*The co-founder and senior pastor of the global megachurch Hillsong has been charged by the Australian police with concealing the crimes of his father
Brian Houston, 67, is said to have remained mum about the child sexual abuse carried out by his father, Frank Houston, in the 1970s.
Australian police alleged that Houston, who is usually based in Sydney, “knew information relating to the sexual abuse of a young male in the 1970s and failed to bring that information to the attention of police.”
Houston has denied the accusations, and an email statement from his church said: “These charges have come as a shock to me given how transparent I’ve always been about this matter. I vehemently profess my innocence and will defend these charges, and I welcome the opportunity to set the record straight.”
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The charges are part of a 2019 criminal investigation that Houston “knowingly concealed information about child sexual assault,” according to the police statement.
Here’s more from the New York Times:
In 2014, an Australian royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse found that Mr. Houston had failed to alert police after his father, Frank Houston, confessed to him in 1999 of sexually abusing a seven-year-old boy decades earlier.
“I confronted him. He went extremely dry in the mouth and said, ‘Yes, these things did happen,’” Mr. Houston said, according to transcripts.
The royal commission’s final report found that, “despite Pastor Brian Houston’s evidence that he had no doubt that his father’s conduct was criminal, he made no attempt to report his father to the police at the time the confession was made to him.”
“Police will allege in court the man knew information relating to the sexual abuse of a young male in the 1970s and failed to bring that information to the attention of police,” a police statement reads.
Houston has been ordered to appear in a court in Sydney, Australia, on Oct. 5.
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