A Letter To Cassandra Thorburn

Hi Cass,

I hope you don’t mind me calling you by your first name. Like some other recent events, you haven’t had much choice in your name being public. And with the way they make your ex-husband and his co host appear like a warped breakfast family, I thought we were all on some kind of first name basis. Karl, Lisa, Cassandra and oh, look, now there’s Jasmine.

Or more aptly, Miss Mid Life Crisis. Now, none of us fell for the pictures of ‘loved up Karl and his MLC’ at the various events he’s been running off to. But the last couple of days, she’s been wearing a ring. Oh, Cass. He’s marrying his red convertible! I so would have  brought the cake and got drunk with you on cooking sherry while me and the 800 million other women, and men, who get it spluttered with mirth  and took bets on how long this commitment to his toupe can last.

Except you seem to have higher standards than me. You’ve shown nothing but grace under fire. Perhaps you would only have got tipsy.

It’s so predictable. We all know what’s next, right? Karl and his MLC’s crassly expensive wedding, then MLC’s rumoured pregnancy and then finally, the baby. I’m calling 2 years tops til there’s an MLC jr. Cos this MLC isn’t stupid. They’re good, these young ones, the designers, at holding back the bile. She’ll wait patiently until her slipper business takes off, and then she will too, with the baby of course, leaving Karl ‘devastated’, ‘shocked’, ‘heartbroken.’

Sounds familiar.

They say you came home from the grocery run  to find that the man with whom you have worked alongside for 21 years to create a world and family of your own had his suitcase all packed. Just as well you didn’t stop for petrol on the way home, or you might have just got a text. Seems like that kind of guy.

You were blindsided, they say. We’ve all been there. It’s like the sky falls in on the earthquake. But what this man did was make it public. Because he thinks he’s Australia’s big brother or fun uncle, when it’s clear from his actions alone post-Woolworths, (he didn’t make you go to Aldi did he?)  that he’s a spineless sociopath.

In contrast, you’ve acted with remarkable elegance, dignity and integrity. You’ve made the information clear and brief. Millions of Sydney dollars don’t fill the giant hole he left in your family when he had his identity freakout at your expense. And  you’re not playing ball.

‘Dead to me’, is an excellent turn of phrase. Bravo.

In any other universe, he would be a laughing stock. An early 40s guy who wears the same suit every day,  who leaves his happy family to run off with his MLC. They’re all doing it, aren’t they? Ewan McGregor, that football coach, even the marriage experts, like Barnaby Joyce. Those precious moments in the maternity ward mean nothing when you’re looking 50 or 60 straight in the face. And to top it off, the new girls think it’s going to be different with them! Oh, Cass, have you got a corkscrew? My sides have split.

But in the hick town called Australia, Karl has an advantage. He’s Jamie Packer’s mate. Goes on his boat. Laughs at his jokes. You probably helped nurture those relationships in the interest of his career and his social life.  Probably stayed home while he was out with his big shot mates schmoozing and drinking and honing his charisma. And his sociopathy.

So I just wanted you to know that there’s at least 800 million of us that get it. Woman’s Day can flog it any way they want, but it’s the same old story. We can see it in her eyes, and we can see it in his. And most of all, you exceptional lady, we can see it in yours. We look forward to your every success.

A lie by any other name is called perjury

In October 2017 an audio recording  surfaced of Senior Pastor Brian Houston's father, self confessed child sex offender and founder of the church that became Hillsong. In this audio below, dated by Frank's own words to be 2004,  Houston Sr is heard to be preaching, despite claims from his son under oath, that once he admitted his offences, he never preached again, nor were any children put at risk. Frank was also considered too wracked with dementia to face the accusations. The following is my FB post 2 Oct 2017

We know that Hillsong pastors are a straight up pack of liars. They say things like “We love you”, and “Everybody’s Welcome” and “We write our own books.”
So you know when the pastor’s lips are moving, he’s lying. The entire OJ Simpson defence team did not lie collectively as much as these guys can. Even the Kardashians are going now, purely out of professional respect.

But with all that money, and so much media, you’d really hope they’d throw a few bucks into covering up their lies better. Fascinatingly, they don’t.

When Brian Houston took the stand at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia in 2014 and said that he'd acted properly and ethically, we knew straight away he was lying. Because we’d been there and watched the first round of lies in 2001. Realising he couldn’t cover it up anymore as they had agreed to in the elders' secret meetings, Brian made some kind of announcement at church services one Sunday. He stated that his father had committed a "serious moral failure", you know, like lying to your mother on her birthday.

He never named his father Frank, founder of the church that became Hillsong, as a sex offender, only his family as the victims of some terrible tragedy that had happened to them, not the 7 year olds his father preyed on.
But later, when pressed he described some vague incident that had happened in New Zealand 30 years earlier. No big deal. Sounded like the old man had bumped into someone in the hallway and not said sorry.

Brian knew this wasn’t true. But no one had any power or evidence to dismiss it. And given the narrative was and continues to be about the Houstons’ suffering in all this, the victims have been mentioned recently, sparsely, mandatorily.
Under oath, Brian stated that as soon as he confronted his own father who confessed, Frank was removed from ministry, his credentials taken away and that he never preached again. He said that he’d told his church immediately, that he’d been open since the beginning about it, and that his father was never allowed in ministry again. The only true parts were that his credentials were taken away. The rest, even according to the documents Hillsong tendered to that court, is lies.

There are plenty of once innocent parishioners who were told to treat Frank like royalty when he was moved to their church. No one said, keep your kids safe from this old guy. And there's plenty of people who heard him preach in the years before he died in 2004.

Now, there’s audio evidence. A tape surfaced this past weekend with Frank’s voice preaching just months before his death, ostensibly from dementia, yet he's remarkably clear on this tape (in the comments). He has a few of his closest relatives nearby, including, surprise!, Brian's son, Ben, and apparently, Brian and his sister, Judith.

Once introduced, Frank says:
“I’m glad if you know – to see young Ben here this morning, growing up. And uh – it won’t be too long before he’s bigger than his father. And wiser than his father. And more anointed than his father because God moves in generations. And my son Brian is doing great things for God, you know? And then I’ve got a daughter Judith. And Judith, my daughter, she’s doing great things for God.

And so on for an hour. So we know that nothing changed much for Frank. He preached his codswallop until he died and Brian knew all about it.

Here’s the thing. You can lie to your congregation pre-Twitter, you can lie to the Royal Commission, also called perjury, because you think they’ll never get around to checking up on you compared with what happened in Ballarat.

But you should not lie to Leila McKinnon. After the Royal Commission, Brian did media rounds and his face started to relax as he repeated the words his publicist had coached him on. Finally, saying things like “ i knew it was criminal” and “ i care about victims” 14 years after the fact appeared to be working. People were listening to him and his story got quicker and smoother.

And while we know it’s hard for the world’s oldest narcissists like Donald Trump to come to grips with technology, the truth is the evidence stays around after the show's over. It’s not just teen girls who have to be careful with which way the web cam faces. The internet is permanent for everyone.
Brian is known for getting very upset at people on social media then deleting his comments. Maybe that’s how his whole life works. Have a tantrum, someone else cleans it up, who cares who’s crying? They won’t be on stage in the choir tonight.
But this isn’t 1982, and if you have go out and miss Mork and Mindy because your brother wants to look at motorbikes your parents will never let him have, you can actually watch the catch up now.

People share a whole lot of information, too. You can’t just keep them apart with hellfire and tithing demands. .

So when he told Leila Mckinnon on Inside Story
“We did tell people straight away. We did take his credentials away. He never did preach again and we did oversee and ensure that he was never put in a position to be close to kids to be able to do that again.”
He’s lying.

When he tells Karl Stefanovic the same thing, he's lying.

You’d hope that if our government won’t follow him up on the multiple perjury charges, that Leila or Karl would. I'm calling on the true leaders of this country to go over their own interviews and see how horrible it is when Brian lies straight to your face, even when you ask him not to.

Because when Hillsong tell you your kids are safe there, you need only to look how they handled the most important case that crossed their paths. They covered up, lied and then lied when it came out. They lied to the Royal Commission and they lied to Leila and they lied to Karl Stefanovic. And we all know the only people allowed to lie to breakfast TV hosts are themselves