Royal Commission : "I Shouldn't Be Alive', Says Victim

By Catherine Armitage
Sydney Morning Herald
December 12, 2013

http://www.smh.com.au/national/royal-commission-i-shouldnt-be-alive-says-victim-20131212-2z8sk.html

Royal Commission broadcast: Jennifer Ingham. Photo: Supplied

Jennifer Ingham says she should not be alive. She was abused by predatory priest Father Paul Brown of the Catholic church's Lismore diocese from age 16. Within a year she could not complete her HSC because she was hospitalised for bulimia.

For the next few years, while her peers were finding their way in the world with new-found freedom, she was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and attempted suicide several times. The abuse continued as Father Brown arranged to meet her regularly at the Sydney University Motel in Glebe or flew her to where he was living at St Joseph's Parish Church, Tweed Heads.

Jennifer Ingham, who was abused by a priest from the age of 16.

He arranged for her psychiatric treatment. Her family was never billed. She thinks he paid.

“I shouldn't be medically alive,” Mrs Ingham, 51, told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse. All the $256,000 compensation she got from the church earlier this year had already been spent on medical bills for her survival, she said. Operations she needed because of the bulimia have left her with such severe mouth pain that she had to break and rest when telling her story to the Commission.

She said the first time she told her story to the church was at a meeting of senior clerics in Lismore in 1990. One of them was Father Frank Mulcahy, who had been to school with and remained friends with her father.

“At the meeting, Father Mulcahy cried and told me he knew that I was being sexually abused at the time”. He also told her he knew of two other girls Father Brown had abused.

“This was consistent with my experience because on the last occasion Fr Brown sexually abused me, he told me that my breasts tasted like the breast of one of the girls whom Fr Mulcahy referred to in the meeting.”

Two further disclosures - to the parish priest at Mt Gravatt in 1993, and to Father Michael McKiernan in 1993, brought no action. Father McKiernan told her to “stop blaming the church and go away”.

When, in 2012, she resolved to confront the church again, she agreed to the Towards Healing process because “it seemed to be the only way in which I could speak to the Catholic church, which was my primary aim”.

At her seven-hour Towards Healing meeting with church officials earlier this year, she was shocked to hear that Father Mulcahy “denied meeting me in 1990 and said that he doesn't remember me at all”.

She said more recently that Father Mulcahy had visited her father at home to give him communion in the last two years of his life when he was not well enough to attend church.

In his evidence Father Mulcahy, now retired, denied "absolutely" that he was informed of Father Brown's misconduct in 1990 and that his denial was aimed at protecting his interests.

Mrs Ingham said in her statement “I hate the disparity” between her compensation payment and much lower amounts received by others. She was “dumbfounded” to be told that hers was “an insurance matter” and be given two weeks to find a lawyer.

For her, the most important part of the pastoral process was a later meeting and apology letter from Bishop Jarratt of Lismore. He told her he “could not comprehend how a man of faith like Father Brown could have held me 'captive for four years'”.

His letter said: “we can't undo the past but the church must make drastic change. Those responsible must be accountable”. She made the bishop promise to tell her story to “all his counterparts, including George Pell”.

The bishop's genuine words “have started the healing process for me. It is slow, but it is happening”, Mrs Ingham said. She said she now truly knows that what happened to her was not her fault, and can “truly forgive myself”. And Father Brown, who died in 2005, “no longer rents a space in my head”.