ABC investigative journalist Louise Milligan has commended the courage of a surviving choirboy who first confided in her against convicted paedophile Cardinal George Pell in 2016.
“Imagine bearing that burden and now facing the know-alls who seek to discredit his evidence and paint him as a mad man and a liar even though they haven’t heard his evidence,” Milligan said at a public Women in Media lecture at ABC Southbank Centre last night.
“He could no longer hold the pain of what happened to him at St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1996 inside himself,” she said.
The survivor was inspired to come forward when a second choirboy central to the case died of a heroin overdose in 2014.
“If the men who were supposed to represent all that is good in the world couldn’t be trusted, who could?” Milligan said.
She said other complainants were inspired to speak out against Pell when “the sense of injustice finally overwhelmed the fear of the consequences”.
“It created a generation of people with deep-seeded trust issues, I could not and would not betray them. I had to show them that there are good people in the world who would do the right thing by them,” Milligan said.
Dr Cathy Kezelman, the president of Blue Knot Foundation, the national organisation supporting adult survivors of childhood trauma, said it was difficult for people to speak out because “we have a society that has treated this with stigma”.
“There is a real fear of not being believed and what we have seen is a lot of survivors have been dismissed and had their issues minimised,” she said.
Finding the courage to speak out often required a lot of processing and internal and external support, according to Dr Kezelman.
“It’s very complex, it’s very nuanced, it takes courage but there are a lot more relevance to it as well.”
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