UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph
Cathy Newman, channel 4 news presenter
2 FEBRUARY 2017
It all began with a letter from a stranger in April last year. There were no details: simply a suggestion that he had a story which needed to be told.
I get dozens of these kind of tip-offs every year, and most are either from cranks or conspiracy theorists. But the letter looked genuine, so I met the man who’d penned it for a coffee.
He told me an extraordinary tale of allegations of abuse, the Church, the law, and claims of a cover-up stretching back decades.
My source had decided to write to me after seeing an investigation led by film-maker Wael Dabbous I worked on in 2014 about Simon Harris, a former public school teacher who sexually abused street children in Kenya. After Channel 4’s investigation, he was jailed for more than 17 years.
The story my source told couldn’t have been more different. It concerned a barrister and leading evangelical Christian, John Smyth, accused of assaulting students from one of England’s oldest public schools, Winchester College, and Cambridge University.
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