AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
JOANNE MCCARTHY
21 Aug 2016
HE is the Catholic priest who stole boys’ lives.
Father David O’Hearn spent eight years fighting the men he sexually abused as vulnerable young boys in the 1980s and 1990s. On Monday some of them will be in a Sydney court to watch him pay the price.
They will pay for the rest of their lives, the men said in victim impact statements.
“We will never know what it’s like to live a normal life as we had that opportunity taken away from us as young boys,” said one of O’Hearn’s victims.
“I think my life could have been totally different if the abuse had never occurred. I would be a different person but I will never know what that person would have been like. I know that I can’t blame everything in my life on the abuse but I do know it’s had a significant impact on me.”
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