‘I believed he was a good person’:
The unsuspecting partners of men who trade child sex abuse material online
When Leah Mouatt first suspected something was wrong with her relationship of nearly six years, she assumed her partner Phillip Vellio was having an affair.
But instead, the man she loved and believed was a good person, was living a sick double life; secretly viewing child sex abuse material online.
Phillip Vellio and Leah Mouat
“Things happen to these children that you would never dream of and he was looking at that stuff,” Ms Mouatt told 60 Minutes reporter Peter Stefanovic.
Ms Mouatt was 25 when she met Mr Vellio. The pair hit it off, they bought a house and eventually settled down.
But in late 2014 the couple began drifting apart and Ms Mouatt began to suspect her partner was having an affair so she went online to find out what he was up to.
Her search took her to a dark corner of the internet, where Mr Vellio had uploaded pictures taken from her and her friend’s Facebook pages featuring her friend’s daughter.
Comments posted underneath the caption were sexually explicit.
“What he’d written underneath this photo told me what the reality was,” Ms Mouatt said.
“That reality destroyed my world in a second and I knew quite quickly after I saw what I saw that the police had to be called.”
Police seized Mr Vellio’s laptops and his iPad, finding more than 32,000 images and 854 videos, many showing children engaged in sexual acts.
Mr Vellio was convicted on two counts of possessing child abuse material and given a 12-month good behaviour bond.
“What upsets me most is maybe I’ve stopped him but who’s helping these kids?” Ms Mouatt said.
“He had hundreds of videos and thousands of images. How many kids is that?”
Ms Mouatt lost her house and her car and had to completely rebuild her life.
Detective Inspector Jon Rouse told 60 Minutes it’s impossible to know how many men view child sex abuse material but the number of arrests has risen dramatically.
The number is in excess of 750,000 people at any given moment, according to Terre des Hommes.
In a similar case, Natalie Walker found out her partner’s awful secret after a friend who serviced his computer stumbled on explicit images of children.
She told 60 Minutes their mutual friends shockingly rallied around her partner, trying to protect him and insisting she was ruining his life by exposing him.
Ms Walker has since founded PartnerSPEAK, the first support group of its kind, to help partners stigmatised by a crime that is no fault of their own.
Bishop's $2 million property to go to victims
of Ballarat paedophile priest ring
Abuse survivor Stephen Woods was on hand to see disgraced Bishop Mulkearns' Fairhaven
house go to auctioned. Picture: Alison Wynd
A survivor of the child sex abuse scandal attended
disgraced Bishop’s estate auction
NAVARONE FARRELL, Geelong Advertiser
A SURVIVOR of the child sex abuse scandal that plagued the Ballarat diocese has spoken out about the sale of disgraced Bishop Ronald Mulkearns’ assets.
Mulkearns died and went to Hell 3 April, 2016.
Stephen Woods, now 55-years-old, attended the auction of Mulkearns’ multi-million dollar Fairhaven home and called for the funds to be easily accessible to survivors.
“I was molested between the ages of 11 and 14. I was molested and raped by three clergymen, Brother [Robert] Best, Brother [Edward] Dowlin, and Father [Gerald] Ridsdale,” he said.
The three clergymen were among many the offenders that were touted as the worse among the scandal that spanned from 1971 to 1997.
“I’m a retired secondary school teacher. I had to stop after my body physically, emotionally and mentally just couldn’t handle it. I was studying my masters at a university in Melbourne and I collapsed and couldn’t keep going.
“That was in 2011. I’m on a disability pension, I’m just surviving. I’m always just trying to survive.”
Mr Woods’ brother was also a victim of similar abuse at hands of paedophile priests at St Alipius Primary School.
Mulkearns’ property sold after auction and the the church will benefit from approximately $2.1 million, which current Ballarat diocese Bishop Paul Bird has promised will go to survivors.
“When you deal with so many survivors in the Ballarat diocese alone, this will only go so far, but the church must make it easily available to survivors because most of us are dead — we need it now,” Mr Woods said.
Several former Catholic Brothers were in attendance, whom Mr Woods recognised.
“It’s cathartic in a way because every time I’ve gone to either churches or funerals or weddings, I see how far I’ve come from Catholic heritage and healing things in the past,” he said.
Mr Woods’ brother, like many other survivors of child sexual abuse, has had a checkered past. Anthony Woods spiralled out of control with drug abuse and died of AIDS in 1990.with his eldest brother Anthony having died from AIDS in 1990.
“Every where I go, I meet people and hear stories like that.
“In my class there were approximately 36 kids in my class, of which five or six we know of have had premature deaths.
“Some obvious suicides, some, they’re typical country boys, they will drive their car off the road into a tree.”
The “nest” that was established in Ballarat was established through word of mouth according to Mr Woods.
“They used to speak to each other and tell each other — thew knew, and they were protected.”
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard hundreds of local children were molested by a nest of paedophile clerics while Mulkearns was bishop of Ballarat from 1971 to 1997.
In February, Mulkearns admitted to the inquiry that he had failed as a bishop.
“I’m terribly sorry that I didn’t do things differently,” he said. “I didn’t really know what to do or how to do it.”
Too bad you didn't know Someone you could go to for advice. Apparently, bishops don't believe God answers prayer.
Childhood sex abuse victim shares powerful story
Annelies Gartner - The West Australian
In a Sydney hotel room in 2012, WA playwright and director Hellie Turner turned on the television to be confronted with Xan Fraser reliving the horrific event that robbed her of her childhood.
In 1981, Xan was 12 years old and living in a small Queensland town. She left her house one evening with plans to meet a friend to go roller skating. On her way, another girl convinced her to make what would become a life-changing decision and instead go to a party.
Xan drank enough alcohol to render herself unconscious and throughout the night she was sexually violated by three men and left for dead.
During the subsequent trial a year later, Xan was required to appear as a witness.
Maclaine and Siobhan Dow-Hall. Picture: Danella Bevis/The West Australian
In the Supreme Court before Justice John Macrossan, she was asked how much make-up she had on that night, how tight were her jeans?
The three men were found guilty of indecent dealing and attempted rape and were sentenced to two years probation. During sentencing remarks, Justice Macrossan said: “Had the girl ... retained some degree of consciousness, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that in that condition she may have consented to your acts.
“Who’s to know?”
Why would it matter; she was 12 years old?
It wasn’t until 30 years after the trial that Xan read the judge’s remarks for the first time.
“I started reading and I was screaming, guttural screaming for over an hour at what he had said about me as that child,” Xan says.
It was her anger over his comments that prompted Xan to contact the media. Hellie tuned in to Xan’s story being told on the ABC’s 7.30 Report.
“I saw Xan and listened to her story and I ended up being really moved. I was crying, she was crying,” Hellie, who at the time was looking for a new documentary-theatre project, says.
Hellie contacted Xan via Facebook asking if she would be interested in her story being adapted into a work of theatre.
Picture: Danella Bevis/The West Australian
She didn’t get a response to her message, so waited a month before calling.
“From the point of the first phone call, there was a little bit of connection,” Hellie explains.
“She grew to trust me, I suppose, and I was very careful not to blow that and I gave her the power to veto, the power of pulling the show.”
Xan had a passion for theatre that grew when her children became involved in community drama.
“I felt like this was the best platform for me to get the message across, to help others and also the process has been very therapeutic,” she says. “It’s almost like I had my own team of people to help me unpick the whole thing and then build a story around it to share it with others on a professional platform.”
After learning of Xan’s passion for theatre, Hellie asked if she would play herself in Project Xan alongside Daisy Coyle, who plays Xan at 12 years of age.
“She just doesn’t mind that I’m coaching her all the time,” Hellie explains. “I took a punt but it’s worked out well.”
Unfathomably, after Xan was gang raped, she was victim blamed by the small community where she lived.
“I was just blacklisted,” she says. “All the kids were obviously told, ‘Don’t go near her, she’s trouble’.
“I don’t know why but boys started picking on me at school and I would fight them and I then got expelled for fighting back.”
Lit cigarettes were put out on her legs and her jaw was dislocated but still Xan received no support.
“Lynch mobs coming up to me and to my house and calling me out and when I finally did leave my house, they got me,” Xan says.
At 13, Xan had a baby — to protect herself from the physical abuse.
“I knew people didn’t hit pregnant people and that’s why I chose to have a baby, to stop being hit,” Xan says.
Resonating at the heart of Hellie’s play is Xan’s story but it also shines a spotlight on rape culture and victim blaming.
“One of the things that we did was unpick the ‘why’,” Hellie says. “Why was this able to happen? Why is a young girl able to be raped?”
Three decades after the dark night that changed Xan’s life forever, rape and victim blaming continue to make headlines. US presidential candidate Donald Trump recently brushed off comments he made about “grab ’em by the p****” as locker room talk.
Last year, Stanford University student Brock Turner received a six-month sentence and was released after three for the sexual assault of an unconscious woman behind a dumpster.
Turner’s father asked that his son receive leniency, arguing the punishment was a “steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life”.
Hellie was horrified that T-shirts were for sale online with the slogan, “Keep calm and rape a lot”, but pleasantly surprised to find the item of clothing had been pulled after public protest.
“I thought finally someone is speaking out because if they start with that one, maybe they’ll be able to see the errant connections to the other T-shirts that are out there, the billion other ones,” Hellie says.
Xan tries not to carry too much rage over her treatment but does have anger towards the judge who presided over the trial.
“They really had the choice to help me and they could’ve done the right thing and I don’t think they did,” Xan says.
No, Xan, they did exactly the wrong thing!
“I really felt victimised and I felt like I was blamed as a woman and that really makes me angry. The judge makes me angry.”
Xan was amazed by the number of people that contacted her after she shared her experiences and hopes her involvement in the play will empower others to tell their stories.
“That’s why I’m doing this,” she explains. “I’m doing this to just continue that — give people the permission to talk about it and to share.”
Project Xan is at PICA from November 8-19.
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