LONDON (ENGLAND)
Daily Mail
Jan. 19, 2020
By Chantalle Edmunds
A professor whose vicar sexually assaulted her while saying ‘this is what God wanted’ 40 years ago has today condemned him as a ‘predator’ who had taken advantage of her faith.
Brave Julie Macfarlane has waived her right to anonymity to speak out against disgraced Church of England priest Meirion Griffiths, who was this week convicted of molesting her when she was a teenager.
The university law professor, now 61, was subjected to a year-long campaign of ‘disgusting’ and ‘repulsive’ repeated sexual abuse.
Griffiths, 81, now faces jail after he was convicted on Monday of indecently assaulting Prof Macfarlane and another woman from his congregation in the 1970s and 1980s.
Griffiths was a rector from the Diocese of Chichester, West Sussex, at the time and Portsmouth Crown Court, Hants, heard he grew ‘obsessed’ with his victims before ‘systematically’ abusing them.
Prof Macfarlane, who has since moved to Canada and lectures at Ontario’s University of Windsor, said she turned to Griffiths when she was 17 and had doubts with her faith.
She said: ‘He was a very big authority figure for me. I was a very earnest Christian girl.
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