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Yesterday, Australia’s highest-ranking Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, was found guilty of child sex abuse.
Pell, who is the most senior Catholic figure to be charged with child sex offences, was found guilty of raping a choirboy in the 1990s and molesting another.
A jury of eight men and four women took three and a half days to find Pell guilty of five charges – one of sexually penetrating a child and four of committing indecent acts with children.
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Pell’s accuser told the court that he struggled for years to understand what’d he experienced at the hands of the then-archbishop.
“I had no intention back then of telling anyone ever,” he told the trial.
“I was young and I didn’t really know what had happened to me. I was worried about anything that could jeopardise my schooling.”
Pell’s other victim was not present at the trial. He died of a heroin overdose back in 2014.
Investigative journalist Lucie Morris-Marr, a reporter for The New Daily, was the first journalist to break the story in 2016.
Morris-Marr was in court yesterday morning and she was there the day Pell’s verdict was handed down in December, while the Australian media was under a suppression order.