Catholic Church litigation in Ellis case was 'runaway train'

ABC - The World Today
March 11, 2014

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2014/s3960858.htm?site=sydney

ELEANOR HALL: Let's go now to the latest from the child abuse Royal Commission, which today heard intriguing details about how the Sydney Archbishop George Pell handled the complaint of child sexual abuse by John Ellis.

John Ellis attempted to sue the Church a decade ago but, in what's become known as the Ellis Defence, the court found that the Church could not be sued.

The Royal Commission has now been told that the Church's lawyers may have not given the full facts of the case to George Pell and that this may have contributed to the long, vigorous and expensive legal action.

Our correspondent Emily Bourke has been monitoring the hearings in Sydney and she joins us now.

Emily, John Ellis was giving evidence again today. What did he say about how this litigation process affected him?

EMILY BOURKE: Well, John Ellis came forward to the Church in 2002 but the wheels of the Towards Healing process moved very slowly in this case and there had been scathing internal reviews about what actually occurred as this process unfolded.

In the end, there was no resolution from Towards Healing and so civil action commenced in earnest in 2004. But by 2007 all legal avenues had been exhausted. The claim was rejected and Mr Ellis was now about to be pursued for the hefty legal costs incurred by the Church.

He told the inquiry today that this set of circumstances had a deep psychological impact and he slipped into a severe depression.

JOHN ELLIS: I considered that I had made a foolish decision to bring proceedings against the Archdiocese, given that the outcome of that decision was a judgement which created further barriers to other victims of abuse seeking justice, against not only entities created for the operations of the Catholic Church, but other entities established under similar legislation throughout Australia.

The realisation of that was devastating.

I was also angry that the trustees had run what I considered to be an immoral defence and that the court system had not protected the interests of victims of abuse.

I was also disappointed that the High Court did not even see the issue as warranting its attention.

I believed at that time that, because of the earlier correspondence I received, the Trustees and Cardinal Pell would make a claim on me for the full costs of the various stages of the court proceedings.

I knew that those costs were more than $500,000. I did not have assets of that value.

ELEANOR HALL: And that's John Ellis giving evidence at the Royal Commission this morning.

Emily, what role did Cardinal Pell have in these negotiations?

EMILY BOURKE: Well, we know that the litigation was protracted and vigorous. Church's lawyers went so far as to cross-examine Mr Ellis over whether the abuse even happened at all.

Mr Ellis found this very distressing, because the Church had earlier accepted the facts of the abuse.

Efforts to mediate or negotiate a $100,000 compensation settlement outside the court system had actually been rejected by the Church's lawyers.

And so the legal action that followed was very expensive. The costs for the Church were in the vicinity of $1.5 million.

Now, the Church did not ultimately force Mr Ellis to pay that hefty legal bill and since 2008 the Church has paid Mr Ellis around $500,000 in financial assistance. It's also worth noting that Cardinal Pell wrote to Mr Ellis in 2009 apologising for the legal abuse he suffered.

But today the inquiry has raised some questions about exactly what role Cardinal Pell had in the legal decision making by the Archdiocese of Sydney.

Mr Ellis expressed the view that Cardinal Pell wrongly believed that Mr Ellis was seeking multiple millions of dollars, which puts some doubt on whether Cardinal Pell was in the loop, given how much the Church ended up spending on legals in the end.

Now, that prompted some questions by Commissioner Peter McClellan.

PETER MCCLELLAN: That does suggest the Cardinal gave you the impression that he'd been involved in the decision making. Is that your recollection?

JOHN ELLIS: On that point, Your Honour: yes, that was my understanding that he had been told that the claim was for millions of dollars and authorised it to be defended, but that he wasn't given complete information about that in terms of what it was that I had been asking for.

So he gave the impression that he was given misleading information about the nature of the claim and gave his instructions on that basis, then left it to other people - he didn't specify - to conduct the litigation.

I certainly left the meeting with the impression of a runaway train with nobody at the wheel.

ELEANOR HALL: That's John Ellis, giving evidence at the Royal Commission this morning; Emily Bourke our reporter covering the hearings.