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Cardinal George Pell, found guilty of raping 13-year-old boys while he was an Archbishop, has described his sexual abuse of children as “plain vanilla sex.”
Despite acknowledging the 13-year-old boys did not “volunteer” to have sex, nor were they “actively participating,” Cardinal Pell’s defense appealed for a lenient sentence by arguing that an Archbishop having sex with 13-year-old boys, against their will, is “on the low end of offending.“
Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Catholic cleric ever convicted of child sexual abuse, was found guilty in December of sexually penetrating one choirboy and molesting another while he was Archbishop of Melbourne, but the verdict was not made public until yesterday.
But Robert Richter, one of Pell’s defense lawyers, drew gasps of disbelief from the court room when he attempted to convince the judge that his client’s crimes were “on the low end of offending”, describing them as “no more than a plain vanilla sexual penetration case where a child is not volunteering or actively participating”.
However Cardinal Pell’s shocking defense was immediately shut down by chief judge Peter Kidd, who described Pell’s sex crimes as “brutal” and made it clear that he views the former Vatican treasurer as a brazen pedophile.
“At the moment, I see this as callous, brazen offending. Blatant,” Judge Kidd said. “There was an element of brutality to this assault.”
Cardinal Pell’s defense also tried to claim that an incident in which Pell grabbed one of the boys by the genitals in an attack that lasted seconds was “fleeting” and therefore not worthy of a prison sentence.
Chrissie Foster, the mother of two girls abused by a Catholic priest, was in court when Pell’s defense lawyer made the comments and she called the remarks “outrageous“.
“How can they say that? These are children, they were children, two of my children were treated to such rape,” Ms Foster said, speaking outside court.
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