UNWORTHY KENWORTHY

A religious drama in Kew in recent days brought back some dramatic personal memories.

Memories about a tense office meeting near Leonda – not far from the Kew Baptist Church where members of a Baptist congregation were told this week that their revered and charismatic pastor of almost twenty years, the late Peter Manton, had been a hypocritical, predatory, sexual abuser of young women.

Some of his victims were young rural Victorians who came to Melbourne as residents of the Baptist Youth Hostel. That hostel became Manton’s sexual lolly shop. Many Baptists in Kew are in shock. Understandably. Do hypocrites rule the altar?

My personal experience did involve Baptists but did not involve the media savvy Manton.

I took a cab to an office at the Baptist Centre back in the Eighties and sat down in a famous Baptist parson’s office. This one was really media savvy. He was IN the media.

He clasped his hands and unctuously asked me: “Derryn, So what’s your problem?”

I said: “It’s not my problem. I think it is your problem.”

I had information that this celebrity cleric had been using his position to sexually abuse vulnerable women.

His name was the Reverend Alex Kenworthy. He had been the top-rating nighttime radio broadcaster in Melbourne for years. He was the nocturnal star of 3AW. My radio station at the time.

(One informant, to prove her legitimacy, had told me about some stunning pillow talk. She claimed that two of my friends were having marital problems. The wife was being counselled, late night as usual, by Kenworthy. Reluctant and embarrassed I broached the issue with my friend. It was true).

I took the issue to management at the radio station. The bosses virtually said that people had affairs. So what?

My argument was then – and still is twenty years later -- that it is none of my business if a man, or woman, has an affair. But when a parson goes on air and proffers succour and spiritual help to women in need and then visits them after midnight under the guise of more religious guidance and seduces them then it IS my business. I’m told he used to put his handkerchief on his head and demand masturbation. Very strange.

I recall writing editorials about the issue. Legally, at first, I could not name Kenworthy and when I did he blustered and sued me and finally dropped the action and paid me $10,000 in legal costs.

For a priest to seduce a vulnerable woman I thought was so low life that I likened it to a doctor who fondled a patient’s breasts when she had gone to him, troubled, with a fear of cancer.

Or a gynaecologist behaving inappropriately during a Pap test when a woman is so vulnerable. And trusting.

At times, in my editorial rants, I remember referring specifically (and deliberately) to “Baptist parsons who prey on birds with broken wings”.

I received a phone call from the Victorian boss of the Baptists at the time requesting I desist from naming their denomination. I said it was deliberate. He asked for a name. I said: “You give me one”. He named Alex Kenworthy.

I received seven or eight statutory declarations from Melbourne women who claimed the compassionate priest of the airwaves had used their

“broken wings” for his sexual gratification.

After we broadcast the accusations on HINCH on the Seven Network – with Pamela Graham chasing a guilt-ridden Kenworthy down a suburban lane – the "stat decs" blew out to twenty.

One woman told me that Kenworthy, in his unctuous, reassuring style, tried to seduce her at her husband’s funeral.

Why should I be surprised when he used to sit in the 3AW studio with a single light almost giving him a halo as he oiled his way through the night.

I know of young female reporters who refused to work nights because of his wandering hands. A Kenworthy guest told me how, shocked, she felt his shoeless socks creeping up her legs during an on-air interview.

And frozen in time is the look of my young assistant producer who came into my office after another AW ratings success lunchtime sausage sizzle in La Trobe Street and said:

“That radio priest just tried to tongue kiss me!”

But back to the Baptist hierarchy. They should be congratulated for doing, or trying to do, what Peter Hollingworth failed at so miserably with the Anglicans.

The Reverend Rod Pell, the current Kew pastor, and the church deacons, called a meeting to honestly tell their flock that Peter Manton was a serial abuser of young Baptist women.

I believe the church was brave and right. Unlike some others.

Unlike my Eighties experiences this church totally and quickly believed the victims. No cover-up was attempted. Several victims, I am told, were actually encouraged by the church, to go public.

A cruel personal postscript to this story:

The Reverend Alex Kenworthy died suddenly and relatively young. I do not know from what. I have always hoped he saw the error of his cynical, hypocritical, sleazy ways and topped himself.

December 7, 2003

.©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2003