'Please don't do this': former student tells of sadistic sex abuse at St Paul's

The Guardian
November 11, 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/nov/11/please-dont-do-this-former-student-tells-of-sadistic-sex-abuse-at-st-pauls

The royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse is examining the response to abuse claims at Brisbane Grammar and St Paul’s.

Drugged and vulnerable in a paedophile counsellor’s office, the student pleaded “Please don’t do this”, the child sex abuse royal commission has heard.

But it didn’t stop Kevin John Lynch, an infamous abuser of boys at two Brisbane schools, from sadistically molesting him.

Now 33, the victim told the child sex abuse royal commission he endured a horror session with Lynch in 1996 where the counsellor sprayed an immobilising drug into his mouth, put “unbearable” pressure on his body and inserted a hypodermic needle into his penis.

Lynch then briefly performed oral sex on the boy, at that time a student at St Paul’s school.

But when, alongside another victim, the student went to then-headmaster Gilbert Case to complain about their treatment, their concerns were swatted away, he said.

“In his opinion [we] were lying,” he told the commission on Wednesday.

The former principal allegedly told the boys they risked being “heavily penalised” for making false allegations about the staff member.

The man, who travelled from the United States to give evidence, recalled feeling stunned and hurt about his headmaster’s blunt denial.

“I was in a state of severe shock and felt helpless and powerless at the whole turn of events,” he told the Brisbane hearing.

But shock turned to anger when he attended a school assembly the next year after Lynch died, at which Case spoke glowingly of the late counsellor.

The inquiry has previously heard Lynch abused scores of boys while employed as a counsellor at both Brisbane Grammar school and St Paul’s from the early 1970s until the late 1990s, many of whom he saw and abused numerous times a week.

The other student who allegedly approached Case with the victim also gave evidence to the inquiry on Wednesday.

He said he had initially sought out Lynch’s guidance because he was having trouble with his stepfather.

But he was also abused and even underwent joint sessions with his peer where he sensed Lynch was grooming him as a successor, later giving him “relaxation tapes” used to lull boys into a trance-like state.

The man said he had for a long time blamed himself for Lynch’s suicide in 1997.

Lynch took his life a day after being charged with nine counts relating to the sexual abuse of a boy.

The man said he and the other boy had both previously gone to Case complaining that Lynch had told one about the content of his counselling sessions with the other. Case is due to give evidence later this week.

To this, Case allegedly replied: “Look, I can’t see these things happening at St Paul’s.”

The royal commission continues.