More Pell Claims, but Beware

By Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
May 14, 2017

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/more-pell-claimsbut-beware/news-story/f8086fc49784c84783cd6c74f3f20509

But now one of the ABC reporters responsible for that report tries again:

A soon-to-be-released book about Cardinal Pell contains detailed claims that he sexually abused two choirboys at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in the late 1990s....

In her television report from last year, Milligan referred to allegations that Cardinal Pell had also been accused of abusing two choirboys, but the book contains details that have never before been made public.

The boys, who were both students at St Kevin's College in Toorak and sung in the choir at St Patrick's Cathedral in East Melbourne, were allegedly abused in a back room of the church.

Of course, I don't know whether the allegations are true or false.

But the timing of the alleged abuse - which Pell denies - is very odd. Is it really likely that Pell, having been under fiercely hostile scrutiny by the media over his conservatism and his attempts to clean out pedophiles in his church and compensate victims, would then risk everything by abusing boys himself?

Even stranger, one of the two victims actually denied he was abused:

Milligan's book, released next week, details the testimony of one alleged victim, a man now aged in his 30s, and the family of a second alleged victim, who died from a drug overdose in 2014.

According to the book, the mother of the second alleged victim suspected her son had been sexually abused and asked him at least twice before his death. He told her he had not been.

But after he died she asked her son's friend, the first alleged victim.

"I asked him if my son was a victim and he said, 'Yes'." The mother was told by the friend that Cardinal Pell allegedly abused both boys.

Police have investigated these claims since 2015 without laying charges.

And Milligan now concedes this about her earlier ABC report that two men claimed Pell had abused them by touching their genitals as he threw them off his shoulders in horseplay with many children at a Ballarat pool more than 40 years ago:

One of the things that has helped George Pell and his defenders to bat off or gloss over the allegations of Monument and Dignan is the seeming ambiguity of the behaviour, depending on how it is cast.

Yes, indeed, they were "seeming ambiguous" - yet the ABC devoted an entire 7.30 program - the whole half hour - to them.

And for a very good reason were they "seeming ambiguous" at worst - as in probably innocent. But Milligan cast them in that program in the most sinister light, on the word of two men with troubled pasts:

As for the second allegation, the ABC did concede that its main two witnesses both had police records. But it omitted more information that goes to the credibility of one, former drug addict Lyndon Mark Monument.

Monument also had a history of psychiatric illness and had been admitted to a psychiatric institution soon after being charged with numerous offences for which he served jail.

That is not to say Monument is not telling the truth, as he understands it. But it is - to me - a caution that his understanding may not be perfect.

Beware. The plural of allegation is not proof.