UNITED KINGDOM
Church Times
by Hattie Williams
Posted: 05 Feb 2016
THE survivor who raised allegations of sexual abuse by a former Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, has given her account in public for the first time.
In an interview with The Argus, a newspaper in Brighton and Hove, the survivor, who has chosen to remain anonymous, describes being repeatedly molested by Bishop Bell over a four-year period, from the age of five.
She said that a relative who worked at the Bishop’s Palace in Chichester would often take her there, “usually for two or three days at a time, sometimes a week”, as a favour to her mother, who was looking after a large family.
Bell would take her to a private room under the guise of reading her a bedtime story, she said, and sit her on his lap, before moving his hands over her thighs and interfering with her. “He said it was our little secret, because God loved me,” she told the paper, on Wednesday.
The survivor, who is now in her seventies, first reported the abuse in a letter to the Bishop of Chichester, Dr Eric Kemp, in August 1995. She said that she had done so after struggling with “feelings of guilt” for decades.
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