How all hell broke loose over police investigation of Pell

The investigation into Cardinal George Pell began at the same time the church and police were arguing over sex abuse crisis response.

George Pell leaves court in Melbourne surrounded by police in May last year. Picture: AP

The once watertight relationship between Victoria Police and the Catholic Church reached a historical nadir in the days, weeks and months before the force ordered the covert sex abuse investigation into Cardinal George Pell.

Operation Tethering began in March 2013, at the same time the church and the force were arguing bitterly in private about the response to the sex abuse crisis, with hostile, tit-for-tat exchanges.

The conflict was exacerbated by some misleading information by Victoria Police to a parliamentary inquiry, which included a misunderstanding about how the church’s sex abuse compensation scheme worked, the number of victims reported to police and the capacity for the abused to report the crimes.

But there was also deep and understandable police unease about the vastness of the abuse problem that had infected the church and the historical failure of both the church and the force to deal with the issue from the 1950s onwards.

That unease was vindicated again yesterday when the Court of Appeal upheld the Pell sex abuse convictions.

Melbourne Response

At the heart of the angst between police and the church was the way the abuse compensation scheme called the Melbourne Response operated.

This spat is significant because it explains the period immediately before police chose to investigate Pell without a contemporary formal complaint made by anyone, which sparked allegations that Tethering was a “get Pell” endeavour by the force.

The Australian has seen hundreds of pages of documents detailing first how Victoria Police largely, and at times fully, supported the Melbourne Response from 1996 until as late as 2010, and had constant dialogue with the church about the way it operated, with police offering advice on how the system could be improved.

This approval was nuanced and some detectives wanted access to more information from the church but force command, the documents show, was behind the response until less than three years before Pell was investigated.

The documents also show that at the same time Operation Tethering began, the church was vigorously defending itself behind the scenes over comments by police and lawyers about sex offending and the church.

On January 15, 2013 — just weeks before Tethering started — the Pell team was still defending the cardinal against claims of wrongdoing levelled against him by a victims’ lawyer to the parliamentary inquiry that concluded he had knowledge of offending by a notorious Catholic brother.

The battle between the church and the force involved three police commissioners and ignited after high-profile former deputy police commissioner Sir Ken Jones left the force.

The brawling intensified as police started investigating Pell, without a formal complaint, creating concerns among senior Cath­olics that the investigation was political.

But The Australian has established that concerns about Pell and possible abuse were raised privately at the Victorian parliament’s Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Non-Government Organisations.

The Australian is not suggesting that police were wrong to investigate Pell, given yesterday’s Court of Appeal judgment tends to further bolster the police action.

But the events leading to Tethering being launched without a formal complaint provide important historical context of what was happening behind the scenes when the operation began.

Before Tethering

Jones was a former senior British policeman who fell out with then Victorian police commissioner Simon Overland, with both leaving their jobs prematurely. Jones left in May 2011 and Overland a month later.

Documents show Jones and others had been working on a new protocol with the church that would have improved liaison between the two groups over clergy abuse and the church believed the police were “very content” with the Melbourne Response.

The dealings between Jones and the church had been cordial.

The documents suggest that for 14 years until 2010, police had worked with the church, discussing how to make it effective.

Police released a media statement on October 30, 1996, headed: “Police support Catholic Church initiatives to combat sexual abuse.” This was at roughly the same time Pell’s sole living accuser in the highest profile abuse case said the cardinal had molested him and another choir boy in St Patrick’s Cathedral, when Pell was archbishop of Melbourne.

Pell was convicted of five ­charges of molestation, including oral penetration of a child and touching after mass in the cathedral just before Christmas and an incident early the next year.

The documents seen by The Australian show the church-police relationship changed sharply on September 29, 2011, when current police chief Graham Ashton — then a deputy commissioner — wrote to the church stating the force could no longer publicly support a new protocol with the organisation.

This was not explicitly because of concerns about the Melbourne Response.

Rather, it was because the force had ruled that the chief commissioner of the day no longer entered into binding agreements with third parties after an intervention by the police files watchdog that related to the multi-billion-dollar Victorian desalination plant.

Police had been criticised for striking a deal to make available secret police files on people protesting against the desalination plant, sparking a review of agreements with companies and bodies outside the force.

Ashton, who was later strongly backed by then police commissioner Ken Lay, sent a short letter to the church on August 24, 2011, rescinding the connection with the organisation over the compensation scheme and protocols for handling abuse.

Row intensifies

But Ashton also forcefully told then archbishop Denis Hart the next month: “The reporting and recording of any crime committed by your staff is a matter for you to manage in accordance with the law and natural justice.

“Our expectations are that those matters are reported to police at the first available opportunity.’’

This letter, comments made later by Ashton in the media and inaccuracies in the police submission to the state parliamentary inquiry then dramatically escalated the battle between police and the church.

It must be stressed that Ashton was not alone in the force, or indeed among victim groups, in believing that the Catholic response to abuse was dated and needed overhauling.

The relationship between the church and police exploded in 2012 when the force wrongly accused the church of failing to report a single case of abuse to police when the church had.

The church also had actively encouraged victims to report wrongdoing to the force. Under the Melbourne Response, all participants were explicitly told they had the option to report the abuse to police, which was up to the individual concerned.

There was a series of examples of abuse being reported to police but it was the practice of the process’s independent commissioner at the time, Peter O’Callaghan QC, to agree to the wishes of the abused person. If they didn’t want to report, then he was unable to report it without their approval.

On May 15, 2012, Hart wrote to Lay, declaring: “As I have said publicly on a number of occasions, the fact is that many of the sexual abuse victims who approach the independent commissioner do so on the condition of confidentiality, having been urged to take their complaint to the police but having declined to do so.

“It is not my expectation that Victoria Police would want the wishes of victims to be ­ignored.”

The archbishop’s language was uncharacteristically strong, also questioning where police were in their analysis of what turned out to be misleading claims by police on the extent of clergy sex abuse-related suicides, which history shows were vastly overstated.

The Australian reported on June 19, 2013, just weeks after Operation Tethering started, how O’Callaghan had accused Ashton of “blatant untruths”, a “travesty” of justice, “utterly false” claims and of “malicious nonsense” in evidence to the state inquiry.

On criticism by police of the alleged restrictions placed on sex abuse victims in relation to future legal action and reporting to police, O’Callaghan asserted: “This is utterly false. It is astounding that a responsible organisation such as Victoria Police could put forward to a most important inquiry such blatant untruths.”

He also rejected police claims that victims were forced into confidentiality agreements if they accepted compensation from the church.

The timing of O’Callaghan’s defence becomes critical in the context of the pursuit of Pell, which was debated during the cardinal’s committal process.

Phillip Island

Exactly why police went after Pell has never been fully explained, particularly in the apparent absence of any formal complaint.

The Australian has been told, however, that police started investigating Pell after MPs and committee advisers at the state parliamentary inquiry had discussed allegations made previously against Pell during a camp at Phillip Island, 140km south of Melbourne, in 1961-62.

It is believed the parliamentary inquiry also was made aware of another potential complaint of sexual wrongdoing by Pell that was never pursued because of misgivings about the veracity of the claims.

“A lot of this really goes back to Phillip Island,” an official familiar with discussions about Pell’s ­activities told The Australian.

“That’s where you need to look.”

In 2002, Pell stood down as archbishop of Sydney amid contested claims by a former Catholic student that Pell had molested him at a school camp on Phillip ­Island.

In the Phillip Island allegations, investigated nearly 20 years ago by retired judge Alec Southwell, Pell was accused of placing his hands down the complainant’s pants and touching his penis and testicles and of forcing him to put his hand down Pell’s pants.

There also was an alleged case of Pell putting his hands down the complainant’s bathers at the beach.

Southwell, who died last year, did not find the case proven but found the complainant, an ­alcoholic with 39 convictions from about 20 court appearances, gave the impression he “was speaking honestly from an actual recollection”.

But he was “not satisfied that the complaint has been established”.

Pell, Southwell ruled, “also gave me the impression he was speaking the truth”.

While Pell had used the Southwell findings as evidence of vindication, it was not a knockout blow because of Southwell’s failure to reject outright what the alleged victim had said.

The Australian revealed in early 2016 that police had revived their interest in the Phillip Island allegations, even though they were more than 50 years old.

Father Rene Ramirez, whose area of control included the old Braybrook parish in Melbourne’s west, confirmed that a detective visited his pres­by­tery late in 2015 to inspect documents from the 1960s.

Pell, nicknamed “Big George” by boys at the 60s camp, was at the time a teenage seminarian at Corpus Christi College in Werri­bee, southwest of Melbourne.

The alleged victim, who would be about 70 today, reportedly did not co-operate with the 2015-16 investigation.

These details emerged at the same time that Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper was about to report how multiple complainants had emerged against Pell, although only one would ever make its way to the County Court.

In many ways, the Southwell inquiry, the large number of people who accused Pell of wrongdoing and the County Court convictions encapsulate the challenges facing the cardinal’s defenders.

When does so much smoke not suggest there is a legal bushfire? Was it all a grand conspiracy?

This conspiracy theory gathers momentum when Pell’s relationship with notorious offender Gerald Ridsdale is considered.

Pell’s reputation is haunted by his decision in 1993 to attend court with Ridsdale as Ridsdale faced sex crimes charges.

The parliamentary inquiry reported in November 2013 and its findings then helped trigger the royal commission.

All the while, police continued their inquiries into Pell until he was charged with the cathedral crimes and mainly water-based offending in the diocese of Ballarat and beyond.

Pell faced 26 charges from nine complainants when he went to court two years ago, with all of the Ballarat-based offending failing to reach the higher court.

During the committal, detectives were accused by the defence of single-mindedly pursuing Pell before receiving a complaint against him.

Defence barrister Robert Richter QC, a strident believer in Pell’s innocence, asked Detective Superintendent Paul Sheridan: “Operation Tethering, that wasn’t a ‘get Pell’ operation, was it?”

Sheridan responded: “I guess you could term it the way you did, but I wouldn’t term it that way.”

Sheridan had told the court Tethering began in March 2013 to determine whether Pell had committed crimes that had not been reported.

It is clear that at the time ­Operation Tethering began, the force was at war with the church and the decision to pursue the ­cardinal without any formal, ­contemporary complaint was ­unusual.

But force command will take comfort from that fact the Court of Appeal yesterday effectively ratified the detectives’ work by upholding the convictions.