The Kid and The Choirboy – the harrowing story of George Pell's victims

[Vouthon]

The Kid and The Choirboy – the harrowing story of George Pell's victims | George Pell | The Guardian

The Kid and The Choirboy – the harrowing story of George Pell’s victims​

This is the story of two teenage boys sent on scholarships from what were then Melbourne’s inner suburbs to a Catholic boys’ school – St Kevin’s College. St Kevin’s is in Toorak, Melbourne’s most exclusive precinct…

I’m not at liberty to name the boys. I’ve called them The Kid and The Choirboy.

When The Kid remembers it, he has tears in his eyes…

‘It was a dream of my mum and I, that I could go to this incredible private school that we could never afford, she was so proud’.

His Grace, Archbishop George Pell, was to say the mass…

The Choirboy’s older sister remembers a very amiable boy…

But at some point between his 13th and 14th birthdays, The Choirboy’s enthusiasm waned considerably…

“Yeah, just out of the blue, ‘I don’t want to be in the choir any more,’” she remembers.

The boy became disengaged and disruptive at school…

Mary’s daughter noticed a marked difference in her little brother from that point.

“Looking back, yeah, his whole personality, well, he changed. He did. He wasn’t the same person as what he was beforehand,” she says.

“His life spiralled,” Mary says. “It really did spiral.”

The year after he left the choir, The Choirboy got into drugs. In a big way…

The Choirboy died in 2014. He was 30…

Although she had informed The Kid, she was still slightly surprised to see the young man respectfully take his place in a pew.

Months later, Mary was serving customers at work when she received a telephone call from a detective from Victoria police…And the detective mentioned something about sexual assault.

“Well, I nearly fell over,” she says.

Detectives from Taskforce SANO, established to investigate child sexual abuse in religious organisations, then came to take a statement from Mary. She was completely in the dark about what had happened. And in her confusion, a new trauma came flooding back…

One evening, some time after the detectives took Mary’s statement, The Kid happened to come by when Mary was on the late shift.

“I just asked him if I could ask him what happened. If, you know, if it wasn’t going to upset him. Because I didn’t want to upset this person, um, because [my son’s] passed away. I didn’t want to bring back bad memories for him.”

But The Kid understood immediately. “He said, ‘No, no, ask me.’ I asked him if my son was a victim and he said, ‘Yes.’”

Her son was a victim, he was saying, of George Pell.

The Kid gently told her what he says happened with the archbishop. “He told me that himself and [my son] used to play in the back of the church in the closed-off rooms,” she says.

In the cathedral? I ask her.

“In the cathedral, yep. And um, they got sprung by Archbishop Pell and he locked the door and he made them perform oral sex.”

 

[Vouthon]

Continued…

The Kid told Mary that her son’s funeral was the breaking point for him. It plunged him into despair and regret. His own mother was very concerned about his wellbeing. He had not been coping since his friend’s death.

He decided that he had to come forward, he had to say something. As The Kid told me at the Returned and Services League club the night I met him, his jaw set, his eyes aflame, insisting that this was “about me and it’s about him”. The Kid, with the support of his mum and a victim’s advocate, went to Taskforce SANO.

“He just couldn’t live with it any more – he had to say something,” Mary says.

She says she liked that he did it for her son. But now she and her daughter are left with so many questions, so much fury. She believes The Kid.

The Kid has not led a chequered life. He’s university-educated, he hasn’t had trouble with the law. He has a lovely young girlfriend, lots of friends, he’s a pillar of his community in a sort of understated, slightly ironic way and, in that part of his life, he is, he told me, very happy. He’s managed, just, to keep it together. He’s been able to compartmentalise. He’s the sort of complainant you’d want as a Victoria police detective alleging historic crime.
The strain of all of this, the enormity of it, means The Kid hangs on by a thread at times – and the thread that held him together enough to make a statement was that Taskforce SANO would arrest George Pell.

The Kid was never interested in going on television – he knows that as a sexual assault complainant, the law allows that he never needs to have his identity revealed. He complained because he just wanted justice.

“These people,” Mary says, referring to abusive clergy, “destroy lives.”

Her daughter nods in agreement. “These people are supposedly someone you look up to. It’s not right, not right at all,” the daughter says.

Mary’s daughter says she is overwhelmed by the courage The Kid showed in complaining about such a powerful member of the church and society.

 

[Hoosier-Daddy]

Thanks for posting this.

 

[AlNg]

If Cardinal Pell is innocent, as he says, I believe it would have been better for him to take the stand and give his side of the story under oath.

 

[pepipop]

Yet the choirboy denied being abused to his mother, that I believe she testified to in court.

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/b...d/news-story/4f594f60d59dbb90c230143e93a2683c

While one of the victims gave evidence about his abuse, the other man died several years ago from an accidental heroin overdose. He never reported the abuse and, the court heard, denied anything had happened to him as a young choirboy when he was asked by his mother.

It is not a very convincing one-off accusation, as if Cardinal Pell was a paedophile it would be assumed there would be a pattern of paedophilic behaviour and more than one occasion of abuse.

However, it seems very strange that a paedophile would instigate a one-off occurrence of child abuse and never again repeat it. Especially so without prior grooming of the boys, not knowing whether or not they would physically fight against his request being that they were 13-14 yrs old, that they would immediately tell their parents/the authorities, or start shouting the place down, etc.

Without doubt, if there were other victims they would have come forward by this time.

 

[DMorgan56]

This trial stinks! The first trial jury hung 10-2 for not guilty. So the prosecutors rolled up a more favorable jury and went at ++Cardinal Pell again.