AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
December 12, 2013
Catherine Armitage
Senior Writer
Jennifer Ingham says she should not be alive. She was abused by predatory priest Father Paul Brown of the Catholic church’s Lismore diocese from age 16. Within a year she could not complete her HSC because she was hospitalised for bulimia.
For the next few years, while her peers were finding their way in the world with new-found freedom, she was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and attempted suicide several times. The abuse continued as Father Brown arranged to meet her regularly at the Sydney University Motel in Glebe or flew her to where he was living at St Joseph’s Parish Church, Tweed Heads.
He arranged for her psychiatric treatment. Her family was never billed. She thinks he paid.
“I shouldn’t be medically alive,” Mrs Ingham, 51, told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse. All the $256,000 compensation she got from the church earlier this year had already been spent on medical bills for her survival, she said. Operations she needed because of the bulimia have left her with such severe mouth pain that she had to break and rest when telling her story to the Commission.
She said the first time she told her story to the church was at a meeting of senior clerics in Lismore in 1990. One of them was Father Frank Mulcahy, who had been to school with and remained friends with her father.
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