ANALYSIS: As a witness at George Pell’s trial, I saw first-hand the strength of his victim

AUSTRALIA
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)

By Louise Milligan

Two 13-year-old choristers from humble backgrounds, who received scholarships to an expensive Catholic school because they could sing their little hearts out.

Two boys whose childhoods, a court has again found, were stolen from them in 1996 by a man who was supposed to represent all that was good in the world: the then Archbishop of Melbourne.

Neither chorister was in court this brisk Melbourne morning.

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One succumbed in 2014 to the heroin addiction that overwhelmed him from the age of 14 — the year after the event that changed their lives.

He was only 31 when he died.

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