PELL CALL LEAK IS SUSPICIOUS

DID police poison the public against Cardinal George Pell — including by leaking to the media details of a private phone call? Monsignor Charles Portelli was amazed last February to read on The New Daily website a story by Lucie Morris-Marr, who’d earlier broken the story that police were investigating Pell over alleged sexual abuse.

This time, Morris-Marr had a scoop that to some readers may have implied Pell had a guilty conscience.

She wrote that Pell tearily apologised to Portelli on the day a jury declared the cardinal guilty of sexually assaulting two choirboys in the sacristy right after Mass.

Portelli had given evidence in Pell’s trial that as Master of Ceremonies, he accompanied Pell everywhere at Mass until he left the cathedral, so these assaults could not have occurred.

That was not the only evidence that left many legal experts astonished by the jury verdict. The jury somehow believed Pell had assaulted the two teenagers in a normally busy room with the door open, and while dressed from neck to feet in heavy and belted cassock-like clothing. What’s more, one of the boys, now dead, told his mother he’d never been abused.

Now Portelli read this on The New Daily: “A tearful Cardinal George Pell was comforted by a key witness in his child abuse trial on the night following his shock guilty verdict …

“A source told The New Daily the cardinal had dinner at a friend’s house in Melbourne with Monsignor Charles Portelli … ‘Pell got quite emotional … and was actually apologising to Portelli for getting him into the mess of the court case and effectively being dismissed as a liar,’ the source said.”

Portelli was surprised because he never made it to that dinner.

What’s more, the conversation occurred three weeks earlier, and in a private phone call: “The cardinal rang me on his mobile and he rang my mobile.”

Pell was not “tearful”, and had no guilty conscience, says Portelli, who firmly believes in Pell’s innocence.

“He apologised to me because the prosecution tried to do to me what they had done to the witness before me. They had tried to bamboozle him.”

Portelli told The New Daily its story was false. The publication said it stood by the story, yet pulled it from the website.

But how did a private phone discussion find its way into a report by a Pell critic who’d never spoken to Pell or Portelli?

One obvious possibility is that Pell’s phone was bugged.

Neither Portelli nor I believe that could have been done by Morris-Marr, so I asked Victoria Police: Was it you?

If so, should police be leaking details of private calls to the media, directly or indirectly?

A police spokesman responded: “We do not provide comment on police methodology. This information has been passed on to the Victoria Police Professional Standards Command for further assessment.”

Morris-Marr, for her part, denies that her source was a police officer, and says suggestions that Pell’s phone was bugged were “rather ridiculous”. They are? Not to Portelli.

This goes to the wider issue of how Pell could be convicted “beyond reasonable doubt” of such an inherently implausible crime.

The suspicion must be that the jury, like many Australians, had its opinion of Pell poisoned by decades of venomous media attacks, including false claims that he abused other children, offered hush money to a victim of paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale, and sheltered other paedophiles.

Sadly, Victoria Police helped to destroy his reputation. Graham Ashton, now chief commissioner, falsely told a parliamentary inquiry that the Melbourne Catholic diocese under Pell had not referred any victims of paedophile priests to the police, and falsely claimed that victims compensated under a scheme set up by Pell had to sign confidentiality causes.

Then, with Pell vilified, police set up an inquiry into sexual abuse by him without having had a single complaint. It instead advertised for accusers, and after years of publicity about the compensation the church was paying.

As Britain found with the scandals at Bryn Eastyn, St Williams and Greystone Heath, there is no surer way to suggest false memories and get innocent men jailed.

Sure enough, many Pell accusers did come forward, only to have their stories collapse in court — all except this one.

So how did Pell’s private phone call become public gossip? Until there’s an innocent explanation, we must wonder if this is more evidence that Pell has powerful enemies determined to believe the worst of him, and to make others do so, too.