Shining Light Onto Darkest of Secrets
By Kimberley Vlasic
ALMOST 10 years ago to the day, Joanne McCarthy received the phone call that would irrevocably change her life and the lives of thousands of others. It was the call that started to untangle the web of lies spun by the Catholic Church to conceal the ghastliest of secrets. It was the call that later led to two police strike forces, resulting in the arrests of at least 12 religious brothers and priests on nearly 500 criminal charges. It was the call that set into motion a series of government inquiries into child sexual abuse, including a Federal Royal Commission, which is ongoing. Joanne clearly remembers that phone call in early June 2006. “It was a man who rang me because he knew my name from writing stuff in the paper but also stuff in the paper about my sons. He rang out of the blue and he wanted to know why no media outlet had ever reported the fact that five years earlier, a Catholic priest from the Hunter region west of Newcastle called John Denham had been convicted of child sex offences,” she says. “I didn’t know the man from a bar of soap and I said, ‘Look, I don’t know, I can go check’.” In the days that followed, Joanne did just that and discovered Denham had not only been convicted, but was illegally working next to a primary school, and the caller was, in fact, one of his many victims. So began a series of phone conversations between Joanne and Denham, during which he repeatedly denied the claim.
“I rang Denham back and that was when he really acted like a pompous git … and I just said, ‘Father Denham, I think you told me a bit of a porky yesterday,” she says. “His next line was ‘I hope you’ve got good lawyers’ and I said ‘of course we’ve got good lawyers, don’t you worry about that’. “Then he said ‘are you going to write a story’ and I said ‘of course I am’.” Joanne’s article, the first of hundreds on the issue, was published in the Newcastle Herald on June 6, 2006. “From that story, just one by one people started coming forward,” she says. Joanne went on to uncover no fewer than 12 suicides or drug overdoses among former students of Denham, one of Australia’s most infamous paedophile priests after being convicted of 111 charges involving about 60 victims. But she says the turning point came more than a year later, when a senior church official died in late 2007, leaving behind a “treasure trove” of documents detailing civil settlements between victims and the church. “That proved not only that a senior member of the diocese had covered up for a very notorious paedophile priest but also that the bishop at the time had basically not told the truth for 10 years about what the church knew and didn’t know,” she says. The issue of child sexual abuse continues to consume Joanne’s life. While her relentless campaign for justice has vindicated victims and put serial sex offenders behind bars, it has also come at a personal cost. At the height of the scandal, Joanne travelled frequently to escape the backlash and even sold her house, haunted by the painful memories of victim interviews. “I have no problems at all saying I definitely needed, at various points along the way, professional help,” she says. “I’m a journalist, I’m not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but I have routinely and regularly had suicidal people contacting me, to the point where I had to actually establish networks of support people so I wasn’t diving into a hole myself. “It is correct to say this is a national tragedy because the impact on thousands of people’s lives and their families has been catastrophic in some cases, and it is ongoing – there is domestic violence associated with child sexual abuse. “I’ve been speaking at engagements and I’ve had women wait until the end – and I’m used to looking out for them now because they’re always there – women who want to talk to me because they’re desperately trying to support husbands who have been victims of abuse as children, and suffered appalling consequences: depression, drinking, drugs, some violence.”
When John Pirona, a victim of Denham and father-of-two, took his own life in 2012, the Newcastle Herald launched the Shine the Light campaign, which was spearheaded by Joanne. “He left a note and it had the final page of it in capital letters, the words ‘TOO MUCH PAIN’ and then I woke up in the middle of the night and started writing this opinion piece and within that I wrote the sentence ‘there will be a Royal Commission because there must be’,” she says. “Sometimes to get things happening, someone needs to actually just state the bleeding obvious … and by that stage, the Hunter community was behind the campaign because there were so many victims in the community.” When then Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on November 12, 2012, Joanne had been writing about the issue for six years. She recalled being in her editor’s office when the news broke. “The second she started talking, I just started sobbing, just lost it completely and just kept on crying, then all hell broke loose because then we had sh**loads of stories to write – it was mental,” Joanne says. In 2013, Joanne received Australia’s highest award for journalism, the Gold Walkley, for her role in the Shine the Light campaign, which she claimed as a win for both women and regional journalism. For someone who has been such a thorn in the church’s side, it may come as a surprise to some that her parents are devout Catholics and she and her 10 siblings attended mass regularly until high school. Joanne also never wanted to be a journalist, initially studying nursing then enrolling in a librarianship course before her boyfriend convinced her to apply for a cadetship with the local newspaper, the now defunct Gosford Star. Much to her dismay, she was offered the job. “How ironic then, that the person who didn’t want to be a journalist, who ditched being a Catholic because the Catholic church doesn’t respect women and lost me at a very early age, I end up being a journalist by mistake and then years later I end up being the journalist that gets more priests put in jail than anyone else,” Joanne laughs. “If there is a God, she moves in mysterious ways.” Joanne will be the guest speaker at the Women in Media luncheon on Saturday, June 11, from 12-2pm at Rydges Esplanade Resort. Tickets start from $50 and include a two-course lunch, visit eventbrite.com.au
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