Hillsong founder Brian Houston to learn fate over allegations he covered up father’s abuse of a boy to police more than two decades ago
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Hillsong founder Brian Houston will learn whether he’s guilty of a cover-up for not reporting his father’s abuse of a boy to police more than two decades ago.
The 69-year-old was a child when his father Frank Houston began abusing Brett Sengstock in the 1970s.
Houston later learned of his father’s abuse and confronted him about it.
Frank Houston confessed and was defrocked in late 1999.
Brian Houston shared the news with other members of the national executive within the Assemblies of God churches during an urgent meeting at Sydney airport.
Hillsong founder Brian Houston will learn whether he’s guilty of a cover-up for not reporting his father’s abuse of a boy to police more than two decades ago
Word of the elder Houston’s confession eventually reached Mr Sengstock, but he could not remember who told him, telling the court ‘it was gossip everywhere’.
However, Houston did not report his father to police.
He faced a local court hearing beginning in December, pleading not guilty to a charge of concealing a serious indictable offence, which stemmed from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Magistrate Gareth Christofi is due to deliver a decision in Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court on Thursday.
Houston’s barrister Phillip Boulten SC previously said Houston believed Mr Sengstock did not want any further action and was by then an adult who could have reported to police himself.
‘To call this some cover-up is a mischaracterisation, it’s very unfair,’ Mr Boulten told the court.
Rather than concealing his father’s abuse, Houston spoke about it in televised sermons attended by thousands, including the then-NSW police commissioner, his barrister said.
Crown prosecutor Gareth Harrison argued Houston made ‘technically correct’ statements that were ‘designed to mislead’ when talking about the abuse committed by his father, conflating his crimes in Australia with others in New Zealand.
The 69-year-old was a child when his father Frank Houston began abusing Brett Sengstock in the 1970s
He relied on the ‘entrenched reverence’ for his father in the Pentecostal movement to control the narrative and enforce a culture of silence, Mr Harrison said.
The older Houston continued to preach at churches within the Assemblies of God until weeks before he died in 2004.
Church figures told the trial they would never have let him appear before their congregations if they had known he was a paedophile.
Brian Houston resigned from Hillsong in March 2022 after breaching the church’s moral code over inappropriate relations with two women.
In a statement in March this year acknowledging a US drink-driving charge from February 2022, Houston said he was under ‘immense pressure and emotional strain’ and it seemed like ‘all hell had broken loose’ before he resigned.
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