Andrew Bolt: Victoria Police’s extreme George Pell prejudice has been exposed
The allegations against Cardinal George Pell ranged from the highly improbably to the impossibly bizarre. Now the High Court has thrown out Pell’s conviction, Victoria’s police should face their day of reckoning, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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Someone must pay for the jailing of the innocent George Pell. Call an inquiry into Victoria’s police.
Consider this damning statistic: Victoria Police has charged Pell 26 times for child sex abuse, but failed every single time.
Every one of those charges was so far-fetched or so weak that it was dropped or ultimately dismissed — although not until Pell had spent a year in jail.
The force’s final failure came last Tuesday, when the High Court unanimously threw out Pell’s ludicrous conviction for somehow raping two boys at once in a wide-open room at exactly the time it was most likely to be full of people.
Imagine police trying 26 times to nail you, and failing every time because the charges were so stupid.
Wouldn’t you suspect they had it in for you?
But police chief commissioner Graham Ashton last week denied his force had a “get-Pell” agenda, telling 3AW: “What a joke. We don’t run vendettas against people.” His police worked “without fear or favour”.
Really? For years it’s looked to me as if his force actually regarded Pell with extreme prejudice.
Ashton himself, when a deputy commissioner, claimed at a parliamentary inquiry that the Melbourne Catholic diocese which Pell then ran had not referred a single complaint of sexual abuse to police. This was not true.
Then, in 2015, months after Ashton became commissioner, his force made an extraordinary public appeal. It urged “victims” to come forward if they’d been abused at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral between 1996 and 2001 — precisely when Pell was archbishop there.
This suggested that police already assumed — without proof — that Pell was probably a child abuser, and all they had to do was find his “victims”.
It also suggested they were inclined to believe anyone who did then accuse Pell was indeed a true “victim”. Police seemed not to be investigating a crime, but trying to nail Pell. What’s more, their public appeal — and a string of anti-Pell leaks to the media — was likely to inspire false memories in some people — that Pell must be the monster they imagined, suspected or believed had once abused them. His face would be put on their trauma. To others, it may have seemed an invitation to compensation. Whatever, it worked, especially with the ABC whipping up a get-Pell frenzy.
Police produced nine “victims”, and charged Pell with 26 offences. But these ranged from the highly improbable to the impossibly bizarre.
Pell was even charged with anally raping a boy for three minutes in a cinema, with the boy screaming on his lap.
Pardon? Which abuser would be so brazenly careless of being seen? Who in that cinema would not have noticed?
Police also charged Pell with taking this same boy several more times from his children’s home — St Joseph’s — to rape him, once on an altar, and once so badly that the boy’s foster mother took him to a doctor. But the police didn’t just charge Pell with crimes which seemed literally incredible.
They also failed to investigate properly, as if they assumed Pell’s guilt was self-evident.
Take that boy Pell supposedly took out of St Joseph’s.
In fact, the boy no longer lived at St Joseph’s that year. Pell never worked there.
The film they allegedly saw at the cinema wasn’t screened that year, and neither the boy’s foster mother nor doctor could recall him having anal injuries. Why did police not check more closely?
Or take one of the four charges the High Court dismissed — that Pell, walking down a corridor of his Cathedral after Mass with Father Brendan Egan by his side, and 50 choristers around him, suddenly pushed one boy against a wall and gave his testicles a hard squeeze.
That was extremely improbable.
Yet police charged Pell without bothering to interview a single witness, not even Father Egan.
Asked in court why not, the investigating sergeant was dismissive: “Because I didn’t.” Police just took the accuser’s totally uncorroborated word.
On it went. Police repeatedly charged Pell with cases so weak that all have failed.
And police were warned they were weak. Victoria’s Office of Public Prosecutions advised them not to proceed with the charges the High Court last week dismissed.
Yet they did.
Result: Pell spent 405 days in jail for a crime he could not possibly have committed.
Call an inquiry into Victoria Police. Now.
Andrew Bolt interviews George Pell in a TV exclusive on Sky News at 7pm Tuesday
Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Victoria Police’s extreme George Pell prejudice has been exposed