AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article posted 2 March 2014)
Australia’s national Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is examining a 2007 civil legal case, in which Cardinal George Pell’s legal team crushed one of the church’s Sydney victims, former altar-boy John Ellis. This Pell victory later helped the Catholic Church to avoid, or limit, paying compensation to many victims in other parts of Australia. The church’s evasive strategy became known as the “Ellis Defence”, although it could be called (perhaps more appropriately) the “Pell Defence”.
Commission chief executive Janette Dines said in a public statement early in 2014 that the Royal Commission is examining the original complaint made by John Ellis under the church’s internal Towards Healing process “and the circumstances in which the Catholic Church raised what is commonly referred to as the ‘Ellis Defence”’.
The Sydney victim, John Ellis, had been a 14-year-old altar boy in a suburban parish in 1975, when he was sexually abused by Father Aidan Duggan. The abuse (and the church’s breach of trust) seriously damaged John Ellis’s adolescence and his later personal and working life when he was practising as a solicitor during his twenties and thirties.
In 2002, John Ellis (then aged 40) contacted the Catholic Church’s “Towards Healing” office, lodging a formal complaint about how the Sydney archdiocese has disrupted his life and his career by its action giving Father Duggan easy access to children. The archdiocese (through its Towards Healing office) offered John Ellis a relatively small financial settlement, on the condition that he would sign away his right to tackle the archdiocese for the kind of amount that any other corporation would be obliged to pay to a damaged person.
The Sydney archdiocese’s draft settlement document indicated that the Towards Healing offer was being made on behalf of:
1. Archbishop George Pell (for the Sydney Archdiocese); and
2. the Trustees of the Sydney Archdiocese.
John Ellis refused to accept this Towards Healing offer and decided, instead, to tackle the archdiocese in the New South Wales Supreme Court for a more appropriate sum to cover the loss of his professional earnings – and to teach the archdiocese a lesson about its covering up of clergy sexual abuse. In naming the defendants, Mr Ellis cited the names of the same parties who had been listed by the church in its proposed Towards Healing settlement deed – that is Archbishop George Pell and the Trustees of the Sydney Archdiocese.
In 2006 the Supreme Court granted permission for the “Ellis-versus-Pell” case to proceed in court, but the archdiocese successfully applied to the NSW Court of Appeal.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.