Victim of paedophile monk tells of devastating impact of abuse in emotional court statement

By Amy Murphy, Reporter13th February 2020News EnglandChild Abuse, Courts / Justice, Cumbria, News England, Non-Recent / Historic Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Victim Support, Yorkshire

One of the victims of paedophile monk Peter Turner has said the abuse he suffered at his hands is just as likely to kill him as disease or old age.

The man, who was aged between 10 and 12 when he was sexually abused by the priest at Ampleforth College (pictured), was praised for his bravery after he read his emotional victim impact statement out at York Crown Court on Wednesday.

He struggled to contain his emotion as he described the harm the abuse had caused him and said he had not slept through the night once in the 35 years since he was abused.

The man stood just metres away from Turner, previously known as Father Gregory Carroll, who sat in the dock and did not look at his victim while he spoke.

He told him: “Gregory Carroll, Peter Turner, whoever you are or pretend to be, to me, you are a priest, a teacher, a rapist, and a paedophile.

“Finally, after more than 35 years, it is your turn to listen to what I have to say to you. You need to hear and understand, as does the court, that what you did to me has pervaded every aspect of my life in the most devastating of ways.”

He added: “What you did to me, you did knowingly and repeatedly, and I will have to live with it until the day I die. It is just as likely that what you did will kill me as much as old age or disease.”

The man said he has flashbacks to the abuse and could still remember how Turner smelled.

He said the priest had also groomed his grandparents and parents, who he could not tell about the abuse.

He said: “Nothing in my past, including my memories of my family, is not tainted by your insatiable and calculating need to secure opportunities for sex.”

He added: “I had no language to describe any of it. None. Not a word. I did not know the names of the acts you were forcing me to commit and that you were committing against me because I was only a boy. An innocent boy, used, sullied, humiliated and abused, whom you raped… because I could not consent to any of it.

“And even though I have the language to describe this now as an adult, there is no way of writing this, or reading it to you now, which does not make me feel intensely humiliated, ashamed and diminished in the eyes of the world.”

He told the court that he had been diagnosed with a chronic sleep deficiency and complex post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the abuse, which had impacted on all of his relationships, made him feel suicidal and left him feeling “revulsed” when he washes himself.

He said: “There is almost no daily action in the ordinary course of being a human being that does not remind me in some way of what you did to me.”

The man said he had not reported Turner earlier because “I didn’t think I would survive the telling of what you had done in its full horrific scale and extent”.

Peter Turner was jailed for 20 years for child sexual abuse at York Crown Court on Wednesday.