Day 11 of the Houston trial.
“If life could be played twice, would you do the same thing again?” defence barrister Phillip Bouten SC asked Brian Houston on trial for not reporting his father Frank Houston’s crimes to the police.
“If Brett Sengstock [Frank Houston’s victim] came to me at 36 or 37 [years old] and said he did not want to go to the police, I feel like I’d do the same thing,” Brian Houston, the founder of Hillsong told the court.
Boulten had taken Brian Houston methodically through exactly when he found out about his father Frank Houston’s pedophile offending in Australia and New Zealand and when Brian Houston had told other people of it.
The aim of the lengthy ‘evidence in chief’ was to demonstrate how often Brian Houston told others of his father’s offending.
Brian Houston recounted interactions with Sengstock, the Australian victim. Brian Houston had been given the job of offering Sengstock counselling, by an Assemblies of God (AOG) national executive meeting in December 1999.
“It was a brief, very brief [phone call],” Houston told Boulten. “Because Brett cut it short. I said you have been offered counselling by the national executive of the Assemblies of God.”
“He said, ‘I don’t want your bloody counselling.’”
Brian Houston carried out his other task of talking with his father. “I told him what had happened at the meeting. That his credentials were cancelled, that he was not going to preach again.”
Boulten: “What other things did he say to you?’
Brian Houston: “He told me that it had happened at a time when he was emotionally low. He told me my grandfather had come home drunk one afternoon and abused him.
“He told me about the $2000 I thought he had paid at Redfern.”
“He said it was his ‘feeble attempt to right the wrong.’
Brian Houston testified that in early 2000 he disclosed his father’s offending against the Australian complainant to some seventy pastors at the Sydney and Hills Christian Life centres. “I specifically mentioned the word ‘minor,’“ Brian Houston told Boulten when pressed on what he had told the Sydney CLC pastors.
Boulten: “what did you tell them what they could say?”
Brian Houston: “I never told them or anyone at any time that they need to keep it quiet. Ever.”
Boulten asked Brian Houston to describe his workload in 2000. “I would say seven months in Sydney, and four or five months travelling.”
Boulten: “Sundays were jam-packed when you were in Sydney?”
Brian Houston: “Yes.”
Boulten: “Busy running the AOG also?”
Brian Houston: Looking back I was too busy.I was carrying a very big workload.”
Boulten took Brian Houston through some holes in the testimony of an earlier witness, pastor Barbara Taylor. In a letter to Brian Houston, she had alleged Frank Houston was in the Hillsong Conference brochure as a speaker and that he was preaching on TV both of which were untrue.
But another allegation, that Frank Houston was preaching in Canberra after his credentials were removed, which Brian Houston disbelieved at the time was likely true, he agreed.
Asked why he had told Barbara Taylor in July 2000 to communicate by phone rather than by mail, Brian Houston resigned that his mail team of young people was not the right place for a delicate matter.
Mallesons printer Graham Bates had been identified after seething by Brian Houston’s legal team as the lawyer Brian Houston and church elder Nabi Saleh had visited to get advice about a document setting out a payment of $10,000 Frank Houston had agreed to pay Brett Sengstock. Sengstock had phoned Brian Houston because he had not received the money.
Brian Houston described that he ‘wanted to make sure any document was between Brett and Frank. To make sure it was not an NDA [non-disclosure agreement], or anything stopping Brett from talking to the police.
Magistrate Gareth Christofi ked “Why were those points important to you?”
Brian Houston “Bluntly I wanted to make sure there was no cover-up.”
In a long section of the evidence in chief, Boulten got Brian Houston to make an inventory of who he had told the story of his father’s offending. By mid-2000 it was 140 people including all elders of the Sydney and Hills CLC, pastors at both churches the AOG national executive and lawyers. He also told pastors overseas.
“I told the whole story of Frank saying it was a one-off and that it involved fondling genitals.
But by late 2000 a New Zealander called Gerald told Brian Houston that Frank had abused him when he was 14 – and he was an exact contemporary of Brian. “I was re-devastated. I realised my father had not been truthful, and the problem was bigger.”
The national executive minutes recall that Brian Houston told them that there were more accusations of ‘inappropriate behaviour from 33 years ago.”
Magistrate Christofi asked Brian Houston if he had any thoughts about other victims in Australia. “I can’t recall having that thought,” Brian Houston responded. “To this day I am not aware of any incidents that happened outside of that timeframe [the early 70s or before].”
Asked whether he believed Frank Houston posed any threat in 2000,”At that time I believed that at 78 years old and in failing health I did not think he posed a threat.” Ian Woods of Hawkesbury Christian Centre the church that Frank had been sent to after his exile from Hillsong, would take the job of looking after frank seriously.
Brian Houston tells the story of pastors making fun “in a non-malicious way” of Frank Houston preaching at a conference in Hobart in 1999 and pointing to a man, praying and prophesying over him, and then doing the same thing three more times, unaware he was repeating himself.
Magistrate Christofi asked if a public announcement would be made if a similar thing happened today. “I am not emotionally attached as I was back then,” Brian Houston responded. “All the way to 2012 I deteriorated emotionally.
“He was my children’s grandfather. He was mom father. I had to oversee it for the church. I had to oversee it for the AOG.
“I remember Sundays when I could not go to church. Of saying to Bobblie ‘we are not going tonight.’”
“Did you ever seek counselling for it?” Asked Boulten, “Not as early as I should have.”
He was asked to look at an extract of a letter from Hazel Houston,.. His mother wrote to the national executive complaining of what she regarded as harsh treatment of Frank>
Brian Houston described her attitude. “My mother never understood. She has her head in the sand. She never understood” – pause as he gathers his thoughts – “the true gravity of the situation.
“There was tension between her and I. I remember saying to her ‘Mum, it’s not just immoral, its criminal.’”
Brian Houston was asked about a conversation with an earlier witness, Pastor Robert Cotton of Maitland Christian Church. “At a leaders breakfast, we had a hallway conversation and he spoke specifically of my mother telling him Frank’s abuse was minor. I told him it was criminal.”
From early 2002 Brian Houston began to tell larger groups of the story. 2,000 people at a ‘leadership vision night’. Then the Sunday congregations – the first recording discovered was March 10, 2002. In the sermon, George Aghajanian tells Brian Houston of a “serious moral accusation”
“Why didn’t you tell the church the specifics?” Boulten asks.
“I wish I had, “ Brian Houston responds. “I was still battling. It was the only time I used the words “serious moral accusation.’
A Kelly Burke article in The Sydney Morning Herald picked up the language of the letter sent to all pastors at the end of 2001, deciding “serious moral failure.”
Brian Houston had toughened his language by Easter Sunday 2002, where he preached on “the most painful thing I have had to tell at church where he described his fathers’ “predatory manner” and that there were victims.”
“Were you trying to hide the offence your father had committed?” Boulten asked, seeking to pre-empt the prosecution.
“No”
Asked what the people in church would have understood his father had done, Brian Houston responded “I had told the pastors and staff that my father has abused a minor. It was spreading rapidly that my father had abused a male child.”
A second article in The Sydney Morning Herald by Greg Bearup in the Good Weekend January 25, 2002, told of Brian Houston recounting“then his father confessed to being a pedophile… finding out that he had abused a child back in New Zealand was like “jets flying into the twin towers of my soul”. Brian Houston also used those words in his Easter Sunday sermon.
Drilling into the New Zealand reference Brian Houston was asked “Did you tell him that it had only occurred in New Zealand?” “No,” he replied.
A highlight of Boulten’s examination of Brian Houston was his testimony that there were a number of police listening to his sermon at the Hillsong conference including then Assistant Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione.
“Did he know your father was a pedophile?” Asked Boulten.
“Yes, I believe he did” Brian Houston responded, going on to tell the story of how Scipione stood beside him at frank Houston’s funeral as the coffin was put into the hearse.
The cross-examination
“Your first priority was to protect the church” “That’s not true” marked typical thrust and parrying in the cross-examination of Brian Houston by Crown Prosecutor Gareth Harrison., which was interrupted by a number of objections by the defence.
“Have you told anyone as leader of the AOG your first priority was the church?” “No”
“Have you ever said anything like that?” “No”
“Do you accept that an important part of your role was to protect the church?” “No. To care for the church.”
“What you did in response to the complaint from Sengstock was to protect the church?” “I don’t accept that.”
Some more interesting responses followed.
Harrison: “When you look back with hindsight does it appear to you that your father left New Zealand because of what he had done to young boys?”
Brian Houston: “It is a possibility.’
Harrison: “You heard Robert Cotton describe that your father said you stole his church”
Brian Houston laughs.
Harrison: “It’s funny is it?”
Brian Houston: “It’s nonsense.”
And on the involvement of Kevin Mudford.
“Did you know Mr Mudford was an evangelist?” “Yes.”
“That he was an ex-bikie?” “Yes.”
“That he was a volatile character?” “Not back then”
“You were scared Mr Mudford would go public?” “No.”
“You knew he had to be controlled.” “No. I did not know that.”
Brian Houston was asked about other witnesses with whom he differed. He dismissed Pastor John McMartin’s evidence that he had phoned Brian Houston with the news of his father’s offences as a “fabrication”. McMartin had difficulty with his evidence, with subpoenaed documents from his church casting extreme doubt on a central plank of his evidence, that Barbara Taylor’s letters to him had not been received. He is in Liverpool local court tomorrow for judgment on a charge of assault with an act of indecency.
Harrison asked whom had Brian Houston testified that he had been frustrated with because they failed to come to him earlier with the Sengstock story. He rejected the assertion that it included Barbara Taylor and Kevin Medford. Instead, he listed senior ministers in the AOG, John McMartin, Andrew Evans, Wayne Alcorn and Jim Williams.
“I want to suggest to you that taking it to the police was the last thing you wanted” Harrison put to Brian Houston.
“I can’t accept that,” was the response.
“I want to suggest the taking it to the police is the last thing you wanted to do.,” Harrison insisted.
“That’s wrong,” Brian Houston flatly denied.
A final intervention by the magistrate Gareth Christofi: “Did you know on the 26th November [1999] that Brett Sengstock was thinking of going to the secular courts?”
“That’s the date I heard it from Barbara Taylor”, Brian Houston said.