Louise Greentree writes about how a young woman longing for love and sexual experience caused a Christian family to be abused and ‘excommunicated’ from Figtree Anglican Church, a parish of the Anglican Church of Australia Sydney Diocese, and launched against the husband of the family totally unfounded allegations of child abuse and sexually predatory behaviour against a ‘vulnerable adult’.
The original article ‘A Cautionary Tale’ was written with pseudonyms mainly to protect the identity of the young woman at the heart of the case. Later events described in companion articles make such anonymity unnecessary. This article is now presented with the correct names of the parish, its leadership and all persons involved. It is now fully rewritten about 18 months after the earlier one, after the members of the Discipline Tribunal and the Promoter of charges, being the Director of the Professional Standards Unit Sydney diocese (PSU), Mr. Phillip Gerber and the diocesan registrar Dr. Philip Seldon effectively refused to proceed to a hearing that had been set down for two days, firstly on the question of jurisdiction. Instead they took every opportunity and applied every form of persuasion to Dr. Scott Dobbs (the respondent to the proceedings) and his wife Machelle to get them to agree to Dr. Dobbs signing terms of settlement in which the Tribunal members recommended to the Archbishop of Sydney that the charges be withdrawn and dismissed. This was not the first time Mr. Gerber had tried to get Dr. Dobbs to agree to the charges being withdrawn or to otherwise end the process by mediation. Dr. Dobbs did not agree then to either action because this was a case where truth mattered, and Dr. Dobbs needed to force the diocese and the parish of Figtree to a public hearing of the case, when the lack of plausible evidence would be apparent to everyone.
Finally he agreed to sign the terms of settlement because these terms also provide for actions on the part of the Assistant Bishop Mr. Al Stewart and the parish to ‘set the record straight’ and to initiate a Christian reconciliation with the Dobbs family, who have been cruelly abused by the diocesan processes and by the parish. And yet these actions, which each member of the Tribunal and Dr. Philip Seldon promised would be carried out in good faith, have not yet been carried out.
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A Cautionary Tale Unmasked