AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
July 23, 2013
Catherine Armitage
Senior Writer
The black-haired man with sparkling eyes sat nervously in the witness stand, his voice faltering as he tried to count the cost to his life and his family of years of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest when he was a boy.
By the time he was finished the courtroom was weeping with him – at the bar table, in the public gallery, in the media seats. The room erupted in applause.
The victim, whose name is suppressed, told the state government inquiry into church and police cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Hunter Valley that he had been “an innocent little kid with a big hope for the future” when Father James Fletcher began sexually abusing him. Fletcher was convicted of the abuse in 2004 and died in jail in 2006.
The abuse left his victim feeling as an adult that he was “just stuffing up my life”. AH, as he is known at the inquiry, eyeballed his younger brothers, there in the court to support him with his mother and father, and confessed he was sometimes jealous of them.
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