AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
By JOANNE McCARTHY Aug. 22, 2014
A HUNTER man wept in a courtroom on Friday as he asked the questions that expose the tragedy of child sexual abuse.
“What could I have been? What would my life have been like?” asked the man known as ST, as defrocked Catholic priest John Denham, 72, sat metres away in a glass-enclosed dock.
ST told a sentencing hearing at the Sydney Downing Centre court that he struggled with suicide every day because those questions could never be answered.
“I hate life. I look forward to the day I die,” he said in a statement read to Judge Helen Syme by his legal representative, Nicola Ellis.
ST was Denham’s student at St Pius X High School, Adamstown, in the 1970s.
Denham is being sentenced after pleading guilty in August last year to 25 child sex charges including buggery, violent oral sex and indecent assault involving 18 boys, aged 11, 12 and 13, at Singleton, Wingham and St Pius X in the 1970s. He accepted another 23 indecent assault charges had occurred.
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