AUSTRALIA
The Age
May 27, 2015
Rania Spooner
Crime reporter
Convicted paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale says he was sexually abused by two family members before he was 12 as he began giving evidence at the Royal Commission into institutional child sexual abuse in Ballarat.
Ridsdale, 81, whose offending against children spans more than three decades from the 1950s to the late 1980s, was appearing by videolink from Ararat Prison on Monday morning.
Being questioned by counsel assisting the commission, Gail Furness, SC, Ridsdale accepted evidence he gave investigators in 1994 of being sexually abused himself, including by an older cousin.
After dropping out of St Patrick’s College in Ballarat at 14, Ridsdale joined an accounting firm, where he worked for more than two years before deciding to become a priest, the commissioner heard.
At the Corpus Christi seminary in Werribee, Ridsdale said his only problem was masturbation, about which he had confessed and had been told was a “serious sin”, he said.
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