Thursday, August 20, 2009

PRIEST SEX CASE

Accuser Admits to Misleading Police

21/08/2009 9:08:00 AM
Original article
A MAN who has accused Catholic priest Peter Julian Brock of sexually assaulting him as a teenager admitted yesterday he initially identified the wrong presbytery where some of the abuse allegedly occurred.

The man told Newcastle Local Court he had misled police about when the alleged abuse finished because he was concerned they would think he was homosexual if he admitted it continued into his 20s.

The committal hearing also heard how Brock had officiated at the man's wedding years after he was alleged to have abused him.

Brock, 63, is facing 22 child sex offences relating to two boys and alleged to have occurred in the 1970s.

He has not been required to enter a plea.

On Wednesday, the hearing was told Brock abused the boy over several years by luring him into becoming naked while playing card games.

Some of the abuse allegedly occurred in a "counselling room" of a Hunter presbytery.

The court heard yesterday that the alleged victim had, in two statements to police, said that he had been assaulted at a certain Hunter presbytery, but Brock was not based there until years after the abuse was alleged to have first occurred.

In a third statement to police, made almost a year after the first statement, the man changed the location.

Under cross examination yesterday, the man agreed he had deliberately misled police in his first statement when he said the abuse had stopped when he was still a teenager.

He said he was embarrassed that police would think he was homosexual if he told them the sexual activity continued into his 20s.

He told police in a second statement he was abused until he was 24 or 25. On Wednesday he told the court that it continued until his late 20s.

Defence counsel Peter Hamill, SC, asked the man about the discrepancies: "It's your memory that is the problem, not your math, it's a fact that it's your memory that changes."

The man replied: "I know what happened to me, I know as a child and I know he did it."

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