Angela Mollard: The men whose lives have been ruined by those they looked up to

He was a teacher we all loved at school, who made us feel our class was special. But he was a predator that ruined the lives of so many young boys who became damaged men and we owe it to them to not look away, writes Angela Mollard.

Of all my school memories, it’s that camp that stands out.

A week free from books and a magical 20km mountain hike in sandshoes.

But what really made that year 6 camp so special for me and my classmates was our teacher, Mr Booth.

He was gruff but wonderful. He made us feel like our class was special. Education, he’d tell us, was our entry ticket to the world.

My brother was placed in his class the following year. “He’s the best teacher ever,” I told him.

But what we didn’t know back then was that James Booth – Jim to those who knew him – was sexually assaulting his students. At that camp, where my mum was once a parent helper and where we’d later accompany him as a family, he was rousing boys from their bunk beds and forcing them to perform sexual acts. As one of my brother’s classmates would later reveal, he was woken, undressed, kissed and forced to take part in oral sex.

But that was 1981. Years later, in 1997, Mr Booth would target another boy. Our teacher was allowed to use the camp, near the mountains in New Zealand’s North Island, at weekends. Websta was 12 when he first went there. It was just the two of them and Mr Booth let him drive. He remembers his chest was sore from holding the steering wheel. Mr Booth offered to give him a massage.

And then he touched him.

As Websta told me this week from his home on the Sunshine Coast, from there it escalated. For the next four years he’d go to the camp with Mr Booth almost every other weekend. They’d hunt possums and fish and ride motorbikes. In the evenings there would be alcohol and cigarettes and Mr Booth would force Websta to perform oral sex on him. On two occasions he anally raped him.

Angela Mollard, bottom row, second from right, and Mr Booth – back row,.

Eventually the abuse stopped but a friendship of sorts continued. Mr Booth continued to give Websta money. As he told me, it helped him buy drugs to push away the demons in his head. Mr Booth hadn’t just taken his innocence, his childhood, he then “afforded me everything I needed to self-destruct in my early years”.

In 2003 Websta moved to Australia. He needed a fresh start, but Mr Booth would continue to send him letters and money. He even visited.

And then one day in 2021, nearly 25 years after the abuse first happened, Websta walked into an Australian police station. After a blistering argument he’d told his wife what had happened to him as a child. “I had to do something, it was ruining me,” he told me. Police set up recording equipment and he called Mr Booth.

“Jim, why did you do those things to me?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” our teacher, now in his late 70s responded.

“You know exactly what I mean. Why did you sexually abuse me?”

“I don’t know … I don’t know … it felt right.”

Websta told me Mr Booth believed they had an “affinity”, a “special relationship”.

He shakes his head: “How can you have a special relationship with a 12-year-old? Now I’m a grown man with a daughter who’s almost 10 I think ‘no way’.”

Last year the teacher we’d adored pleaded guilty to a raft of charges against four boys and was sentenced to seven years in prison. My classmates and brothers were sickened. How had we not known? My younger brother, who’d had Mr Booth as his rugby coach, said he’d always felt uneasy. “We suspected something was not right but we did not know what to do about it.”

Arguably we still don’t. While #MeToo has reduced the stigma for female survivors, men don’t disclose their stories as easily. They carry the secret and the shame and as an extraordinary new book by journalist Shannon Molloy reveals, on average it takes a man 30 years to tell someone what happened to them.

I urge you to buy his book, You Made Me This Way, because it’s important. Yes, it’s confronting, and the stories of abuse will stay with you. But it’s also full of light, a light that must be shone on this subject because we owe it to the men and boys in our life not to look away. As Shannon writes, and this paper reported last Sunday, child sexual assault victims are more likely to self-harm, experience poor mental health and take their own lives. Websta has considered suicide but there’s his daughter. He couldn’t do it to her. So he keeps going but as he tells me, he feels empty. “It’s like I’m lost, I’m not whole, it’s like I’m broken.”

Yet Websta and Shannon and those interviewed for News Corp’s podcast Predatory are speaking because if they’re heard the outcomes are more positive. Websta tells me he didn’t tell anyone about Mr Booth for all those years because he wanted to protect him. He now knows that’s the insidiousness of grooming. If he can save one kid from his fate, he tells me, it’ll be worth it.

Mr Booth is an old man now. Websta saw him with his walking stick via video link at the sentencing. It upsets him that our teacher, with probation, could serve fewer years than he was abused.

He wonders if there were other victims. Wishes he’d spoken out earlier. Yet he’s relieved that the fears he had before his daughter’s birth that he, too, would be a predator, have proved unfounded.

Now he just wants peace from the ugliness that lingers in his head and makes him a man he doesn’t want to be. He still numbs himself with drink.

As for our paedophile teacher, the anger still simmers. “He did the worst thing any adult could do to a child. I had dreams and plans and they were taken from me.”