AUSTRALIA
Sky News
The sexual abuse was the devil’s way of punishing the boy for his sins, pedophile priest Peter Searson told his victim.
Searson abused the altar boy for six months from 1978, on Saturday mornings when the nine-year-old washed the Melbourne priest’s car for 50 cents and mowed the lawn.
BVD was already scared of Searson, who even a fellow priest described as a bizarre human being, but his devout Catholic mum told him to do the job.
He couldn’t tell anyone.
‘Searson threatened me, saying I would go to hell if I told anyone, that the devil was punishing me for my sins and this is how he was doing it, that if I told anyone, I’d be taken away from my family and sent to a child’s camp,’ BVD told the child abuse royal commission.
‘I was terrified.’
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