George Pell Exposed Himself to Young Boys at Surf Club, Says Victorian Man

By Melissa Davey
The Guardian
July 28, 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jul/28/george-pell-exposed-himself-to-young-boys-at-surf-club-says-victorian-man

Tyack has also spoken to the ABC’s 7.30 program, which has reported police are investigating multiple child abuse allegations against Pell (pictured) along with Tyack’s allegation. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

A man has spoken publicly about allegedly seeing Australia’s most senior Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, expose himself to a group of young boys at a surf lifesaving club in the late 1980s.

Les Tyack, from Victoria, who reported the alleged incident to police and also provided a statement to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, has gone public with his story in the hope it will support survivors who have also spoken out about coverups and abuse by members of the hierarchy of the Catholic church.

Tyack told Guardian Australia: “I witnessed Pell involved in a situation where he very clearly exposed himself to three young boys at Torquay Life Saving Club in the summer of 1986 or 87.”

Tyack has also spoken to the ABC’s 7.30 program, which reported police are investigating multiple child abuse allegations against Pell along with Tyack’s allegation.

Pell has denied all the allegations, saying they are “totally untrue and completely wrong” and “nothing more than a scandalous smear campaign”. He said if the claims had “any credibility,” they would have been pursued by the royal commission by now.

The other allegations involve two former St Alipius students, who allege Pell repeatedly touched their genitals while swimming with them at the Eureka pool in Ballarat in 1978-79. At the time, Pell was episcopal vicar for education in the Ballarat diocese.

The royal commission was unable to accept Tyack’s statement about the alleged incident he witnessed at the pool because it did not fall within its jurisdiction of examining child sexual abuse that occurred within institutions, including religious, educational, not-for-profit and charitable institutions. But Tyack has also made a statement to police, who have interviewed him twice about the allegations in the past 12 months.

“As a member of the surf club I’d be there at least every Saturday or Sunday, I had kids involved in surf-lifesaving and was pretty active myself,” Tyack said.

“I walked into the change rooms and Pell was in there and he was facing three young boys, towelling his back. Then I went to have a shower and he was still standing there when I got out, this time with the towel draped over his shoulder and full-frontal facing the boys.”

In his statement to the royal commission, Tyack said the boys appeared to be about eight to 10 years old and about two to three metres in front of Pell on the bench along the opposite wall to the entrance.

Tyack said the boys were dressed by the time he got out of the shower, and he told them to gather their belongings and leave the room. He said he then allegedly spoke to Pell.

“I said; ‘I know what you’re up to. Get dressed and piss off, and don’t come back to the surf club. If I see you here again, I’ll call the police.”

He said he never saw Pell again.

“I’d seen him in the surf club two or three weeks prior to the incident and I didn’t know who he was,” Tyack said. “I was talking to a couple of surf club members and I said, ‘who’s that guy’, and they said, ‘that’s George Pell’, expecting me to know who he was and that he was a bishop. That’s why I didn’t tell the police at the time, because I thought who’s going to believe me over a bishop of the church? But it was something I did mention to mates early in the piece.”

Pell was appointed an auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of Melbourne in 1987.

Tyack says he knew someone who was sexually abused by a Christian Brother in a Geelong school, and that the incident changed his friend “dramatically”. When reports about the abuse that occurred in Geelong institutions were reported by local media in 2012, Tyack decided to file a police report about allegedly witnessing Pell expose himself to children. Guardian Australia has seen this police statement.

In his statement to the commission, Tyack said at the time the incident occurred: “I was not aware of the bigger picture and the problem that was going on with priests and teachers within the church and schools.”

“I thought initially that it was a once-off of Pell exposing himself. The more I have heard over the years of the incidents involving victims of the Catholic church, the more this incident has played on my mind.”

Guardian Australia has spoken to two separate witnesses whom Tyack told about the incident at the time.

“Les and I are pretty good mates and Les certainly told me,” one of the men, who did not want to be identified, said.

“I’m not some wacko with a vendetta against the church,” Tyack said.

“I’ve held fairly senior positions in the community, and it’s not something I do lightly, speaking out like this. I’d prefer not to be doing it. But I’m doing it to appeal to any members of the public who have seen members of the clergy in compromising situations to come forward.”

Guardian Australia has contacted the Vatican for comment. In a statement made to the ABC, Pell’s office said that he “emphatically and unequivocally rejects any allegations of sexual abuse against him”, adding that “claims that he has sexually abused anyone, in any place, at any time in his life are totally untrue and completely wrong”.

A spokesman for the Victoria Police chief commissioner, Graham Ashton, told the ABC there was “very much a live investigation” into the allegations. Ashton denied to 3AW on Thursday that police had leaked the allegations to the media. He said the Pell case had been referred by Victoria Police to the Office of Public Prosecutions.

“They’ll give us an opinion on whether more investigation is warranted, whether its not going anywhere, whether they don’t recommend taking it further or if we have got enough to lay charges,” Ashton said.

It is not the first time allegations have been made against Pell. The Southwell Report, an internal investigation conducted by the Catholic church in Australia, examined an allegation that Pell had sexually abused a 12 year-old boy at an altar boys’ camp on Phillip Island in the early 1960s.

Led by AJ Southwell QC, a retired judge, the inquiry found in 2002: “The complainant, when giving evidence of molesting, gave the impression that he was speaking honestly from an actual recollection. However, the respondent, also, gave me the impression that he was speaking the truth.”

Southwell concluded there was a lack of corroborative evidence to prove the abuse had occurred, that he was not “satisfied that the complaint has been established”.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Pell was being investigated for allegedly committeding “multiple offences” when he was a priest in Ballarat, and also when he was working as the archbishop of Melbourne. It was reported that detectives from taskforce Sano had compiled a dossier containing allegations that Pell sexually abused minors “by both grooming and opportunity”.

Pell has strongly denied the allegations, describing them as “without foundation” and “utterly false”.