the hypothetical event that it was 4.30 pm, Pell would have had time to get from the funeral to the meeting.The next day, it says ‘Horsham dinner’. Horsham, being, of course, the parish of Father Frank Madden—was Madden returning there?
Of course, even if BWE got his dates wrong and he was at Gladys Pope’s funeral, it doesn’t mean Pell said ‘Gerry’s rooting boys again’. Pell’s legal team argued forcefully that their client never spoke in such coarse terms. People who knew him in his Ballarat days beg to differ. But certainly, Counsel Assisting the Royal Commission, Gail Furness (who did not have all of the material at her disposal that I have just canvassed) submitted, essentially, that the story could not be stacked up. But it shows how easy it is to demolish someone in the witness box even if there is a possibility that they are right.
Getting back to the Cardinal’s statement to me, when Leder responded, there was nothing about dates. It was just a blanket denial. It seemed clear he had no obvious date alibis (which I had already assiduously checked)—otherwise they would have been produced immediately.
The third thing that occurred to me was that I had never even asked the Cardinal any direct questions and had not provided very much detail of what was alleged in the story. I had a list of questions ready to send to Pell’s media liaison. Perplexed, I rang Leder direct. It was a strange situation to find myself in with someone I had liked and respected. ‘Well, Richard, here we are,’ I said to him. We made friendly small talk, but then we got down to business. I told him I was confused—I’d been sent a statement and his client hadn’t yet had the opportunity to know what the allegations were against him. I said I felt distinctly uncomfortable, as a journalist, because I would always give the subject of my story the opportunity to know what was being alleged about them. ‘It doesn’t matter, Louise,’ Leder said. ‘Because he hasn’t done it. So he doesn’t need to know what you have. Because he has never abused any child, anywhere.’
‘Still, Richard,’ I responded. ‘I’d feel much more comfortable if he knew what I have. That’s the sort of professional courtesy I give anyone.’ Leder replied that he’d have ‘to get instruction’. He promised to get back to me. He never did. One thing always stuck in my mind from that conversation. As we were dispensing with the niceties, having a dark chuckle at the situation we found ourselves in, Leder said, ‘All’s fair in love and war, Louise.’ Of course, it was just a solicitor’s black sense of humour—trying to get by in an awkward situation for both of us. But the fact remained that ‘war’ was the operative word. Love got left out of so many equations involving the Catholic Church and allegations of clergy abuse. ‘Love one another, as I have loved you,’ Jesus told us, that’s what we used to chime back to our teachers in our Catholic primary school. Love one another, as I have loved you.