The Church of England has agreed to pay £40,000 damages to a woman who was abused as a teenage girl by a vicar when she was living in Chichester.
Dr Julie Macfarlane, a law professor from Windsor, Ontario who specialises in the self-represented litigant phenomenon, will also receive an additional £40,000 to cover legal costs.
Dr Macfarlane was abused through an entire year by the cleric when she was just 16 and going througn a religious crisis in the 1970s.
IB Times reported that she first complained in 1999 to the Anglican church in Australia because the clergyman had moved there. He resigned immediately. She made her legal claim in 2014 when she heard about the extent of the sex abuse scandal in the Chichester diocese.
The Church tried at first to say it happened too long ago for her to claim damanges. Dr Macfarlane, aged 57, also described how she was "ripped to shreds" over two hours by an expert appointed to assess the claim. The Church also tried to claim that she had consented.
She was quoted as saying: "I was a 16-year-old girl coming to my minister for spiritual counselling and he dropped his pants. I asked the lawyers to explain to me what a consent conversation would look like in this context? People just looked down at their legal pads."
She tweeted:
Earlier, the professor described what she went through in an article in The Church Times last November.
She explained that she had been an enthusiastic evangelical in the era of Billy Graham and speaking in tongues. Worried that she was starting to lose her faith, she went to the Rector for spiritual counselling. "He told me that God wanted me to kneel and perform oral sex on him."
That was the start of 12 months of abuse. "He waited for me in dark alleyways as I walked home from the restaurant where I worked as a dishwasher in the evenings," she wrote. "The priest — whom I regarded as my spiritual mentor, a man of God whom everyone else in my church treated as authoritative on spiritual matters — told me that God wanted me to do this. I got away only by leaving for university (one the furthest distance from my home that I could find). Still I told no one. I tried to forget."
After making her complaint to his superiors in Australia, she decided to find a way that her experience could encourage others to find support. So she decided to sue for compensation for the effects of the abuse on her life, including the toll of bringing the lawsuit.
"I am a law professor, internationally known for my work on legal practice and the legal profession. I have a wonderful family, and a happy, fulfilled life. I have no need to go back to this nightmare," she wrote. "I am doing this because I feel I am now ready to hold the Church to account — and because the Church says publicly that it wants to take responsibility for the system that allowed members of the clergy to abuse girls and boys — men such as the priest who abused me."
In a statement, the Church of England said: "We still have so much to learn and to do, and we need to do it quickly."
