Parallel Hells

By Kay Ebeling
City of Angels
July 15, 2014

http://cityofangels12.blogspot.com/2014/07/parallel-hells.html

Crimes of pedophile priests in Australia and USA too similar to be coincidence

“Hello, John it's C from the Royal Commission here, how are you. John: Good, thanks.” John Brown agreed to let me transcribe and publish his submission to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia.

The commission report released last week shows that when a nation looks into child sex abuse at an institutional level, "well over half" took place in Catholic Church properties. Why Can't the USA do an inquiry like the one just completed in Australia?

As I transcribe John’s testimony, he says, "“I found myself in a school that the teacher happened to be the nun who sexually interfered with me before ... and I was groomed by Kevin O’Donnell who’s a pedophile priest.” I realize that's eerily similar to Ted’s story from the USA, which I'd been working on in Chicago, but then he'd said, don't publish it. In that case the perpetrator was Gilbert Gauthe, who like O’Donnell, is a prolific and now-infamous pedophile priest in his region. Both boys were sexualized by nuns who then were party to the crimes of the priests. I got back in touch with Ted Lausche, said, you have to let me publish your story along with John’s, because they're so much alike. Ted said, yeah okay go ahead.

So below is John Brown's story from Australia, in the form of a transcript of his Royal Commission testimony, illustrated with memes John created about the subject. Next month City of Angels Blog will publish Ted’s story from Louisiana (Ted now lives near Chicago) and because the two men’s stories are so alike, this project is titled:

Parallel Hells: Crimes of pedophile priests in Australia and USA too similar to be coincidence, Parts One and Two.

The combined posts are at least the length of a book brought to you totally free here at City of Angels Blog, but you can financially support this effort by sending me high fives through the PayPal buttons on the left, using any credit card. I report it as freelance writing income, think of it as a magazine subscription.

Thank you.

Similarities in these two stories is, to me, more proof that rape of children is an inherent product of the secrecy and power of Catholic Church practices, many of which still have not changed, but instead as these crimes have been revealed past two decades, the Church has successfully found ways to deflect guilt, bypass accountability, thwart most efforts by victims to publicize the crimes, and manage public opinion of themselves.

So we bloggers plod on.

*****

TRANSCRIPT

(edited a bit for clarity)

Q : It's Tuesday January 7 2014 and I'm an officer with the Royal Commission into Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Also present is [DELETED] another officer for the Commission, can you state your full name and date of birth.

J : John Anthony Brown, 27 December 48.

Q : Is this the way you want to engage with the Royal Commission?

J : Yes it is.

Q : You can come in person and speak to a commissioner in private.

J : I understand that yeah.

[TRANSCRIBER: WHY CAN’T WE DO THIS IN THE USA????? ]

Q : At first, tell us the story from the beginning.

J : Okay. I was born into a very Catholic family who lived directly across the road from the Catholic Church and I was inculcated into that religion without any choice in the matter. In hindsight, I realize that I was a sexualized little boy at three and a half years of age. I realized that that had come from being used by people of religion to satisfy whatever their ills appeared to be. And that included rape and- and just [HESITATION] in that early period I see it- to me it's just insane. And it's insane to get back into somewhat, still today.

Q : If you're getting emotional we can stop.

J : I'm well aware of that, I understand that and I'm okay. [OVERLAPPING] that's right, I understand, the emotions. They're there and they happen. . . . As a four year old I found myself in a school that the teacher happened to be the nun who sexually interfered with me before I’d been of school age. And I had some issues on the day my mother took me to school and gave me a hiding and forced me back into there.

The culmination of that I suppose came when I was eight years of age. I was groomed by Kevin O’Donnell who’s a pedophile priest who was, from what I understand, located in Seymour, and he came across to my home town of Yea on occasion, to fill in. He groomed my family. My mother fed him, because he was the local priest and that was part of her responsibility being married to a Catholic. She wasn’t born that way. She converted for the sake of my father.

Q : Oh, okay, yep.

J : My mother took on the obligation of raising her children within the Catholic Church. So she was blackmailed, in effect, to hand over her children to this cult.

[TRANSCRIBER: Hmm, THAT'S ONE WAY TO PUT IT]

J : I wasn’t the first of her children to be sexually abused by Catholic clergy and I wasn’t the last in my family. My own experience with Kevin O’Donnell set off [SIGHS] I have a horror period between starting school and reaching eight years of age. There's a lot of stuff went on in there. [TEARS]

But, I've got to go this way.

I was raped by Kevin O’Donnell [LONG PAUSE] and I had been, I had a refuge. My mother arranged for me to go to a friend’s house named H, I even live there at times. That was my safe place, safe from my brother predominantly, to begin with.

My mother went to H when I came home from being raped by O’Donnell that day. H intervened with the church on my behalf or on behalf of my mother, because he was a member of the Knights of the Southern Cross, which were a secretive men’s organization that's part of the Church. [PAUSE]

That entailed H making some sort of arrangement to have my experience documented with the church with the Bishop in Melbourne at the time.

*****

When I was fourteen, there was a new priest there, a fellow by the name of Des Cameron a newly ordained priest, came to Yea. And on St Patrick’s day in 1972 around eleven or twelve o'clock in the morning my sister came running home from across the street and this Cameron in his black robes was standing there across the road.

She ran in to my mom and she was crying. I ran in after her, and she told mom what had happened. I headed out and I pitched rocks at this bloke and I hit him with a couple. Mom went to H about it and he spoke with the priest. He came back and mom talked and he went back several times.

At some point the local police were involved, there were four or five cars parked on the street by that stage. H tried to go into the presbytery and it finished up in a fight. He was a seventy two year old man. And [TEARS] they hit him and kicked him and they dumped him on the veranda at that presbytery and left him there for a long time.

Q : Hmm.

J : They took him to hospital and he spent eight days there and he was taken to Melbourne by that priest, Cameron. And he died in Melbourne that day.

With regards to Cameron, I found his number several years ago and I spoke to him. And he remembered me and he remembered H and he told me that H left all his money to the church. He began to lie to me so I just hung up.

*****

I took another whipping off my father, I’d already taken a whipping when I was eight from my father at the direction of, uh, uh, of, uh, oh I can see the bloody face, um, my own abuser O’Donnell who instructed my father to whip me with a stalk whip.

I was whipped because I was the designated spawn of the devil. I was the son Hitler had spawned as well. Because I spoke out or I simply shouted about what they were doing to me. And at that age, I didn't understand what the hell they were doing but anyway [SIGHS] um, [SNIFFS] I know that my mother spoke to the policeman and he ceded everything back to the church.

My father was threatened with excommunication and there were other threats, I only heard that. My mother took it seriously though, and I don't know what it was the threat that was made against my father.

At school I was, as I said, the designated spawn of the devil. I was the one who was taken by the ear up to the front of the class and in the church, in front of the entire congregation as the example of a child who is designated for hell. I was fourteen and this was not long after H died.

At the school I was set up for special attention, because of what I’d been saying about H’s death and my sister and the priest and what had happened to me and what I’d experienced with the nuns in the convent. On one day the nun directed three or four, I can’t recall, of the bigger kiddies- we were in mixed grades so some of those kids were pretty big boys- they were to catch me in the classroom, so that this nun could beat me with a T-square.

I punched her in the stomach and knocked her down and I clambered up over the desk and kicked the window out and took off.

They transferred me, made the arrangements for that, to transfer me to the high school, and to ensure that I was given a regular beating, to keep me in line, and to inform the school of quote bullshit that I was talking.

[AGAIN: Watch here for Ted’s eerily similar story from the USA here next post at City of Angels Blog]

*****

In the rape by O’Donnell, I injured my foot. I had my right foot slammed repeatedly in the locking mechanism of the car door. And that was not to be spoken of publicly or directly. It was to be spoken of as my being pigeon toed. It entailed me wearing special boots made by the local boot maker, and H paid for them. But I took a beating every time referred to that day I was abused by O’Donnell.

And I still every day of my life, I wake up and the first thing I do, before I step up, is to see how that foot’s going to treat me. Gets to piss me off sometimes [LAUGHS] I tell you.

Q : Do you recall the names of those nuns?

J : No. Not in that way. I only recall a few names of nuns. And I don't- I've never closely explored that period to [STAMMERS] to that extent to where I could try and identify someone.

Q : If you feel uncomfortable answering a question, please let me know.

J : That is to my knowledge the only part of my life where I have that. And if need be with the right support I'll go there [VOICE SHAKES] if it becomes important.

Q : What actually happened with the nuns?

J : I have more recollection about events where I was abused. I did detail with a counselor that I saw here in Toowoomba events about being tied and raped by- tied by a nun and raped by a priest in the convent. [VOICE SHAKING] I have an experience of being tied and buried in a woodshed to silence me again. Buried under wood and having to promise to be silent and being given cigarettes when they let you out to make sure that you were going to shut up and don't say anything.

[AGAIN: Next month you will read similarly horrible details of Ted’s life in a Catholic orphanage in Louisiana)

Q : Did these incidents occur before your experience with Father O’Donnell?

J : Yes, before. [SHAKING] I have- that is one of my horror moments, and the other was, I was the chosen one to do the eternal chores. They were the daily things you went and you toted their groceries and their grub from the shops. You collected their eggs. You dug the garden, you watered the garden, you lit their fires in the winter time, you stoked the fires, you carried the wood in. And much of this is done during school hours as well. Once while carrying an armful of wood into the convent, I bumped a handle of the sauce pan on the stove and splashed it and the nun took to me with a block of that wood and beat the shit out of me.

I, well I have a way of laughing about it now. I fell and knocked most of the bloody pots off the stove, and so I then didn't get any dinner. But they made me kneel on the blocks of wood for hours.

Q : This was while you were living across the street from the church and convent but before the incident with Father O’Donnell?

J : Yes.

Q : Any other incidents from that early period?

J : I have a couple of sort of glimpses of a priest in the nuns’ sleeping areas. And nothing- that's not- no, not like that.

Q : You said you were tied down by a nun and raped by a priest, did you tell anyone about that?

J : I don't know. I don't know. I know that I shouted about them touching me, but I, in looking back, I didn't have the words.

Q : How old were you at this time?

J : In the five six seven bracket.

*****

FATHER KEVIN O’DONNELL

C ; You were eight when you met Father O’Donnell?

J : Yes.

Q : Are you able to tell us a bit more about that?

J : He was a visiting priest and he had arranged to have me show him the way to a little church called Cheviot, or Caviot, in the Cheviot Hills, which was sort of in the similar direction from Yea.

He told my mother that he had never been that way before, and it still just-

Driving has been my livelihood for a great deal of time. There’s a difference when somebody drives and they know where they're going. That trip that day I never gave O’Donnell any direction as to where he was going. And so that was bullshit that he had never been that way before.

Meme by John Brown

He drove out about two miles to what's called the Gin-Gin turnoff and from there he began to masturbate, and he stopped at the Reserve, at the- [TEARS] river crossing and then he raped me on the side of the road, not that far from the church. He then drove to the church and did his ceremony thing and when they were coming out, I took off and ran into the bush. Oh- [SIGHS] They sent other kids after me to bring me back and they dragged me back, and then as soon as they let me go, I ran again. And they pulled me back and I ran again, and then the men came and I got away from them, and I hid in what they call a grotto thing. It had a statue in it and I hid behind that.

They pulled me out of there, I lost my shoes there, and three or four men pulled me out of there, and they kicked me and punched me and kneed me and forced me into the car. I hit and tried to get out, and that's when they kept just slamming the door on my foot. [TEARS]

He drove away from there and he came back a different way. When the car was coming down towards the river flats, it had to go slow, and I jumped out of the car. I ran across the road and tried to hide, I was a little kid.

[OH, MAN this sounds, again, so much like Ted’s story from Louisiana, coming in August at City of Angels Blog]

I went back and realized there was nowhere to hide. But I tried to run away, and I tripped and nose dived into the road and knocked myself out, or I got knocked out, I don't know which.

I came to in the car in the little lagoon park in Malswroth another couple of miles further on across the river and he was forcing me to give him oral sex. [LONG PAUSE] Are you there?

C ; Yes I'm here.

J : Sorry. There was a person came and talked with him and then he waited there- I don't know how long, it seemed to be a long time. He stopped again at the little entrance park to Yea, by the Yea River. The trees there were planted in the Second World War to spell out the town name, Y-E-A.

*****

O’Donnell was running on about what I should say. And then he drove me home, and it's a steep little hill, when we got up there I jumped out of the car again, while it was going. I tried to hide in a culvert that ran under the road and he threw rocks into the culvert to try and drive me out. Eventually he put my shoes on the road and left. I grabbed my shoes and ran home and told my mother.

Q : What was he telling you you should say to people?

J : [SIGHS] [LONG PAUSE] uh, it was about just going a different way in driving all the time.

Q : To explain the time?

J : I guess so. I, I, I guess so. [TEARS]

Q : Like I said if it's getting to be too much.

J : I don't know, I don't know, I never thought about that before, so I have no- I'm only guessing.

Q : Did you tell your mum everything that happened?

J : Yes, ah yes, I was, I was bleeding and she put me in a bath. And even though it was summertime, I know- I was shivering, I must have been in shock. And she wrapped me up in a blanket and set by the kitchen stove and talked to me.

Q : Did she believe you?

J : Yeah, yes.

Q : What happened next.

J : Well that was- she- she she went and talked with- [NAME DELETED] and that's when he got involved and it was all quote taken care of by the church. O’Donnell was to not be in touch with children again, the church was going to see to that.

I know my mom was shocked later to learn that he was in another parish near [INAUDIBLE] or somewhere like that not long after, he was there. And I know she went back to –NAME DELETED and that caused issues for a while.

I know that a bishop came up to Yea because of it and he took away boxes of documents, from what I understand, for him to take care of.

Q : Do you know who this bishop was?

J : Oh yes. Yes, There have been a number of meetings. They met through the Knights of the Southern Cross.

Q : I'm not aware of this group, were they attached to the church?

J : They were just another one of their secret men’s organizations doing their quote good work is the myth. They were all probably people inspired to do good. And yeah been deceived by the system of it, what it was, into protecting the good name of the church, that was part of their role.

It was all very secret.

*****

Q : In 1962 at age fourteen the situation occurred with your sister and Cameron? Can you tell us what happened?

J : Not a great deal. I know she spoke to mum and I wanted to know what was going on. And she pushed me out of the kitchen and closed the door on me.

Q : How old was she?

J : I don't know probably nine or ten, something perhaps.

****

FEAR while hiding from his perpetrator:

It was a gutter that had eucalyptus saplings growing in it. I hid in there and I ran down the hedge line between the church and the presbytery, there was a gate there and I could look quickly, keep running, go over the bank, under the fence and hide in a big cypress tree.

That's where I heard the fight. I could hear them punching H [TEARS]

Later when it got quiet I ran past to have a look and they were dragging him onto the tile veranda of the presbytery under the window of the first room there. That's all I saw and I kept running.

Q : After all this what kind of contact did you have with the Catholic Church, something in Melbourne?

[DELETED PARTS ABOUT JOHN’S MARRIAGE]

*****

When I went to the police [about another issue in the 1990s], what set it off the rails was the fact that I had acknowledged that I was a survivor of abuse by Catholic clergy. That was the first of I don't know ten or fifteen attempts at taking up this and other stuff with police here in Toowoomba.

Somewhere in that process I had realized that my own abuse hadn’t been properly addressed and I sought out counseling. It was a bit of a journey.

I finished up with a psychologist in Toowoomba and I began to see her on a weekly basis and did so for several years.

It was during that time I learned that the fact that the Catholic Church was effectively advertising healing and compensation, and I was advised to- I went to see a fellow, the precursor to the Toowoomba Advocacy Service Cast TASC and I explained some of my life to him, and he was about to retire and hand the organization over to someone else.

He was a lawyer I think of some sort and he offered to take my case on for me in his retirement, he had an interest in doing that. But it didn't really get off the ground, because in the process of doing that, his own childhood abuse at the hands I believe of an Anglican priest surfaced and brought him problems and he also encountered health problems.

Some years later, I encountered him in the local Kuala store and I made a point of walking across in front of him and nodding to him and he just, he didn't recognize me at all.

I made the contact with the church Melbourne thing, Peter O’Callaghan from there came to Toowoomba and he acknowledged that I had been abused and claimed that he would expedite my case through the system and that he would seek to get me the maximum, whatever.

He tried to get me to see a psychiatrist and I'm not sure if my research is right, it showed that he was part of the [SOUNDS LIKE] Deep Sleep fiasco.

Q : Oh yes.

*****

ACTIVISM

J : By that stage I’d started to have contact with other survivors around the world and getting a bit of a picture of how the system operated, I suppose, little snippets of it anyway.

O’Callaghan came and there was a lengthy time and then S came to Toowoomba and identified herself as a psychologist for the Catholic Church Care Link system. She was going to expedite this really bizarre conversation.

I've only been suicidal on three occasions to my recollection in life, bordering that on several occasions, and she was the cause of one of those. I had a copy of the recording, they promised me a transcript. The tape was more than half an hour and the transcript only took three pages. It read predominantly in brackets ‘UNDECIPHERABLE’ that word was repeated over and over again. I don't know what went wrong.

I rang and tried to ask for a transcript as they’d promised and they deemed me to be off my meds, a threat, I was a danger and risk to her.

Whatever.

That effectively derailed any process that I was doing with the Church, although around that time I’d written to O’Callaghan and I’d asked him a number of questions, and he wasn’t forthcoming with answers. My questions were mostly to do with his independence and what the qualifications and experience was of S and a number of things that are important to know when you're dealing with this sort of stuff on a personal level.

I’d begun to publish a little bit of stuff online and that was causing O’Callaghan a great deal of concern. I wasn’t able to get any information on which to progress through to a solution or whatever.

S when she arrived in Toowoomba, if you listen to the conversation, she's very good in the beginning, this was about dealing with the stuff in my way, how I needed to deal with it, blah-blah-blah, but when you got down to the nuts and bolts, it was this way or the fucking highway and you can piss off. [LAUGHS] They only did it one way.

Q : Anything else about how the Church representative dealt with you?

J : I was- I didn't like being put into a position of take it leave it. And I didn't like the fact that despite me having identified who my abuser was by name, and despite her supposedly having that information that she hijinked some sort of story about trying to think who it possibly was for a while in the conversation.

And I realized how she asked me whether the guy was circumcised or not. I realized what sort of impact that had on me, having to journey there in that, and what pissed me is my recollection of the smirk on her face while she was doing that.

To the point where it stuck in my head and I had to even that score and I know that I played a stupid game, but I sent her an email saying to the effect that it's very difficult to tell whether an erect penis is circumcised or not.

[JOHN WAS 8 YEARS OLD, THAT'S NOT A DETAIL AN 8 YEAR OLD SEES]

I suggested that I had a friend who would like to put evidence in her hand and I followed that up with an email to say that I hoped she didn't mind that he had a show and grow tattoo on it as well. I thought, fuck you, to beat me up psychologically like that.

*****

Q : And the Melbourne response?

[Refers to Melbourne Response and independent commissioner, Peter O'Callaghan, QC ]

Background: ]

J : My relationship I suppose you could call it with the Care Link system was chaos. My wife was involving her extended family. My abuse became her gossip and that went to her extended family and it went to neighbors. With the neighbors, one was a designated hitter after a little meeting of righteous Christians got together and determined I was not being a good Christian, so he was designated to set me on the right track.

They had issues with the fact that I wasn’t raising my son as a Christian and that it was because I had a tiff with the school over giving them the official note to say that he was not to be in religious instructions and they put him in the back of the classroom. That culminated with a row with the headmaster on another occasion.

*****

[STUFF ABOUT WIFE’S FAMILY LEFT OUT]

[Back to John’s problems with the designated Christian assigned to save him. ]

He stormed into my office one day, I told him to fuck off. They quite openly told me that they would do everything that they possibly could to destroy me and my business and I've had similar stuff from my wife’s extended family.

[because he didn't want to raise his son Christian]

I had a thriving business that was sabotaged largely from the inside. There's a fellow who will be able to tell you his views at the time, a computer programmer I hired. We sought to go into a partnership as a way of stabilizing my circumstances. My business had won a small grant from the government, my business was going to go global.

Q : What was the business?

J : I developed a contact management system and I was selling it to premier research organizations here in Australia called CRC’s, community research councils. They were the premier research organizations in Australia, an ideal long term niche market, high value, and yeah.

Q : Your business suffered because of the threats?

J : Badly, yes.

Q ; What happened with Melbourne?

J : With the Melbourne response? Really that had come to a standstill, I wasn’t getting any response from O’Callaghan and I received a phone call from a fellow who identified himself as a private investigator who was brother or uncle or some such of H from a crowd called In Good Faith and Associates in Melbourne. And he in that conversation convinced me that these people had a very-very good knowledge of my circumstance, and I never questioned how they came about that.

I think I had sold my business, because I was just not able to deal with it, I might be out of sequence there, this might be before I got to that point.

But, well, I was- it must have been after I sold my business, because I went to work for the people who bought my business.

I had a lot of conversation with a therapist and the major part of that conversation was that I was not a believer in religion in any way and in fact I was probably the Church’s world’s worst enemy.

I think at that time I was identifying myself online at Buggered by a Priest. [LAUGHS] I think that's the name, I was the world’s most despised Catholic for talking about the clergy abuse issue.

[OH MY GOD! THAT'S when I contacted John, I know it, I remember seeing that identification and thinking, I've got to see who this is]

There was supposed to be no religion involved with this organization In Good Faith and the program was entirely separate.

That effort started to come apart when they had a teleconference meeting. During the introduction to that meeting that H introduced a priest from [INAUDIBLE] who was part of the program. During my conversations with H she disclosed to me that she was employed with the Melbourne Catholic Archdiocese prior to 1996, her role was dealing with survivors of abuse, and that she had access to a large number of what she referred to as victims’ records.

She told me that she had done a settlement with the Catholic Church for wrongful dismissal, though it wasn’t until sometime later that I came to understand that there was in fact truth to what she said with regards to leaving that Archdiocese program with the private confidential records of many abuse survivors, which she claims to have photocopied before being- having to return the originals, I believe that's the way it would have worked.

I didn't realize until later that somehow I don't know how she found details to connect, so that her brother, a so-called private investigator, could contact me. The only place I'm aware of, I don't know whether this is right, potentially my records would have been from H’s time would have been part of files on survivors. I don't know.

Otherwise, the only other way that they could have found my details was through, I believe she had at that time a relationship with S in dealing with other survivors. And it was one of those on again off again relationships, she belonged to a different sect within the church. They're all working for a common cause, looking for more victims.

It gets messy there, I know.

Q : We need to go into this further.

J : We need to, because this woman has spoken to me of dealing with people attempting suicide and the like. And my dealings with her, as I said, I've not very often been suicidal in relation to this and I can recount occasions.

On another of those occasions was after a phone call with H, and I had given this woman every piece of knowledge and information and ability to abuse me, or use it against me, and she did.

[HMM: Reminds me of some in the “survivor movement” in the USA]

Q : This is an issue that we maybe need to come back and speak to you about again

J ; Yes, this is incredibly important because it goes to people being, the way I see it, people who have lost any faith in the religion side of it being introduced to this thing [CONTACT WITH THE CHURCH FOR HELP] by people who want to bring them back into the religion. And that's a case of come back here and let’s abuse you with this stuff again.

Q : Were the group In Good Faith separate from the church but still faith-based?

J : Well I was in Queensland, I was under the impression that they were not. As I said, when I took part in that teleconference and this priest was there involved and we had prayers, then H, for probably the longest period of my life I've been silent-

H rang me here to apologize for whatever she might have inadvertently done wrong [LAUGHS] which is a good my hands are tied Catholic response. My case according to her was pivotal, she had a so-called class action that was going to take place, and that's what drew me in to be involved. I had a discussion with her and I turned off the web services when I realized how much religion was involved.

I had up until then I’d really not gotten myself involved with local Australian survivors, I’d mostly done quite a bit of stuff in the United States, doing phone calls from Australia. My thing was to try and understand how the thing works.

In Good Faith was going to put my case through the Melbourne process and that was going to entail going through their lawyers. I didn’t progress that, some of it I didn't feel good with the fellow who ran the service, P, and then I had an unfortunate experience with R and not her fault in that.

She was going to do a timeline of my experience and she was in Brisbane and I drove down to stand with her. I walked in the door and it took me weeks to work out what the hell happened to me.

And all I can explain is that she had a reasonably, not low cut, but she had a- I think it ran straight across, I don't know. But she had a complexion that reminded me of one of these nuns. Moreso there was a small- the skin on the bone part had a wrinkle that moved and I was just locked onto that and that was taking me back into the abuse as a kid in the convent. [TEARS]

Q : That triggered your memory?

J : Yah. And it didn't go well there, because, yeah it didn't go well.

Q : Was this group charging people?

J : Oh, these are the only organization I know together with P who are lawyers, they'll turn around and write off a thirty-fifty thousand dollar debt, never heard of one. I don't know.

One of the things I had done, as I said, I used to do phone calling to the United States and I came to understand that there was a considerable amount of double dipping going on between lawyers over there.

Q ; Was there discussion about what In Good Faith would provide you?

J : It started out as being my case was to do with this proposed class action, which appeared to fizzle off.

[HMM: That happened in the USA too]

Then it was in the production of a document called- what do they call it, it was Always Forward, or Always Toward, it was another towards healing sort of name thing. And this was a major production, it was whittled down to I think around fifty five pages and then it went to the lawyers and came down to fifteen pages, I think. But it was going to be the fait accompli and my support was sought because I had- they had an understanding or whatnot.

I had contact with other survivors and I had a group. And I had never gone that way with any earnestness but I had contact with others. I think that was a big attraction, because it got fairly serious in the marketing game. It was all about new victims.

Q : Did you ever receive any money from the Catholic Church?

J : No. I had heard, I had contact with other survivors who had received assistance at different times and then I read where they had offered survivors three hundred dollars.

On one occasion I did attempt to get some assistance with school fees for my son, I was putting him through school here. I was having trouble meeting the payments and I’d heard that the [INAUDIBLE] service had paid for education for other survivors’ kids. So I thought I would see if that might be an avenue.

The fellow from grammar school here contacted I believe S and yes they did do that on occasion. But they wouldn't do it on this occasion because my son was not going to a Catholic school. If I was to send him to a Catholic school, they would certainly help.

*****

I had to have some interaction with Relationships Australia and I simply came away from that thinking it was another number to add to ten or twelve psychologists I’d sampled. One I’d already decided not to go back to.

Q : You haven't received any money or formal conclusion?

J : No, not from O’Callaghan. I had an email apology from George Pell and bits and pieces like so, but nothing beyond that, that's it, that's yeah- it's, it's-

Q ; When did you get from Pell?

J : I just sent another- that three hundred dollars would be very handy to me, so I sent an email just the other day to [SOUNDS LIKE] John Usher out of Sydney. That was a reply to his email to me offering an apology from Pell.

Q : You haven't received the apology yet?

J : Well he says, Cardinal Pell has asked me to respond to your email on his behalf, he's presently away from Sydney. He expresses his sincere regret about your abuse by Kevin O’Donnell. I've referred the matter to the Melbourne Response who will ascertain what the archdiocese is doing to assist you. Could you let me know if your contact with the archdiocese of Melbourne has been unhelpful, and did I told him yes it had been entirely unhelpful and destructive.

IRREVERENCE

Q : When was your interaction with Melbourne?

J : The first of December 2009 they replied to an email I sent out, so whatever the date of my email was, I don't know how long before that it was. I could probably find that, I can tell you.

Q ; And you were offered an apology by George Pell, right?

J : Yes, yes.

Q : Why were you contacted by Melbourne?

J : Well I sent an email around to probably several thousand Catholics across Australia to say that I had the wording to go on a t-shirt or something. The t-shirt basically said that I’d been fucked over by the Catholic Church and the police commissioner and the minister for police.

In the email I asked if they could help with the font.

And they responded to that.

******

THAT'S IT!

That's

THE END

John’s email to several thousand Catholics, identifying himself as "Buggered by a Priest" in the "from" box, tells you the level of disrespect with which he holds their hierarchy, and I agree.

*****

Post Note:

The Commissioner conducting the interview with John asked him:

IS IT OK TO USE YOUR STORY?

J : I put my flag up there really high if there's any opportunity to use me, I particularly want to convey the understanding of what it's like to be raised in an environment that's based on psychological blackmail and intimidation and threat and how that leaves you in a perpetual state of fear and terror.