AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
By JOANNE McCARTHY March 14, 2014
IN 1989 a couple travelled to an isolated farmhouse in the southern highlands for time alone.
The mood was strained.
For the previous year the woman had been recovering from major surgery to correct a serious physical disability involving her hips and legs.
The man was distracted and aloof. Although that had been a feature of their relationship since he first suddenly and forcefully kissed her in her parents’ house in 1976 when she was 22 and he was 30, and a few months later had sex with her, the woman sensed there was something more as they settled in for their four-day getaway.
They had sex over that four days, despite the discomfort that was a consequence of the surgery. But he had never let her discomfort stop him from having sex, she said in a statement to her lawyers many years later.
On the last day the woman tried to break through his distraction.
‘‘Was something wrong?’’ she asked.
There was, he said. The relationship was over. He could not continue to carry on with ‘‘a public and a private life’’.
The man was Catholic priest Father Tom Knowles. The woman was Jennifer Herrick. In 1989 he was 42 and she was 35. He was on his way to becoming Australian head of his order, the Blessed Sacrament Fathers.
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