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	Submitting to the Faith A Former Altar Boy Plans to Sue the Catholic Church for at Least $1 Million over Alleged Sexual Abuse By Jill Rowbotham The Australian [Australia] March 23, 2006 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/ story_page/0,5744,18567107%5E28737,00.html John Ellis is a rarity in the sordid annals of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests - according to his lawyer, it is unusual for the church to fight civil law suits. After a series of hearings in July, August and October, the NSW Supreme Court recently ruled the former altar boy from Sydney's Bass Hill parish could sue the trustees of the Roman Catholic Church for the archdiocese of Sydney over five years of abuse by a priest, Aidan Duggan (deceased), starting when Ellis was 14. Ellis's lawyer, David Begg, who has managed numerous civil claims against the church in NSW, says it is usual in his experience for the church to settle such cases out of court. Because the church, represented by its solicitors Corrs Chambers Westgarth, decided to contest the action, Ellis, 45, had to satisfy the court that although in legal terms the traumatic events with Duggan were ancient history, and the time to seek formal justice over them had expired, his case was worthwhile. His side effectively argued that because it was only recently that Ellis realised the catastrophic effect on him of the regular sex sessions in the 1970s, he should be allowed to seek redress. It also named the Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, as one of the defendants, but the court ruled Pell could not be sued personally. The church is still considering whether to appeal the judgment. If it does not, it may settle, or proceed to trial. The church is not telegraphing its defences in that event. For Ellis, the legal aspects of the case are only the most public trials he has endured. Living quietly in a modest house in Sydney's northern suburbs he talks about the private agony of having made something substantial of himself despite the handicap of a terrible secret, only to have it all come crashing down when he least expected it. In 2000, newly married and in love, he was also a relatively new partner at a leading law firm, Baker & McKenzie, where his prospects were bright. "Everything was right and this was the time to enjoy the fruits of the hard work of the past," he says. Instead, within months his life began to fall apart and ultimately he lost his career, his health and very nearly his marriage. It was a succession of bitter blows for Ellis, the second youngest of seven children born to working-class parents and raised in Bass Hill in western Sydney. He had been heavily involved in the local church and was an altar boy when Duggan arrived in 1975. According to evidence Ellis gave the court last year, Duggan took a special interest in him, inviting him to the presbytery, where Duggan lived, for coffee, meals and later, Latin lessons. When the sex began, it was both oral and anal, and frequent. The pair drank scotch together, took short holidays together and Duggan told Ellis words to the effect: "It is OK and normal to feel the way we do. But some people don't understand. I understand you." Ellis summed up his teenage view in his evidence: "I thought I was homosexual ... I believed that he genuinely loved and cared for me and that if I loved him, I had to submit to his sexual advances." The regular sexual encounters ceased when Ellis left high school, but continued infrequently for some years afterwards. Ellis had achieved high marks at school and after an unsettled year at a seminary, began nursing training. On completing this training, he embarked on a law degree, graduating with first-class honours from the University of Sydney in 1992. He had realised while in his early 20s that he was heterosexual, married in 1986, had two children and divorced in 1993. He had joined Baker & McKenzie a year before and became a partner in 1999. Reflecting now on that time, he says when he met and married his second wife, Nicola, in 2000, he felt he had "finally come home". But soon there was a frightening deterioration in the new marriage. "Probably less than three months into the marriage things started to unravel," he says. He was "uncomfortable" about being loved. "Even to the extent of someone coming down to the station to pick you up if it was raining. And that escalated." He began seeing a therapist, who later told the court Ellis had "a sudden and severe onset of severe emotional and psychological distress from an unknown source". Symptoms included "anxiety, angry and violent outbursts and significant self-harming behaviours which had resulted in physical injuries including facial lacerations and bruising". This was, in the therapist's opinion, "consistent with adult survival of child sexual assault". Professionally Ellis was working to consolidate his position, but trouble was already brewing, and colleagues began complaining about his behaviour. This situation also worsened, and in 2003 Baker & McKenzie called in a consultant to assess all aspects of his performance. Her report, tendered to the court, was damning of his effect on people. One of the kinder remarks was that it was possible he did not understand "the impact his behaviour had on others". Others said: "John is deceitful, malicious, controlling, manipulative, prosecutorial and focused on causing humiliation in his dealings with people he considered are 'below him in the pecking order'." People who had worked with Ellis irregularly, according to the report, experienced "extreme frustration, loss of confidence, loss of motivation and are often reduced to tears or have suffered incidents of being physically ill". Those with more regular contact showed signs of extreme stress, including "depression, withdrawal from the group, sleeplessness, general decline in health ... and even verbalising thoughts of suicide". Ellis recalls now that he was shocked by the report, which later began to affect his own health. At the end of his time at the firm he was reduced to working part-time, between one and three days per week. He was asked to resign in 2004 and did so. By that time, he and his wife were living apart. He was also near the end of about 2 1/2 years of contact with the church's Towards Healing process, set up to help victims of abuse within the church. This had proved unsatisfactory. While Duggan was still alive - he died in 2004 - he suffered from dementia among other illnesses and was never interviewed. Instead, Ellis says, there were many meetings with a facilitator, culminating in the offer of $30,000 on condition of signing a release promising not to sue. At that point Ellis took legal advice that he could have a substantial damages claim of at least $1 million. Ellis dates his awareness that the abuse was linked to the collapse of his life to therapy sessions late in 2001, but says the trigger was his first real encounter with intimacy in his marriage to Nicola. One of the psychologists who assessed Ellis told the court that among the reasons why people sometimes failed to make the link between abuse suffered as children and problems which developed later was: "The effects of the abuse emerge slowly as the person matures ... persons who suffered abuse will sometimes not become aware of the causal link for many years." He concluded Ellis was an intelligent and capable person who, "in normal circumstances ... should have had few difficulties functioning satisfactorily in all areas of his life. The sexualised relationship perpetrated by Father Duggan has altered Mr Ellis's psycho/social/sexual development." Unfortunately, he took a rather gloomy view of Ellis's future. Not so Ellis. "I am optimistic," he says now. "It has been a lot of work and there is a lot more work to do. In a sense I feel that this has happened to a lot of other people and a lot of people end up a lot worse off than I have out of it. In a way the fact that it came up at the time it did was probably a positive thing; that I had a solid foundation - I had been to university, had qualified, had a career I could pick up the pieces of later." He and his wife, Nicola, began living together again in January. "We had had this incredibly intense, positive experience and formed a strong bond in a short period of time before all this happened. There have been times when we have thought if we were realistic rather than idealistic we would end up going our separate ways, but the basis of it has always, at every stage, been a strong bond and commitment to being together." Therein lies his salvation, together with weekly and sometimes twice weekly therapy and the general task of rebuilding his health. Resurrecting his legal career is a strong ambition, but not a short-term one. His faith has also taken a battering. "I just found myself sitting in church feeling I did not belong there," he says of his attempt to graft on to the local parish, but he attends a church in the city monthly. Something that has helped him get on with his life is that, as part of the healing process, he and Nicola visited Duggan, in 2003. It was 16 years since he had last seen him. "It was a good thing to have done and I think the overwhelming sense I got from it was: 'Here's this old, frail, pathetic man that's had this major impact on my life. Am I going to let this pathetic, frail person keep destroying my life?' So in terms of moving forwards it was a positive thing." With the church's position undecided, moving forward could present yet more challenges for Ellis.
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