AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

By CATHERINE ARMITAGE Dec. 9, 2013

JOAN Isaacs was 14 years old and near the top of her class at the Sacred Heart Convent Sandgate in Brisbane when Father Francis Derriman got her to join his “cult-like” group of four children.

She told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse he used the Peanuts comic as a way to bond the group. He called himself and the rest of them Brown after the comic’s main character Charlie Brown.

To her knowledge three girls in their “Brown” group were sexually abused, including her, aged 14 and 15 in 1967 and 1968. One of the girls fathered a child to Derriman at age 17.

Her voice sometimes breaking, Mrs Isaacs detailed how the priest told her he was dying of a fatal lung disease.