AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
September 2, 2015
Timna Jacks
Reporter
A Geelong Grammar School student who was abused up to 40 times by a school tutor he considered a “father figure” has no memory of the abuse, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse has heard.
Luke Benson, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, attended the school from the late 1980s to early 1990s, was asked to attend Prahran police station in 2005. There, he was informed that one of the school’s house assistants, Philippe Vincent Trutmann, had admitted to sexually abusing him 30 to 40 times over a two-year period.
“It is confusing to have no recollection of the abuse,” Me Benson said. “I have no memory of this happening and I inquired whether it was a mistake.
“The police told me that Trutmann had reviewed school yearbooks and identified from photographs the boys who he had abused. I think this was the worst day of my life.”
Trutmann was sentenced to up to six-and-a-half years in jail in 2005, for sexually abusing 40 young male boarders at the school’s Highton campus between 1985 and 1995.
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