By Rebekah Devlin
Adelaide Now
August 26, 2008
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,24247868-2682,00.html
THE wife of fraud pastor Michael Guglielmucci has vowed to try to save their marriage, despite the humiliating revelations of his cancer hoax and pornography addiction.
Speaking exclusively to The Advertiser, Amanda Guglielmucci, 29, defended her husband, who faked a two-year battle with cancer.
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| Act of faith ... Michael and Amanda Guglielmucci on their wedding day in July, 2001. |
She insisted he was a good man, trapped by lies which had spiralled out of control.
"I know he's not an evil man, there's not evil in his heart," she said.
Mrs Guglielmucci, who is staying in their Sydney home while Michael is with his family in Adelaide's southern suburbs, said she would try to salvage her marriage.
"I know that I love him, I know that much," she said.
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"We're just not going to rush anything, we're gonna walk through the process, however slowly it needs to happen, in order for the healing and restoration to be complete and then we'll go from there."
She has turned to a counsellor to help cope with her husband's massive deception, which has shocked not only his family's church, Edge Church International, but the world-wide Christian movement.
"I'm actually seeking professional counselling myself. I need to be able to unravel a lot of emotion that's bombarding me at the moment, I owe it to myself to work through that properly, and to him," she said.
"I had questions after the shock of it all, but my initial thoughts after hearing that were a sense of sorrow for the church and that a lot of people were going to be hurt because of it."
Just 15 days ago, the world-renowned pastor and songwriter sat his wife of seven years down at their Sydney home and told her the awful truth.
"I was the first one he told, he confessed everything to me," Mrs Guglielmucci said.
"He just went through it – where it had started, everything in his life as a young kid, the patterns. He was crying, sobbing actually, absolutely sobbing, he just said `I don't have cancer'.
"He was terrified, I still remember the look on his face . . . it was a very hard moment for him, as it was for me hearing it."
Despite his elaborate deception and his admission of an addiction to adult pornography, Mrs Guglielmucci said it was feelings of sympathy and shock rather than anger that overwhelmed her.
"I could just see a really broken, unwell man. At that point I found it really quite hard to get angry," she said.
"Seeing your husband of seven years absolutely sobbing in front of you, risking everything coming forward and telling the truth – in that instance it was really hard to be angry or mad."
Mrs Guglielmucci said she understood people struggled to believe she could not have known her husband was faking his illness. However, she maintained his real symptoms – vomiting, hair loss and apparent pain – never gave her reason to suspect otherwise.
"I never questioned it, when you love someone you trust them. I had no reason not to trust him," she said.
"Perhaps I feel a little bit foolish in this, hindsight's a fabulous thing . . . but I'm trying not to beat myself up."
Mrs Guglielmucci even quit work to look after her ailing husband. "In the middle of the night he was in so much pain I would put towels in the microwave to try and give him some relief in his back," she said.
However, she never attended doctors' appointments with him, a move she now regrets.
"Before I stopped working to care for him, I was busy, he'd have doctor's appointments when I couldn't be there and he would say `it's fine you don't need to be there'," she said.
"Or I would just drop him off at the hospital."
While his initial confession to his wife did include his addiction to porn, Mrs Guglielmucci said she had not even begun to process that element of his deception.
"We're only talking two weeks (since admitting his lies), there's a lot of stuff to deal with," she said.
"That sort of side of things hasn't really hit me yet, there's many levels and layers to everything. I can almost talk about it like I'm removed from it. That's where the professional help will help me work through that – it hasn't hit me yet."
Mrs Guglielmucci said her faith in God had remained unmoved throughout the ordeal.
"At times like this, it's just a stronger resolve," she said.
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