AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times
October 19, 2013
Paul Bibby
Court Reporter
The woman sat in the witness box – tall, neat, fair-haired – and told the jury in a calm voice that at the age of 16 she had tried to jump from a moving car after being raped by Father Finian Egan.
”I actually tried to kill myself – I wanted to die,” the 59-year-old said, as one juror in the back row cried quietly. ”I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to make it end. I felt in my heart that the only thing I could do was to kill myself. I was too scared that they wouldn’t believe me. A Catholic priest and a young girl? Back then you never heard about that stuff. I opened the door as the car was going … He tried to grab hold of me … He took me in his arms and said he was sorry.”
The woman, who cannot be identified, told the Downing Centre District Court that she was raped and indecently assaulted by Egan on separate occasions while he was working as the parish priest at The Entrance on the central coast in the early 1970s.
She is one of four alleged victims who will give evidence against the 78-year-old priest on eight counts of indecent assault and one of rape in relation to alleged incidents in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The woman told the court that as one of three siblings being raised by a single mother, she saw Egan – the local priest and basketball coach – as a father figure.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.