Tag Archives: Louise Milligan

Australia, Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media, The Left

Award-winning article on Cardinal Pell’s persecution

Fr Frank Brennan was awarded the Australian Catholic Press Association’s 2022 prize for best feature writing for ‘Anatomy of a Travesty’. He wrote the following on his Facebook page, pointing out the reprisals for any Catholic of standing who dared to defend Cardinal Pell.

My 8-page feature on the acquittal of Cardinal George Pell, ‘Anatomy of a Travesty,’ has won the Australian Catholic Press Association’s 2022 prize for best feature writing. I am delighted that the piece was judged worthy of an award. It was always difficult for anyone in the Catholic Church to write publicly about this matter.

The Pell saga was an appalling police sting operation protracted by grossly erroneous judicial reasoning by Victoria’s two most senior judges. It took all seven of the High Court judges to put things right. Hopefully lessons have been learnt by the police and the Victorian DPP so that complainants and those accused of child sexual abuse can be better served by the criminal justice system.

The demonstrable failures of the Victorian criminal justice system did nothing to help the efforts being made to address the trauma of institutional child sexual abuse. As a society we need to do better, and the legal system needs to play its part.

I hope my writing has contributed to more just outcomes, sparing complainants and accused persons unnecessary added trauma and hurt.

The feature article is the last chapter in my book ‘Observations on the Pell Proceedings’ (Connor Court 2021) which is dedicated to ‘those who seek truth, justice and healing and to those who have been denied them’.

Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media, Religion

The Pell lynch mob – undeterred and unbowed

The main point that emerges from Ross Fitzgerald’s review of Gerard Henderson’s book, Cardinal Pell, the Media Pile-on and Collective Guilt, is that the cardinal’s antagonists remain immovable in their belief that he is guilty as charged. It does not matter what has been said, how detailed and coherent the analysis of the ‘choirboy’s’ absurd story, the 7-0 verdict of the High Court, and the international consternation at the failure of Australia’s legal system, they remain impervious. You only have to follow Louise Milligan’s twitter account to witness the mob’s delusion and unrestrained hatred of Cardinal Pell. Indeed, I have described Milligan as delusional, but I wonder. Is it delusion or is it pure malice? Is she mad or bad? Gerard Henderson’s highly recommended book provides evidence for one or the other – or perhaps both.

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Cardinal George Pell: a man of sorrows

Ross Fitzgerald, The Australian, 8 December 2021

The case of George Pell revealed deep fault lines in Australian society. Some people were convinced of his innocence, but many others wanted him to be guilty.

The trial, retrial, and conviction in December 2018 of Cardinal Pell for historical child sexual abuse of two choirboys at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral that allegedly occurred in the mid-1990s, gained international attention.

Sensationally, in April 2020, all seven judges of the High Court of Australia quashed Pell’s conviction.

On April 7, 2020 at 10am, Chief Justice Susan Kiefel quoted from the unanimous judgment: “It is evident that there is a possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof.” That Tuesday morning, as a high-profile convicted pedophile, Cardinal Pell was in solitary confinement at the maximum security Barwon Prison, near Geelong. He had been incarcerated in various prisons for 405 days.

As Gerard Henderson documents in this scrupulously researched book, the High Court’s decision had huge reverberations. Even though the evidence against him was weak, most of Pell’s opponents, in Australia and overseas, retain their unambiguously entrenched positions.

Henderson argues, convincingly, that the Cardinal’s many antagonists continue to deny him the presumption of innocence.

Read the rest here …

Books, Feminism, Media, Men, Political correctness

Milligan’s desperate response

On 29 November, at the time of media responses to Gerard Henderson’s myth-slander-smashing book, Cardinal Pell, the Media Pile-on, and Collective Guilt, Louise Milligan, delusional and desperate, sent out this whimpering somewhat incoherent tweet.

‘Never, ever under-estimate the ability of the old boys network to be just that. Old. Boys. Desperately clinging on to what they think is, and want to be, power, but is really just a bit sad and desperate.’

It could only be in response to the praise for Henderson’s book that flails the media for its lies, bigotry, and incompetence, with a special focus on herself and David Marr. The tweet was a typical reaction from Milligan when faced with criticism about her shoddy, prejudiced journalistic efforts. Never ever does she attempt to defend her work against penetrating criticism.

In another context where she sickens with sanctimony and self-righteousness, she would be loud in her condemnation of sexism and prejudice against old people. Like Susan Mitchell in condemning Tony Abbott for being a man (Tony Abbott, A Man’s Man), Milligan sees nothing out of place in condemning her opponents for merely being male.

One cannot help wondering how she overcame her disgust and actually married a specimen of that revolting race and had a child with him. Indeed, one could wonder the same about most of her faithful female support. They cannot all be lesbians. They must have long-suffering, groaning husbands who feel helplessly trapped in a medieval sewer cistern.

Australia, Books, Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media, The Left

The tide has turned against Louise Milligan and David Marr

Gerard Henderson’s book on the George Pell pile-on exposes journalism’s mob mentality

CHRIS MITCHELL, The Australian, 29 November 2021

The release last Wednesday of a book about the media pursuit of Cardinal George Pell, and an earlier decision by The Washington Post to re-edit slabs of its own reporting about Donald Trump and Russia, highlight the need for journalists to reflect on how they are being used by their own sources.

The Post probably helped restore some lost credibility after special counsel John Durham on November 4 charged Igor Danchenko with lying to the FBI over the now notorious Christopher Steele dossier. The Steele material was used by the FBI, the Democrats and the media to build the Russian collusion case against Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign.

This column had outed links between the dossier and the Democrats, but ABC’s Four Corners went on to run a three-part special on the subject in June 2018, grandly called The Story of the Century.

Four Corners has never corrected the record. Nor has it admitted one of its main sources, former Barack Obama security chief James Clapper, had already told a secret congressional hearing he had seen no credible evidence against Trump even before he told Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson the opposite.

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media, Political correctness

Louise Milligan – youse are all wrong

Gavin Morris, ABC News Director, has tossed in the towel. Who could blame him? Louise Milligan, whose self-righteous cussedness has topped unheard of heights, would be purgatory enough. But imagine having to deal with Sarah Ferguson, Sally Neighbour and that whole band of whingeing self-righteous man-hating feminists at the ABC? Hell on earth. I wonder that Morris endured it so long. To give a taste of the brain-destroying torture Milligan has in store, I provide a link to Stuart Lindsay’s piece in the 10 January 2021 edition of Quadrant: Ignore the High Court, Louise Milligan Knows Best – Quadrant Online. Stuart Lindsay is a retired Federal Circuit Court judge .

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Ignore the High Court, Louise Milligan Knows Best

Stuart Lindsay, Quadrant, 10 January 2021

If you want a true sounding of the depths to which the trade of journalism and the vocation of writing in our country have fallen I suggest you can do no better than listen to or read the recent interview and transcript of Louise Milligan, the much-feted anti-Pell fanatic, on a podcast called The Garrett.

The Garrett is produced in Melbourne by a lady named Astrid Edwards, who interviews “writers on writing”. However, if you examine her website you will notice that the writers are overwhelmingly women and the writing is overwhelmingly leftist stock-in trade. And if you subtracted from the podcast’s interview catalogue those which deal with either feminist, black- or Islamic-grievance or climate change, you would be left with, well… Richard Fidler. He is the author of a gem of a book about the Byzantines and his undogmatic and agreeable presence on Ms Edward’s site is as anomalous as is his presence on the ABC’s airwaves. The explanation for the narrow range of the podcast’s pre-occupations is obvious enough. The website says it has “ongoing partnerships with the State Library of Victoria, Writers Victoria and RMIT University.” Alas, these days, what good thing ever comes out of an institution with “Victoria” or “Melbourne” in its name?

Remember, too, that most of The Garret‘s subjects have probably already been given their complimentary promotional tour at tax-payers’ expense by the ABC leviathan before they sat down to talk with her. In other words, The Garrett is just another of the vast number of state-funded or state-affiliated organs whose function is to sustain the Left’s stifling overlordship of every aspect of Australian cultural and political life. You know the ones I am referring to; the ones that get all of the government grants and award each other all of the prizes.

But don’t let that prevent you listening to the Milligan episode. You will learn much about Milligan and about her employer, our national broadcaster.

THE High Court judgment which set aside the Victorian Court of Appeal’s upholding (with Weinberg J in vigorous dissent) of Pell’s conviction and the unmistakable language of stern reproof in which that judgement was written don’t seem to have signified much of anything to Ms. Milligan. Rather, the High Court has taught her nothing about either the fundamental tenets of fair reporting or the criminal law. Both the woman and the ABC are unteachable. Why do I say that? Let me take you to the transcript. First, this bit (with my highlighting):

Read the rest here…

Books, Catholic Church, Culture, Feminism, Law, Media, Political correctness

Reviews of Milligan’s aWard-winning book

Keith Windschuttle’s book, THE PERSECUTION OF GEORGE PELL, has destroyed every aspect of the case against Cardinal Pell for the sexual abuse of two minors. This is a book to be studied over time, and compared with those shoddy one-sided books that played a crucial role in the attempted public lynching of the cardinal. Foremost was ABC employee Louise Milligan’s CARDINAL, a book driven by Milligan’s swirling emotions rather than reason and objective handling of the evidence. Indeed, the rules of reason do not feature in Milligan’s worldview which is neatly divided into those she hates (mostly masculine men) and those she loves with an abundance of smarmy emotion. It is useful to be reminded of Gerard Henderson’s comments on two critical reviews of CARDINAL.

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 MEDIA WATCH DOG

ISSUE NO. 365, 16 June 2017

 IN WHICH PETER CRAVEN (FAIRFAX MEDIA) & GERARD WINDSOR (THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN) AGREE THAT LOUISE MILLIGAN’S BOOK CARDINAL IS A PERSONAL “ATTACK” MOTIVATED BY “ANIMUS”

According to MUP chief executive Louise Adler, Louise Milligan’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Cardinal Pell (MUP, 2017) is a work of “forensic and meticulous research” and an “important contribution to the community’s understanding of the Catholic Church’s response to child abuse”.

According to ABC editorial director Alan Sunderland, the public broadcaster stands by the reporting of Cardinal George Pell by Louise Milligan – one of the ABC’s star investigative reporters – on the 7.30 program on 27 July 2016. Much of the material in the 7.30 program appears in Cardinal.

Continue reading Reviews of Milligan’s aWard-winning book →
Australia, Books, Catholic Church, Media, Political correctness, The Left

The BIGOTED SCRIBBLINGS of the ABC’s Louise Milligan

One must be continually reminded of the appalling standard of Louise Milligan’s book CARDINAL which has filled the pig’s trough of anti-
Catholic literature. This is the standard of thinking of Australia’s left.

Reviewed by Gerard Henderson

Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell 
By Louise Milligan,

– With a memoir piece from John Clifton who attended St Francis Xavier private school – the Ballarat school George Pell ministered to in the 1970s.

According to Melbourne University Press, Cardinal uncovers “uncomfortable truths about a culture of sexual entitlement, abuse of trust and how ambition can silence evil” in the Catholic Church.  In an email forwarded to me on 30 May 2017, MUP chief executive Louise Adler wrote that Cardinal is an “important contribution to the community’s understanding of the Catholic Church’s response to child abuse”.  Ms Adler was defending Louise Milligan’s refusal to answer questions about Cardinal – despite the fact that her journalistic career has been built on asking questions of others.

In fact, Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell is neither of the above.  Cardinal  does not uncover “uncomfortable truths” about the Catholic Church.  The scandal of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has been known for decades.  Nor is the book a contribution to “the community’s understanding of the Catholic Church’s response to child sexual abuse”. As the author acknowledged when interviewed on the ABC TV News Breakfast program on 17 May 2017, Cardinal was written “from the complainants’ point of view”.

So Cardinal is not an objective analysis of either the Catholic Church or Cardinal George Pell.  Rather, it is the case for the prosecution – primarily researched by ABC journalist Louise Milligan while working for the taxpayer funded public broadcaster.

Read the rest here…

Catholic Church, Law, Media, Religion, The Left

Patching up a dodgy Story

Keith Windschuttle’s latest essay on the Pell Affair, ‘How the Rome Interview changed Choirboy’s Story’ shows what an appalling farce of injustice Victoria Police and Louise Milligan made of the complainant’s story to make the case against Cardinal Pell stick.

It is essentially this. The choirboy spun one story of what happened, which was gobbled up by the police and Milligan. This story prevailed between 2015 and 2016 when the police interviewed the cardinal in Rome. It was the version that Cardinal Pell and his lawyers had received from the police before the meeting. There were huge problems with this story as Windschuttle points out, so big that the police had to patch over the problems. The second patched-up version was sprung on Cardinal Pell and his lawyer whose bemusement at the discrepancies between the two versions is evident in the video of the interview. Windschuttle concludes:

‘What this indicates is that the case against Pell was never some immutable truth embedded in the choirboy’s memory. It was an evolving story created by the police and their sole witness, which they treated as a work in progress, and one which they could, when confronted with obstacles or inconsistencies, change at will.

‘So the story that impressed the Crown prosecutor so much that he put down his pen and stared blankly at the screen was not the only version of these events told by the choirboy and those who coached him. Moreover, the later story was so different to the first version that it must have incorporated a whole new range of fictions about the timing and location of the alleged abuse, and who was doing what and when, all of which must have borne their own share of invention too. In other words, those who found the choirboy such an impressive witness were very easily persuaded.’

The willingness of the media to do their own patching-up (favourable to the ‘boy’) is demonstrated by Windschuttle’s quotation from Megan Palin’s piece on that grubby little woke online operation news.com.au/

Read the article here…

Australia, Catholic Church, Law, Media, Political correctness, Religion

Milligan incites the ABC lynch mob against Andrew Bolt

Malicious delusional Louise Milligan is at it again in her usual one-sided, question-begging, distorting way, inflating a case again Catholic St Kevin’s College to make it appear such things only happen in the Catholic Church and Catholic schools – all run through the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Australia’s Anti-Catholic Central. How wonderful it is to have a billion-dollar state enterprise at one’s disposal. Nobody and no institution does bigotry as well as Milligan and the ABC.

Andrew Bolt dared to make a mitigating comment about the St Kevin’s case. That was enough for Milligan to rise in fury and set the lynch mob on him. Bolt can handle himself, but he should know that he has risen high in list of those Milligan and her class are out to destroy. He should remember the mob outside St Patrick’s Cathedral shouting, ‘We’ll get you in the end, Pell.’ They got him.

Here’s Bolt’s answer to Milligan and her lynch mob:

ABC’S LOUISE MILLIGAN PICKS ANOTHER CHERRY IN HER CRUSADE

I don’t trust anything that the ABC’s Louise Milligan says in her reports on the Catholic Church or George Pell. Nor should anyone trust her tweets, like this appeal to my boss at Sky to, what, sack me?:

Read on…