Many claims fell over before cardinal’s trial

Then Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr George Pell at Saint Patricks Cathedral, in Melbourne in 2000.

While not even Pollyanna could derive optimism from George Pell’s wretched week, the majority of sex abuse allegations against the cardinal investigated by Victoria Police fell over before trial.

In normal circumstances, the cardinal and his team might have been quietly welcoming the fact multiple charges and allegations that emanated from his home town of Ballarat did not progress.

Police had been investigating many potential complainants after launching an investigation in 2013 without any evidence at the time that Pell had done anything wrong. While the death of the Ballarat investigations has inevitably, and understandably, upset some of his accusers, it has delivered Pell and his team something of a ­Pyrrhic victory.

It also belies some of the misinformation hurtling across the ­social media wasteland that is painting a picture of a cardinal with a large number of established abuse victims. The five successful sex abuse charges relate to only one living victim and a dead former chorister and centre on St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in 1996 and 1997.

Yet, the overall number of police complaints disproportionately related to Ballarat, the provincial capital of Victoria’s west, and occurred decades ago.

Pell’s committal hearing a year ago heard allegations of swimming pool abuse, a sex attack in a cinema and offending at a church and on top of a hill. None was substantiated. Most lurid were the ­unsubstantiated claims of an ­assault at a Ballarat cinema while Pell and a boy were said to have watched the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The cinema claims were thrown out and by the time prosecutors came to fight the so-called swimmers trial in the County Court, these allegations also had fallen over.

Prosecutors had wanted to take to trial allegations Pell indecently assaulted two boys at Ballarat’s Eureka pool in the 1970s.

MORE: This saga has a long way to go yet, writes Pell’s biographer

MORE: Pell video of police interview in Rome released | WATCH

But prosecutors opted against trying to run the cases of two charges of indecent assault, in large part it seems because County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd ruled against allowing so-called tendency evidence to bolster the prosecution’s chances.

The swimmers trial, which was meant to go ahead soon, involved allegations Pell touched two young boys, one aged as young as nine, the other up to 12. One boy complained of repeated touching of his genitals, the second alleged unwanted touching of his testicles; both alleged they were molested at the Eureka swimming pool. At the time, Pell was aged in his 30s and was emerging as a ­celebrity figure in his old home town.

The County Court heard there was to be a third case of inappropriate swimming behaviour ­alleged, this time at a lake in rural Victoria where a 10-year-old was alleged to have been confronted with the cardinal’s erect penis.

No police charge arose from this claim but the prosecution had wanted to use his evidence to support other claims that the cardinal indecently touched boys in water.

Like much of Operation Tethering, it came to nothing.

Which can’t be said of the ­cathedral charges.