Church abuse scandal: my dad the abuser

‘He was a master manipulator whose abuse spanned 40 years in three different countries.’

The words of John Smyth’s son PJ – one of his earliest victims – in an exclusive interview with this programme.

The Makin review detailed Smyth’s horrific abuse of those he met at public schools and Christian summer camps.  What is less well known, is how Smyth senior controlled and abused his own family, who are only now facing up to the devastating toll on their lives.

Warning, this report contains extremely distressing details.

Cathy Newman: PJ Smyth, start by telling us your earliest recollections, really, of your childhood?

PJ Smyth: I think that would be our family home two miles outside Winchester. My dad, my mum, three sisters and I, a swimming pool, beautiful home – a lovely big garden, yard, with an orchard. But there was a shed at the top of the orchard.

Cathy Newman: And the shed really came to dominate your childhood.

PJ Smyth: Yes, it’s been defining in my life.

Cathy Newman: So tell us what happened in the shed?

PJ Smyth: The experience would start a long time before we actually got to the shed. We had this black book in the kitchen that my wrongdoings would be recorded in. And when my dad came home from work, he was sometimes away for days, he would read them and he would say, Peter-John, it’s time to go to the shed, which was synonymous for a beating.

Cathy Newman: How painful was it?

PJ Smyth: Extremely painful.He had a selection of canes and he had at least one tennis shoe. I remember there was tape around the middle of it to help him. And he didn’t hold back. Beatings were six or 12 or 18. I remember one stands out – it was 36 – and I remember it because it was 6×6, it was six subjects in school. I got a bad report for each of them.

Cathy Newman: And your mom handed out bandages and adult nappies. What are your memories of her role?

PJ Smyth: She and my father would sometimes put cream on me if it had been a beating that wounded me to need cream, which was not uncommon. She was very kind to me whenever I got home after a beating.

Cathy Newman: Do you think she was controlled by him? Do you think she was scared of him?

PJ Smyth: My mom was at the epicentre of this magnetic field of my father’s control. She was his – the closest victim to him – for all her adult life, really.

Cathy Newman: Does she know that, do you think?

PJ Smyth: I’m not sure. He was a master manipulator. His abuse spanned 40 years in three different countries, and he managed to just keep going and get away with it. So take that manipulative, dark genius and apply it to my mum, my sisters, me – child’s play.

Cathy Newman: You were so young when all this was happening. I mean, seven was when it started. You didn’t know any different?

PJ Smyth: I didn’t know any different.

Cathy Newman: You thought this was what childhood was?

PJ Smyth: Yeah.

Cathy Newman: How does that strike you now?

PJ Smyth: I’m appalled that it happened to me. I am – I have to lean on what my therapists have taught me, that betrayal trauma, which is trauma from a primary protector in one’s life, is particularly damaging. And it places an individual, such as myself, in an impossible position because you can’t admit – I couldn’t admit – my father was a monster and I couldn’t get away from him. So I had to create a reality where I remained dependent on this primary provider figure in my life. So I excused what he did. I feared him, wanted to stay in his good books. I did everything possible just to keep my – my therapist said you were operating to survive. I had to make it okay somehow.

Cathy Newman: Let’s go forward to 1982 because in 1982, a secret report by the Reverend Ruston detailed your father’s beatings. What changed for you after that?

PJ Smyth: So I was 11 in 1982, and all I knew at the time was that my visits to the shed stopped. So after four years of visiting the shed, that stopped.

Cathy Newman: Very abruptly?

PJ Smyth: Yes, I have since joined the dots. I now know that’s when courageous people outed my father. There was a bizarre incident that stuck in my mind, and I remember it so clearly because I’d just made the hockey team. But I was sick, so I couldn’t play in a game. And I was in Sick Bay at boarding school and my dad came to visit me and he lay on my bed with me and sobbed. And he said, Peter-John, I’m so sorry for being such a bad father. And I remember stroking his head and saying, ‘you’re not dad, you’re not, you’re wonderful’. And I had no idea what he was talking about. But again, reading and knowing what I know now, I think that was when he was outed.

Cathy Newman: He was rumbled.

PJ Smyth: He was rumbled.

Cathy Newman: That is the one instance I’ve heard of – of him expressing remorse for what he’d done. And he didn’t own what had happened in the 1982 report?

PJ Smyth: No. So in 1982, I was grateful that my shed visits stopped. But I was not grateful, to say the least, that my father wasn’t stopped. With the knowledge I have now, I know that senior leaders in the Church of England knew about his abuse and somehow they saw fit to allow him to relocate to Zimbabwe. Maybe they were thinking, put distance between his UK victims and him, but he moved to Zimbabwe with his family.

Cathy Newman: Who were his victims?

PJ Smyth:  – who were his victims. And no one no one thought, if John Smyth is doing these things in his garden shed, what’s he doing in his home with his family members? If he’s beating older boys like this, what might he be doing to his young son?

Cathy Newman: So how angry are you, that he wasn’t stopped in 1982. You said he was outed, but actually, he was – it was all covered up. He was shoved off to Zimbabwe, but he wasn’t stopped.

PJ Smyth: So angry. So disappointed. Countless lives would have been different. When I speak to my sisters about it, that was the pivotal moment. 1982. Lives would have been saved.

Cathy Newman: And how grateful are you to the British victims who did try and get help in 1982? And it meant that your beatings in the shed stopped?

PJ Smyth: If it were not for them, I would have been hurt more and longer. I’m very grateful.

Cathy Newman: What were you told about why you were suddenly uprooted and going to Zimbabwe?

PJ Smyth: My dad told us as a family that he feels called as a missionary to Zimbabwe. And that was his big line. And he said, I’m going to be leaving the law. We’re going to move to Zimbabwe and serve the Lord there. And I swallowed that hook, line and sinker.

Cathy Newman: And he started up again in Zimbabwe. The holiday camps began all over again. Do you remember witnessing anything untoward at those camps?

PJ Smyth: Well, at the time, I would say no, there was nothing untoward. And that’s to my – that’s to my shame really. Now, I would say, yes, I did witness untoward things. Every night there was skinny dipping. So I would now say, yes, that was not right.

Cathy Newman: But you were in his thrall at this point?

PJ Smyth: Absolutely.

Cathy Newman: So everything he said went. You had no means to challenge him?

PJ Smyth: Yes, that’s correct. The shed had broken me to his will. It was the blend in the shed of the physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological. That was the cocktail.

Cathy Newman: And I suppose this is where the story gets really dark, because do you remember what happened the night that Guide Nyachuru died in 1992?

PJ Smyth: I do remember some things. I was his dormitory leader. There were probably 15 of us in the dormitory – and the dormitory leader’s responsibility was to lead Bible devotions and so on. And we went for a skinny dip that evening at about 9 o’clock. That was what different dormitories did every evening, lots of naked bodies jumping in and out of the pool. And the next morning, Guide was not in his bed.

Cathy Newman: Do you remember what went through your mind at that point?

PJ Smyth: I mean, it was ghastly. We, I remember – I think – dad announcing it to all of us on camp when we were in the dining room for breakfast. I remember us not being allowed near the swimming pool. So I never went down to the pool. I didn’t see Guide’s body. And I remember my dad announcing it to the camp. But I don’t remember much of my response or our response beyond that.

Cathy Newman: So your dad subsequently was charged with culpable homicide. What did he say to you about that case?

PJ Smyth: He kept it very quiet. We were living five hour’s drive away from my parents. And I called up my dad and said, when I heard about it, ‘dad what’s this, why didn’t you tell me?’ And he said, ‘I’ve been wanting to keep it quiet and wanting to protect the family.’

Cathy Newman: So how much were you in touch with him when he moved to South Africa? He was in a different city in South Africa. You were in hospital with cancer. I know you thought you were going to die – you’d rewritten your will. And your dad visited you in hospital. What did he say?

PJ Smyth: My mum and dad came in and sat down and he said, ‘Peter, we’ve got something we would like to bring to you. We have seven ways that you have dishonoured us, and we believe that this is why you’ve got cancer and that you will get better from cancer if you repent of dishonouring us.’ And I can see you shaking your head – you think – that’s crazy.

Cathy Newman: It sounds absolutely deranged.

PJ Smyth: Well, this is the even crazier bit. I didn’t say, ‘Get out of here, you evil man. You’re giving me a death threat. You’re even leveraging my cancer for your own narcissistic ends.’ I didn’t say that. I meekly listened. And at the end of it, I said ‘Thanks dad, that I’ll prayerfully consider what you are saying’. And when I told Ashley, I mean – Ashley stormed out of the hospital room. My wife Ashley. When she came back in and I told her how I had concluded it, she went white and walked out in tears and she found some of our best friends and said, you’ve got to come and talk some sense into him.

Cathy Newman: So it was someone from outside your family, your wife, Ashley, who really showed you how you were being manipulated and how you had been being manipulated all your life.

PJ Smyth: She was a key part in helping me see that. I think she was a victim herself. And I regret that I didn’t protect her more from my dad. I regret I didn’t protect my sisters more.

Cathy Newman: Well, let’s bring it almost up to the present. Just days after you moved here to America, you were in Maryland initially, you became a senior pastor there – and we broadcast our report. When you saw it, what did you think?

PJ Smyth: Well, Cathy, your documentaries upended my life professionally and personally. At the time that I saw them, I had a begrudging respect for you, but I wasn’t grateful to you. Seven years on, I am grateful to you because you courageously brought into the light what I couldn’t and others wouldn’t. I watched them and thought, ‘that’s compelling and I think that sounds right’. And then I would toggle across to ‘I can’t even – I shouldn’t even be thinking that because that’s dishonouring of my dad.’ I mean, I believed what you said in your documentaries, but not deeply.

Cathy Newman: You were still in denial.

PJ Smyth: I was still in denial. And, as an example, following your documentaries, I made some statements that were factually inaccurate about my father and my relationship with my father – back 23 years previously and 40 years previously in the UK. And those inaccurate statements caused harm to some individuals and organisations. And I was confronted about that in 2017 and again in 2021. And I owned my mistakes and I apologised and I was stepped out of ministry.

Cathy Newman: Because initially your public statement described your dad’s abuse as ‘excessive physical discipline’. How soon did you realise that you’d made a mistake – and you own your mistake now I know.

PJ Smyth: I look back on describing what you presented in your documentaries as excessive physical discipline, and I shake my head and shudder that I could have described it like that. I should have used words like crime and torture, but I was unable to. Your documentaries punched a big hole in my wall of denial, but didn’t bring it down.

Cathy Newman: Did you confront your dad after those reports?

PJ Smyth: Yeah.

Cathy Newman: How did that go?

PJ Smyth: Terribly. With my dad, you couldn’t critique him on anything meaningful without risking complete ejection from his life. And when I said, ‘Dad, you need to come out, you need to face up to this.’ I said, ‘Dad, I will do a world tour with you, helping you, taking you to victims – these victims – to apologise. You need to do what’s right. You’ve got one short window to respond correctly.’ His response to me was ‘Stop being disloyal. It’s lies and exaggeration and it will pass. Keep your head down. It’s a media storm that will pass.’

Cathy Newman: There’s a sort of parallel, isn’t there, between what happened to you and what’s happened to the Archbishop of Canterbury, that he was, to quote the Makin Review, ‘insufficiently curious’. You refused to face up to your father’s abuse really. Do you think he was right to step back? To resign as Archbishop of Canterbury?

PJ Smyth: The Archbishop of Canterbury wasn’t my father’s son, and he wasn’t a victim. In terms of him taking responsibility for his inadequate response in his ministry and more broadly as the leader of the Church of England’s – their woeful response. I respect him for resigning.

Cathy Newman: Did some of your critics struggle to believe your accounts of your own abuse? And what impact did that have on you?

PJ Smyth: Yes. My situation was unique in that when I got things wrong in 2017, I got them wrong as a church leader. And I own that. For a church leader to do erroneous communication about such a sensitive subject, as it was with my father, that needed to be apologised for and corrected. And I did. However, I was treated as a church leader first and – as a victim – as a very distant, even inconsequential second.

Cathy Newman: Well, the year after we did our report, your dad died. What were your thoughts when you heard they had died?

PJ Smyth: I was relieved. And it’s been complicated grief as you can imagine. I was also – there was relief – but there was also a disappointment in me that he was not held to account. I believe that would have been the right thing for him to do – to face up to it. And as a Smyth, as one who bears his name, there hasn’t been closure on that front.

Cathy Newman: So you’d have liked to have seen him go to jail?

PJ Smyth: I would like to have seen him take responsibility – full responsibility – in whatever form that was.

Cathy Newman: On the day of his funeral, you and your sisters sent a message to the British victims via Andrew Graystone, who’s sort of become their advocate. What made you do that?

PJ Smyth: We could empathise with some of their pain. But I think particularly we were aware on that day of the justice that they would never have in terms of my father being held to account. And we wanted just to take whatever little action we could to honour them and say that we were thinking of them.

Cathy Newman: Well, I brought a letter with me from one of the British victims who we’re calling Graham, and I just wondered if I could give it to you.

PJ Smyth: That’s amazing.

Cathy Newman: I wonder if I could ask you just to read a few sections from it that particularly spoke to you?

PJ Smyth: ‘PJ, I just wanted to hold out the hand of friendship. The hand of shared pain, the hand of bridge-building. This ghastly, awful saga has ruined both of our lives. And dad’s abuse still casts its long, deep, deep shadow across decades. None of us realised the effects would be all, so, all-consuming. And none of us knew that trauma does not go away. We both have lives to live, families to love and support, and the shadow must be cast aside. Peter – one day I would like to meet. We need not actually speak, but walk on a beach, or mountains, cry or just stand side by side. And know that we were both there. I look forward to living without this albatross around our necks. Take care. Love to all your family. I hope you find peace, joy, and a new spring in your step.’

This means a lot. I think this is very gracious of him. And it’s my desire too. I don’t know what to say.

Cathy Newman: But you’re with him in solidarity and he’s reached out to you. That means a lot.

PJ Smyth: I’m very grateful. One of the reasons I did this interview, the main reason is to show solidarity to the other victims of my father and to hopefully raise awareness of trauma.

Cathy Newman: It’s just over a week ago, I think, that the Makin Review was published. 251 pages, a brutal exposé, really, of your dad’s abuses in three different countries. What did you think when you read it?

PJ Smyth: I think that it cemented my father as the most prolific abuser connected to the Church of England. And I think it cemented the Church of England as needing rapid and radical changes in terms of their response to abuse.

Cathy Newman: What words, or word, would you use as his son to describe him?

PJ Smyth: Grand narcissist, barbaric, even monstrous, and my father.

Cathy Newman: PJ Smyth, thank you very much.