THE EVOLUTION OF A LIE

Transcription

1 The story of how in certain personnel of the University of Wollongong and Figtree Anglican Church conspired to manufacture lies and bring false charges against a man and his family of enthusiastic Christians. THE EVOLUTION OF A LIE The Dobbs family v Figtree Anglican Church and the Diocese of Sydney. Louise Greentree

2 Table of Contents Preface: About the author. How the Dobbs family came to consult the author. Introducing the Dobbs family. i ix Chapters 1 to 6: The story Chapter 1: The story. 1 Chapter 2: A timeline and outline of the evolution of the Lie from the 1990 s to 6 November Chapter 3: A timeline of the development of the FAC Lie and the FAC Clandestine Lie, 12 with cross-fertilization from the UOW Lie, from some time in 2006 to the end of January Chapter 4: Continuing the Timeline: the formal complaint to FAC Children s Minister 18 Yvonne Gunning and the aftermath. Chapter 5: There were problems with the case which were identified from the start, 22 yet the PSU went on and on with an expensive, time-consuming and fundamentally flawed and incompetent process resulting in Scott forcing a referral to a hearing by the Disciplinary Tribunal. Chapter 6: Figtree Anglican Church and the PSU are responsible for abuse of the Dobbs 25 family and Emma Nicholls. (More to come) APPENDICES Appendix 1: The people in the story. i - xxv i

3 Preface About the Author Louise Greentree holds the degrees of BA LLB (Syd) LLM(Hons) (UTS) and the General and Advanced levels of the Professional Certificate in Arbitration (Adel.). She has undertaken training in restorative conferencing and collaborative law. She was admitted as a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of NSW in 1971 and to the High Court of Australia in She practiced as a solicitor in a Sydney city firm, becoming a partner in the mid 1970 s, and left there after about 21 year to join the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Faculty of Law and Legal Practice academic staff. Her academic interests were Alternative Dispute Resolution with an emphasis on transformative and restorative processes, Professional Legal Ethics and Family Law. She is now retired. She is also a musician, holding the A.Mus.A. for Piano (performance) and the A.Mus.A. for Pipe Organ (performance). She holds also the Graduate Certificate in Church Music from Sydney University, and The Archbishops Certificate of Church Music (UK) through St. John s College, Morpeth, NSW. She has served as Organist and Choir Director for various parishes in Sydney diocese of the Anglican Church over a period of about 18 years. How the Dobbs family came to consult the author It was in about June 2007, one day when I was in my office in the Faculty of Law at UTS, that I received a telephone call from a young man who introduced himself as Christopher Dobbs. He said he had found my staff profile on the Faculty's website in which I described my research interests as including Anglican Church ecclesiastical law. First, he cross-examined me as to possible connections with Sydney diocese of the Anglican Church. Apparently satisfied that I was not in sympathy with or in some other relationship with the Sydney diocesan church organisation or Figtree Anglican Church (FAC) which would give rise to a conflict of interest or destroy trust between us, he started to open up about the problem. After giving me some details of himself and his parents and five siblings he said to me: All of us have been thrown out of church. I was astonished and said: I thought the church wanted to get more young people to come to church, not throw them out. Whatever did you do? Piss in the sanctuary? Having reassured me, he filled me in with some of the details of the treatment his parents and he and his siblings were suffering at the hands of FAC clergy, staff and parishioners, even though they were long-standing parishioners themselves. He arranged for his mother Mrs. Machelle Dobbs to make an appointment to come and see me. She came, with a very large bundle of documents and a very supportive friend to assist her. Her story was astonishing: her husband had been accused of child sex abuse involving a by then 20-year-old woman, Emma Nicholls, who had been coming to their house on and off as a friend of their children for over 6 years. He was accused of continuing grooming and sexual abuse of her as an adult, all apparently under the eyes and noses of the whole family and the many friends and homestay students who occupied the Dobbs family home most of the time. I agreed to go through the documents and to prepare a report of the situation in the light of ecclesiastical law of the Anglican Church Sydney diocese. I worked my way through the documents, the main ones being a statutory declaration made 23 February ii

4 2007, by Emma Nicholls and Dr. Scott Dobbs statutory declaration responding to the allegations. What struck me most forcibly at the time was the triviality of the allegations, none of which involved any form of sexual activity. This impression was confirmed by other material made available to me, particularly information about the mental and physical difficulties that Emma Nicholls was attempting to live with. My report on the initial documents was followed by access to further information and documents: I prepared a report of my analysis of the materials and sent it to Scott and Machelle and I offered my services with some expertise in Sydney diocesan discipline law to try to bring some reality and resolution of what was clearly on the face of it a gigantic beat-up. More and more information and documents became available during the following 2 years as the case was referred to a diocesan investigator and his report eventually was made available to the Dobbs. The file containing his report included many signed statements (in lieu of statutory declarations) by various people he interviewed; in the large folder containing his report were many of the PSU file documents letters, telephone memoranda, faxes, s and file notes. Although 99% of the investigator s report and other material in the bundle were irrelevant and much of it contained malicious misinformation, the whole of it was referred to the Professional Standards Committee (PSC) of Sydney diocese. Then, as Scott on my advice refused to accept the findings of the PSC s highly flawed report, the Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen was required to appoint a person to bring charges the very few that were left after all this examination of the complaint - against Scott in the church Disciplinary Tribunal. During the preliminary directions hearings Scott asked for copies of all of the transcripts of interviews conducted by the investigator engaged by the diocese. These transcripts have been an additional and very informative source of analysis, especially where the final signed statement did not fully reflect the interview. None of that information or the content of those documents caused me to change my initial view, but provided ever stronger reinforcement of it. Indeed, with the benefit of access to many more documents including the transcripts of interviews and the file documents, I came to view the Emma Nicholls complaint as a frame-up. The interview transcripts and other documents revealed a secret false sexual harassment complaint made through the Equal Employment & Diversity Unit (EEDU) of the University of Wollongong (UOW): And it was not only Emma Nicholls case that was a frame-up. Investigation of the documents disclosed a totally fabricated sexual harassment case, made in 2005 against Scott by a student from 1999, that he knew nothing about because it was kept secret from him by Robyn Weekes, the director of the EEDU at UOW at the time. This secret complaint came to light only after it was clear to FAC personnel that the complaint by Lee Nicholls, Emma Nicholls mother, on behalf of her 20-year-old daughter, was collapsing under the weight of its own incongruity. It was then, the documents disclosed, that the wife of the senior FAC minister and a former academic colleague of Scott, Helen Irvine, accused Scott of sexual harassment of many UOW female students. This accusation was nothing to do with FAC and nor could it be dealt with by FAC nor by the PSU of Sydney diocese. Not that that deterred the determined people of FAC, Helen Irvine at the forefront who was pursuing the allegations in the teeth of her husband s pleading with her not to do so. iii

5 But loose among these documents in the investigator s file was a signed Record of Interview of this secret sexual harassment complaint by the former student Corinne Cortese. This was signed the day before the UOW Academic Probations Committee (APC) considered and denied Scotts application for permanent employment on the academic staff. Corinne Cortese authorised the Record of Interview to be given to the Chairman of that Committee. I read the Record of Interview with amazement. Again, these were trivial, incredible and implausible complaints that, in the light of other information that surfaced, made it very clear that here was the first frame-up of Dr. Scott Dobbs. That information disclosed the evidence that Scott held of a culture of bribery and soft marking prevalent in the Faculty for overseas students on both the Wollongong campus and the Dubai campus. In the light of investigations being conducted by a journalist on this subject at the time, Scott must have been viewed by his superiors (to whom he had complained without any effect) as a very dangerous man. Corinne Cortese gave an interview to the diocesan investigator, which she did not need to do as she was not a parishioner of FAC nor of any other Christian Church, and nor had she encountered Scott in or connected with FAC in any way. In the transcript of her interview she seemed to have no memory of making the complaint and at first, she talked vaguely about possibly complaining about some boy who was being a nuisance. Her grasp of the details was hazy, although her memory improved with the sympathetic leading questions from the investigator. She did not provide a copy of the Record of Interview to the investigator (she had no recollection of its existence) and there is nothing on the file to indicate who did. However, when Scott asked for his UOW personnel file after a disastrous meeting on 2 May 2007 when Helen Irvine raised these exaggerated claims, when he received it, it had been sealed and the seal had been broken. The People s Warden at that time was David Reynolds who was employed in the Human Resources Division of UOW, and although this is another example of what I found to be an almost incestuous intermingling of FAC and UOW people and cross-pollination of the separate interests of two different organisations, there is no evidence that he was involved in irregularly accessing Scott s file. But someone was involved in that irregularity. The way in which this hidden report was brought into the totally unrelated issue of a complaint on behalf of the 20-year-old Emma Nicholls by her mother Lee Nicholls is another of the strange and improper ways in which FAC personnel and officers of the diocese of Sydney created a massive lie about Scott and a subsidiary lie (which I call 'the Clandestine Lie') about him and his wife Machelle and their six children. None-the-less the whole structure of lies started to crumble and as will be seen, we have the unedifying spectacle of the parish and diocesan officers scrambling to try to get something on Scott to stick only to have each of their stratagems fail for want of evidence. All of the Dobbs family were subjected to cult-like shunning and dis-fellowship by FAC parishioners, staff and clergy. As the matter was pressed forward by the parish Scott and Machelle and their children were made the target of vicious shunning in the church (until they were banned from going to the church), on the beach, and even in the girls school, The Illawarra Grammar School (TIGS) by teachers who were also FAC parishioners. Wild rumours were circulated in the parish and beyond, representing Scott as the worst kind of sex offender. Yvonne Gunning and Bruce Clarke admitted contacting other churches in the area to warn them about the Dobbs family. Bruce Clarke went to the girls' music iv

6 teacher and warned her that Scott Dobbs was a sexual predator. The Dobbs family fought back: After examining the next collection of documents that came through, comprising the report from the investigator and the signed statements I was given an answer to the prayer: 'Lord, what can we do?'. What we were asked to do was to mount a campaign of public information addressed to parishioners putting the case for the Dobbs family and exposing the triviality of the accusations by Lee Nicholls and Emma Nicholls and the inconsistencies in their evidence. I started writing articles about the complaint and publishing them on my page of a website started by my brother David Greentree with the domain name anglicanfuture. Then I produced executive summaries referring to the full articles on the webpage and these were ed to certain parishioners and handed out or posted to other parishioners as well as Figtree leaders. My niece and nephew Elizabeth and Timothy Greentree interviewed the Dobbs family about the effect of the case on them and their response to Emma s complaints and produced DVD s of the full interview and a shortened version. The full interview was (and remains) published on my webpage and the shortened versions were sent to a few people significant to the story, from the Archbishop down. We prepared Press packs for the day when Machelle might authorise us to distribute them to the media. How FAC leadership hated this and how they hated me. In particular, how Phillip Gerber, director of the Professional Standards Unit (PSU) of Sydney diocese hated me for drawing public attention to the shortcomings of his professional competence in handling the matter. Philip Gerber attacked me (rather than considering the dubious merits of the case and how best to resolve it): When I contacted Phillip Gerber about the case he took a very haughty stance and refused to discuss it with me, even though I had authority from Scott for him to do so. He wrote to Scott pointing out that he had searched to see whether I held a current practicing certificate as a solicitor, as if he was warning them off me and that I must have misled them as to my status. In fact, as Anglican church ecclesiastical law is not part of the protected practice of solicitors, his stance was odd to say the least. And Scott and Machelle were aware that I was a law academic, not a solicitor in practice. His attitude must be open to criticism. Here was I offering the Dobbs a free service. But Phillip Gerber wanted to force the Dobbs into having to incur crippling legal fees. This was just outside the realms of possibility for the Dobbs. Scott had only recently obtained full-time employment after leaving UOW at the end of 2005 and he still needed to support all six children, aged (the eldest at university) and Machelle, who was still supplementing family finances by providing for overseas homestay students from UOW. But forcing litigants into near bankruptcy from massive legal fees is a wellknown tactic employed by solicitors to deny access to justice for a party opposing a wellfunded client (in his case his client was the Anglican Church Sydney diocese). It is disappointing that Phillip Gerber thought that this was an ethical and appropriate way to behave while representing the Anglican Church and dealing with persons with any sort of complaint against diocesan personnel and church workers. When I continued to advice the Dobbs family, and particularly when I started publishing articles critical of the case (see below), his fury knew no bounds. It may be that he would say that he pressed ahead with a case that not only was without merit but which he had himself identified as being without merit from the start, only because of v

7 my writings. That is an argument that will not wash. His stubborn clinging on to the case was disastrous for the reputation of the Anglican Church, for FAC, for Christian principles and for legal professional ethics. Not only was the diocese committed to huge fees for an entirely worthless investigation but everything he did simply gave me more fuel for critical articles. At about 8.00am one day after the Professional Standards Committee had produced a staggeringly incompetent report and Scott had forced the Archbishop to refer the case to the Disciplinary Tribunal by refusing to accept the recommendations of that report, Phillip Gerber telephoned me at home. For about minutes he treated me to a harangue which, although not employing crude language, was offensive. It was also incredibly stupid he had no idea who could be in the room with me listening to him, or even recording his tirade. But suddenly, from the last minutes his voice and language changed, from which I deduced that someone had come into his office and he did not want to be overheard talking in the previous fashion, which was well below the standard of professional courtesy that he should have maintained. I listened of course (it was not much point debating with him, he was incandescent with rage), interested in this complete collapse of his professional persona. If he had thereby intended to bully me or otherwise coerce me into abandoning my advice and my writings, he failed. The other time when his professional persona completely deserted him was when Scott, Machelle and I attended at St. Andrew s House for a short session with the tribunal for procedural reasons, to set a timetable for filing statutory declarations of evidence. We all went to a meeting room to hammer out preliminary details of this timetable. As I followed Scott into the room, Phillip Gerber shut the sliding door in my face and held it fast against my entry until his barrister remonstrated with him, and opened the door for me to go in. The new Senior minister of FAC refused to obey the Archbishop s direction using the existence of the Anglican Future website as an excuse. After the Tribunal had recommended that the case be withdrawn and dismissed, and approved the Terms of Compromise which included the withdrawal of conditions on Scott, Machelle and the family worshiping at FAC, Christopher Dobbs went to see Ian Barnett, the current Rector replacing Rod Irvine who had retired, to talk about how that would be implemented. Ian Barnett told him that the 'anglicanfuture' website had to be taken down before they could come back. I wrote to Ian Barnett to say that the Dobbs family had no power to take the website down and nor did I except for Louise s Page. I wrote that I had no intention of taking my page down as the material published on it was doing good things for the future of the Anglican Church. I invited him to draw my attention to anything on the page that was not true and I would certainly withdraw that. He did not reply. During the preparation of the case FAC staff engaged a solicitor to threaten Machelle and me with legal proceedings. At one stage a local solicitor, presumably a member of the FAC congregation, wrote a letter to each of Machelle and me threatening us with defamation and Machelle with an Apprehended Violence Order! The latter was particularly inappropriate as Machelle had not seen Emma, nor spoken to her for about 2 years since she last drove her home from FAC s evening service at the end of January 2006 until a brief glimpse of her the week before in the street outside a hall where Machelle was waiting to pick one vi

8 of her daughters up from a party. They did not exchange looks or words. But after my reply drafted for Machelle pointing these things out, and on my behalf requesting him to indicate which parts of the material on the website he alleged were defamatory of his client, as I could not stand in the shoes of a Supreme Court Judge to make that assessment myself, he also did not reply. It was clear that he had not even looked at the website, such were the ignorant assumptions evident in his letter. When I said, laughing, to Phillip Gerber that the solicitor had written in such an incompetent and unprofessional manner to a fellow-lawyer and former solicitor, he hastened to say that he 'did not have anything to do with that' and that he had told them not to do it. I took this to indicate that the diocese and their lawyers saw a grave danger in taking any steps to bring the issues contained in my writings into the Court arena where the whole matter would become even more widely known and the reputation of the church, particularly FAC, damaged even further. Machelle endured a physical and verbal attack in FAC after the case was over. One of the odd things about the case has been a sustained attack on Machelle and the children by clergy, staff and others from FAC. If the allegations had been serious and true, then surely, she would have deserved support. Even the then Diocesan Registrar Philip Selden was rude and dismissive of her concerns. When she telephoned to speak to the Archbishop about the extreme distress that FAC actions against her children were causing, she was never put through to the Archbishop, and Dr. Selden wrote a memo saying simply she seems upset. After the allegations had all been withdrawn, and the case over, Scott, Machelle and their children went to an evening service at FAC at the express invitation of the guest speaker, whom they knew as a friend. Both during the service and after a parishioner and former part-time member of FAC staff, Helen Wilmott, poked her in the back and abused her for coming to the church, saying scandalous things about Scott in front of the whole congregation. I wrote a letter to the Archbishop enclosing the report of the incident written by Machelle s friend, a stranger to FAC, who had witnessed these things. Clearly the Archbishop contacted FAC and remonstrated with those responsible, especially as I named the two wardens on duty who did nothing to intervene. Equally clearly, that did no good. At a meeting the wardens called with Machelle and Scott which I attended, they told us that they did not agree with the outcome and they had asked the Tribunal to rescind the Terms of Compromise, even though the Tribunal had no power to do that, nor indeed to do anything with the charges that had been brought. ********** Over the years since we met, Machelle Dobbs and I have spoken frequently on the telephone as well as face-to-face when we could both fit these meetings into our crowded lives. She and her husband and family have continued to live in Wollongong and I lived in Sydney, over 100kms away, for most of the research and writing the early drafts of this book, and now in country Victoria, even further away. From the first meeting Machelle was distraught and bewildered by this attack on her husband and family by this young woman Emma Nicholls, to whom she and her family had shown nothing but kindness and great forbearance. She could not understand why they were being attacked by people of the church they had attended for 12 years and regarded as friends as well as brothers and sisters in Christ. Even those who were most poisonous in their relaying of vicious anonymous gossip had to vii

9 acknowledge that there had never been the slightest cause for any complaint about Scott Dobbs over those 12 years. Why then were they so ready to declare open season on the Dobbs family members? Machelle kept saying to me: Why are they doing this to us? and I would have to answer: Machelle I cannot answer the why questions. I can only answer the what questions. This book, The Evolution of a Lie, is an attempt to answer the why questions. viii

10 Introducing the Dobbs family Dr. Scott Dobbs, his wife Machelle and their six children Christopher, Nathan, Ellesha, Charis, Tiara and Cheyenne lived in the Wollongong area in the south coast of NSW below Sydney at the time of our story, having moved there in early 1992, about 15 years before the events described in Chapter 1. They had been regular attenders of Figtree Anglican Church (FAC) for around 12 years, which was for the whole of the lives of the two youngest children. Scott, who was born and raised in the USA, and Machelle, born and raised in Australia, met in Hawaii in They were both missionaries with the Christian organisation Youth with a Mission (YWAM) and Machelle was on her way to a mission posting in Japan. When Machelle came back to Australia and in due course Scott followed her they were confirmed their marriage vows, taken first in Hawaii, in Australia on 22 March They set up their home and their first child was born in While Machelle was in Australia she worked for a while with a Christian missionary organisation Christian Commandos that sent its missionaries into the Sydney streets of Kings Cross at night offering Christian friendship and practical help to the woman and boys who worked as prostitutes in that area. They are both gifted evangelists and deeply committed Christians, and they have raised their children also to have a deep commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. After they moved to Wollongong Scott went back to study at the University of Wollongong (UOW), completing the degrees of Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Commerce. Because of his outstanding results and his intellectual capacity (a former colleague, now a Professor at another university, described him to the author as the best mind on tax I have ever known ) he was successful in obtaining an APRA scholarship to complete his PhD in finance and commerce. While he was undertaking this degree, he was offered some tutoring to help defray some of the expenses of raising his family, as Machelle did not work outside the home. Machelle not only ran the household for the benefit of her husband and six children but also took in homestay students, who were one and all welcomed in and taken into the hearts of the family. In addition, she ran an open house for all friends, a home where the Christian gospel was preached and practiced. Not surprisingly the lack of a regular professional income from Scott over many years placed enormous financial strains on the family, who weathered this period by faith, as Machelle describes it. Scott completed his thesis and he graduated with the degree of PhD in June He was offered a contract to teach in the Accounting & Finance unit of the Faculty of Commerce. However, when his contract came up for review by the Academic Probations Committee (APC) in November 2005 his application for a permanent appointment was refused. After leaving the University of Wollongong in November 2005 he and his family endured over 12 months of reduced income from employment in a series of casual positions until in February 2007 a parishioner at FAC, David MacNeice offered him work in David s accountancy and financial advising business MoneyWise Accounting in Wollongong. Scott went on to found his own accountancy and financial advising practice in Wollongong and set about completing his professional legal training to enable him to be admitted to the Supreme Court of NSW as a legal practitioner, which took place on 25 May ix

11 The Dobbs family: Scott Dobbs and Mrs. Machelle Dobbs, and their children Christopher Dobbs, Nathan Dobbs, Ellesha Dobbs, Charis Dobbs, Tiara Dobbs, and Cheyenne Dobbs The Dobbs Family at the conferral of the degree of PhD, June 2003 (Source University of Wollongong website) x