Ex-Brethren man admits indecency
Nelson Mail
October 13, 2009
A former member of the Exclusive Brethren who claims that as a young girl she was sexually assaulted by another church member, says she was too scared to tell her parents as she was worried the church would split her family up.
“It knocked me incredibly. I couldn’t even tell my parents because they were members of the church. If you told your parents something like that you could end up disintegrating the family, so I hid it.”
The 54-year-old woman was one of four former members of the church who say that they were indecently assaulted by Stoke man Clive Allen Petrie, 74.
At the opening day of a jury trial in the Nelson District Court yesterday, Petrie admitted one charge of indecently assaulting a girl under 12 years old. He denied a further 10 charges of indecently assaulting a girl under 12 years old and two charges of inducing a girl under 12 to do an indecent act on him.
The Crown alleges the offending happened in Nelson and Motueka in the 1950s and 1960s, with further offending occurring against the fourth victim in the 1980s in Stoke.
Petrie was reportedly asked to leave the Exclusive Brethren church in April 2007.
Defence lawyer Robert Lithgow, QC, said in his opening address that the four women had only stepped forward after being approached by another former church member, Blenheim man Neville McCallum, who had heard Petrie was allegedly still abusing children.
A 56-year-old woman, who was the victim of the charge that Petrie yesterday admitted, said when she was a child Petrie would visit her parents’ Nelson house. Petrie used to seek her out and assault her either while she was in bed or playing in another room of the house.
She said her mother asked her if Petrie had ever interfered with her when she was about 10 or 12 and she had said yes.
She remembered the church holding a meeting about Petrie and she remembered his then-fiancee coming out of the church crying and throwing her engagement ring onto the gravel.
“I knew it was about Clive, I didn’t know exactly what it was about, but I felt it had something to do with me.”
She said she had left the church when she was 22 and “had moved on”. She had never met Mr McCallum and only knew a bit about his feelings about the church.
The 54-year-old woman and her 63-year-old sister both said that the Petrie family used to come to their family’s farm in the Motueka area for get-togethers with other Brethren families.
Petrie would seek them out, and get them away from the rest of the group where he assaulted them, they said.
Both said, at times through tears, they couldn’t tell their families about it, as no-one would have believed them.
The older sister said her family left the church when she was 16 or 17 and she didn’t have any contact with the Petrie family after that.
Ad Feedback
She had only come forward after her sister said one day “Petrie is the perpetrator”.
“I just said `me too’,” she said.
It was the first time in 50 years that somebody had believed her about Petrie, she said. She said she was not making up the allegations and was not rallying to some call by Mr McCallum that Petrie was still abusing children.
The younger sister said in answer to questions from Mr Lithgow there had been no pressure to come forward.
She said testifying in court was the last place she wanted to be. “I didn’t even talk about it to my sisters. I’ve felt embarrassed, yicky and horrible all my life.”
A 31-year-old woman said Petrie abused her when she stayed at his house from time to time. Her family left the church when she was seven.
