A Follow-Up on Cardinal Pell -- Are They Trying to Get Him Even After Death?

Even in death, they can't leave him alone! Not content with a kangaroo court conviction and imprisonment, they're still trying to smear his name!

From Rorate Cæli

By Serre Verweij

[Rorate: Read Verweij's series on Pell here]

One of Australia’s favourite left elite mouthpieces, the ABC, has published an article by Louis Milligan and Charlotte King that reveals new abuse accusations against the late Cardinal Pell. Specifically, they revealed two new accusations against Pell.

One of the two accusations was accepted by the compensation scheme five weeks before the cardinal died, another was made against the cardinal by a man described as James, in 2024 after Pell’s death. The dead cannot defend themselves. The Soviet Union knew this when they started their campaign to smear war-time hero, and saviour of Jews, Pope Pius XII in 1963, roughly five years after he had died. Pell is now facing another campaign to smear his memory.

It has been noted that the burden of proof for the compensation scheme is lower than beyond a reasonable doubt of criminal trials, but it is also even lower than the balance of probabilities adhered to in civil court case, it is “reasonably likely” or “reasonable likelihood”.

The Victoria Police attempted to have Pell tried in criminal court on the many charges they solicited, but did not properly investigate) during operation Tethering. The prelate ended up seeing all charges against him dismissed in criminal court, however. Some of his accusers also wanted to try to get a verdict against him in civil court, including men who claimed Pell had molested them at a public pool during the 70s, but in the nearly five years since Pell’s acquittal by the High Court of Australia, nothing has come of that either (although apparently the diocese of Ballarat settled with a single accuser who also made claims against a Christian brother).

This is the key issue, Pell is not guilty according to any form of sexual abuse or sexual abuse cover up, according to any final judgement of an independent, impartial and fair court of law, criminal or civil. Pell is innocent before the law, just not according to certain government bureaucrats.

Yet, it seems necessary to deal with the two new accusations in detail and analyze them in the broader context of the previous false accuse against Pell and his unjust conviction.

Furthermore, Milligan has had an important role in defaming Pell for roughly a decade now, even writing an entire book attacking Pell called Cardinal – The Rise and Fall of George Pell. Columnist Peter Craven reviewed it for the Sydney Morning Herald and described its many deficiencies. Milligan was, and is, openly biased against Pell and admits that her problem with him is for a big part his doctrinal orthodoxy. She has openly shown more sympathy for his liberal predecessor Frank Little, even while admitting the Archbishop was an abuse enabler. She even tried to suggest that Pell had served as a fixer for him even when Little disliked Pell and the fact that Rome had made him an auxiliary bishop and kept him at arm’s length. Pell must somehow be blamed for the pederasty enabling of his loveable liberal predecessor, even when he immediately reversed course with the Melbourne Response as soon as he became Archbishop.

It should therefore come as no surprise that Milligan attempts to attack Pell even after is death and will not let such a thing as the rules of evidence get in her way.

The gymnasium trampoline rape 

The post-humous accusation by James is suspicious for multiple reasons. He says he stole a cardigan belonging to Pell, who coached the school's football team who then chased after him. The ABC describes it thus:

In his complaint to the scheme he says Pell chased him into the school's gymnasium, which was empty, and put him on a small trampoline.

"I remember him saying 'Pull your pants down'," James wrote.

"I thought he was going to whip me with his belt. He didn't."

"He put something in my ass — I presume it was his penis," James wrote.

"It was very painful. I was bleeding from my bottom afterward."

James was too ashamed to tell his mother, Carmel, for 50 years, until he came forward in 2024 to the National Redress Scheme after having sought legal advice.

He told the Redress Scheme that he was "scared that people won't believe me".

"I am just tortured by the fact that for 50 years, he'd lived alone with that horror," Carmel, a once-staunch Catholic who has been an advocate for victims of clergy abuse in the Ballarat diocese, says, tearfully.

Pell raped him in the gymnasium on a trampoline? Was the school empty that day? Did nobody notice an adult man chasing a boy who misbehaved? That by itself may have been expected, but Pell wasn’t worried that such a chase wouldn’t make for a very clandestine rape opportunity? Not worried anybody would show up in the gymnasium? The boy allegedly bled from his bottom, but this was not noticed by parents or doctors afterwards?

He says he was afraid of not being believed, but was he afraid no one would believe him, while anti-Pell songs were sang by Tim Minchin, while mobs yelled at Pell at the court house, and even when Pell spent over a year in prison after being wrongly convicted? Was he really afraid to share his story regarding a man whom Wikipedia described at the time as a convicted child sexual abuser?

Another problem is that the story sounds very similar to the one that Pell was unjustly convicted of earlier, before the High Court unanimously acquitted him. A boy does something forbidden, breaks the rules, Pell catches him, then rapes him. However, Pell was finally acquitted of that earlier ‘assault’, because witnesses and the timeline confirmed that people would have been coming into the sacristy after mass, at the same time Pell was supposed to be raping the boys. The story has been known to the public since late 2018. Any accusation after that which describes an equally unusual and implausible rape and that allegedly happened decades ago, with no supporting evidence, deserves more scrutiny, not less. 

It is the ‘Pell raped a boy in broad daylight rather than in secret’ story that started with career criminal Phillip Scott in 2002. He claimed Pell molested him in a tent with others present, yet magically no one noticed.

The fact that the accusation was upheld is indefensible in light of the reasoning that was used. As the ABC reports:

The decision-maker stated that part of the reason they accepted James's account was that there were two other complainants from his school (who have never gone public) who also made accusations about Pell abusing them, which the diocese of Ballarat had also not accepted.

This is the same logic that a complaints commission of the Catholic Church in the Netherlands used to justify upholding two unsubstantiated accusations against deceased former bishop Gijsen, after previously rejecting them. They accepted one unsubstantiated accusation, because there had been another unsubstantiated one. 

This was rejected in court. The Dutch court in Gelderland rejected this reasoning as violating key legal principles. The court held this, in spite of the fact that judges in the Netherlands are rather left-leaning and Gijsen was hated for being a voice of orthodoxy who rejected homosexuality, upsetting the gay community and resulting in protests. Still, the court rejected this level of unfairness and violation of the rule of law. Yet, similar reasoning was now used to uphold an accusation against Pell by the compensation scheme in Australia. 

The only difference is that in Pell’s case, the earlier accusations weren’t made spontaneously by the alleged victims, but followed an active fishing expedition by the Victoria Police, who were looking for people to accuse Pell during operation Tethering, even though they had received zero complaints against him. Stories that Pell was allegedly a child abuser have poisoned the public discourse in Australia for over a decade. 

Furthermore, in Pell’s case, based on the provided information, it seems that he was still alive, when the earlier accusations were made and that he wasn’t tried on them. Were they not reported to the police, or did it not go to trial because of how weak the evidence was? 

Regardless, the earlier complaints themselves were not substantiation even by the compensation scheme, yet were now used to substantiate an accusation that might not have stood on its own, which has been rightly rejected as violating the accused’s rights in secular court.

Another pool story

The other accusation claims that Pell had groped a boy through his clothes at a pool, by sometimes grabbing him by his genitals, instead of by an arm or leg. Like the trampoline accusation, this sounds inspired by an earlier well known accusation against Pell which he was cleared on. The two men who accused him of molesting them at a public pool in Ballarat during pool games in front of everyone, with no one noticing. ABC notes that:

As in James' case, the decision maker referred to other claims of activity by Pell, although the decision letter redacts the details of those complaints.

 

Were these other complaints from the abandoned pool case, or from other accusers who came forward after the pool case was in the news? Either thing seems problematic. Again, the Compensation scheme relied on logic that judges have held violates basic legal principles.

The pool case itself is noteworthy because the men who accused Pell had previously made unsubstantiated accusations of abuse against other adults and engaged in criminal acts. The Catholic League described their criminal records back in 2017 and criticized the media for ignoring it:

Lyndon Monument was a big boozer, a drug addict, a drug dealer, and a thug who beat and stalked his girlfriend. An ex-con, he has also been arrested for burglary, assault, and making threats to kill. Damian Dignan also has a record of violence, and has been arrested for drunk driving.

Not surprisingly, Monument and Dignan have also made accusations against former teachers. These are the guys who said Pell inappropriately touched them while throwing them off his shoulders in a swimming pool in the 1970s.

Additionally, it already inspired a copycat accuser at the time who went to the police and was also hailed by the media, but finally dismissed as an unsatisfactory witness for refusing to answer basic questions about what he had said to the police, offering answers such as “whatever you think works” or “no comment”. 

As the online blog Irish Salem has noted, one of the two accusers even retracted part of the accusation.

In a committal hearing, B said “I don’t remember saying that” when asked why Milligan recorded him saying Pell had touched his genitals when drying him, and also getting him to touch Pell’s. He agreed this would be a “lie”, but he might have said it because he’d had “massive mental health issues”, being “in the middle of a complete meltdown” involving “drink, drugs”. Prosecutors dropped the case before trial.

Once again, considering the fact that Pell had at least two implausible or retracted pool game abuse accusations made against him, similar stories should have been dealt with in a more critical manner.

Problems with the Compensation scheme and a pattern of implausible stories

The compensation scheme should have been more cautious in considering the possibility of copycat accusations against someone as well known and vilified as Pell, who has had documentaries, songs and books with detailed alleged stories against him (nearly all of which were belatedly debunked). A man who is listed amongst Wikipedia’s examples of victims of miscarriages of justice.

While real serial abusers leave a trial of victims who provide a trail of accusations, in Pell’s case we see a piling on of ludicrous stories. A pattern of accusations that are either implausible or outright proven false.

With people like Weinstein, Cosby and the now infamous McCarrick, there were independent complaints and accusations from different victims before any one accusation received significant media attention. Women warned about attending Weinstein’s parties and people made complaints without the police organizing a fishing expedition or sustained media campaigns targeting the men.

Another important detail is that these serial abusers tended to try to intimidate or smear their victims, even hiring people to do so. Pell is not accused of having enlisted any clergy or friends to intimidate victims, nor did they work under him or depend on him in any way later on, so that he’d have leverage over them. He didn’t hire journalists to dig up dirt on anyone. He never sought to avoid trial, never hid in the Vatican invoking its sovereignty, willingly testified to Royal Commissions, never sought to have any case settled out of court. 

He is apparently a serial abuser who never bothered to systematically groom, isolate or bribe victims, who never resorted to bribing witnesses and never leaked negative information about the personal lives of his accusers. 

According to critics like Milligan he is the kind of man who would actually abuse in broad daylight and yet, somehow he did this for decades with there not being a single rumour in the way there were many with McCarrick, Weinstein or Saville. Again, the only person who ever accused Pell of sexual misconduct was the career criminal before operation Tethering and he refused to go to the police, even when Pell critics like David Ridsdale told him to. 

Finally, why are there only accusations of Pell that allege stuff that happened decades ago? Why has no one accused him of anything after early 1997? Did Pell become impotent relatively young? Is it not strange for serial abusers who keep getting away with their crimes, even in broad daylight, to suddenly stop, after achieving even more power by becoming a cardinal?

Conclusion

By allowing such judgements to be made public the compensation scheme in Australia has helped to defame Pell and rewarded the witch-hunt by corrupt police against him. It’s shameful that the fact that a man previously suffered miscarriages of justice, robs him of his presumption of innocence. Don’t be surprised if more people from the same school as the recent accuser, now claim to have been molested and come asking money. 

Milligan has helped to once again politicize the fight against child sexual abuse. Real victims aren’t helped by this at all.