AUSTRALIA
The Age
Richard Baker, Nick McKenzie
June 6, 2012
As a child and young man, Tony Hersbach was regularly sexually abused by a Catholic priest. He told no one for more than 20 years, and when he finally revealed all to the church hierarchy, it did nothing. By Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie.
TONY Hersbach was 42 when he told his wife that the man who married them and played grandfather to their children had regularly molested him during his youth. Lu Hersbach’s reaction to this bombshell was disbelief. The priest whom her husband had accused of despicable acts had been a dominant influence in their lives ever since he married them as 19-year-old sweethearts.
Over the next 24 years Father Victor Gabriel Rubeo would dine with them on Sunday nights, accompany them on holidays and attend their children’s birthday parties. He opened their mail and entered their bedroom unannounced.
“The man was so entrenched in our family that when I was told … [it was like] someone really close to you has died. You have this sense of disbelief and I guess I hung on to this sense of disbelief for as long as I could,” Lu Hersbach says.
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