Feted by TV bosses, MPs – and even the Pope
SMILING as he wraps his arm around the shoulders of Pope Francis in 2014, Peter Saunders had emerged as Britain’s leading advocate for adult survivors of child sexual abuse.
Despite struggling at school, in part due the abuse he suffered at the hands of Jesuit priests as a youngster, he had created the National Association for People Abused in Childhood in 1997.
The charity struggled financially for many years, but the emergence of Jimmy Savile’s crimes in 2012 and the child abuse scandals which followed created a growing need for NAPAC’s helpline and counselling services.
Over the past seven years, NAPAC has received more than £2.5 million from the Home Office and the National Lottery and Mr Saunders has become a regular guest on television and radio stations around the world.
The increasing profile of the devout Catholic led to what Mr Saunders described as ‘no-holds barred’ discussion with Pope Francis about child abuse in the Catholic Church in 2014 and the offer to join a special Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
At the time, Mr Saunders said: ‘I told [the Pope] that the Church needed to get its act together, that it needed to support survivors and to do more to protect children… I am going to raise issues around the cover-ups of the past. I want to try and help change the Church for the better.’
He approached the role with his customary vigour, but his uncompromising approach led to his departure from the commission in 2016. ‘A number of members… expressed their concern that I don’t toe the line when it comes to keeping my mouth shut,’ he said.
Uncowed by criticism, Mr Saunders then became a supporter of claims by a man called ‘Nick’ about a VIP paedophile ring operating at the heart of Westminster.
‘Nick’ was later unmasked as Carl Beech, a fantasist who had made up the claims, causing anguish to innocent men such as the MP Harvey Proctor and Lord Bramall, a former head of the British Army.
Beech, who was last month jailed for 18 years for fraud and perverting the course of justice, first emerged in NAPAC’s newsletter in 2012, where he wrote a poem under his real name about the fictitious VIP sex ring.
A year later, NAPAC appealed for abuse survivors to assist a Channel 5 documentary team making a programme about the claims.
The programme featured the first TV interview with Beech, then calling himself ‘Stephen’. In November 2014, Mr Saunders told MPs on the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee that there had been ‘a cover-up [of abuse] at the highest levels’ and of ‘abusers and perpetrators in positions of great power’.
Even by October 2015, when Nick’s false claims were beginning to unravel, Mr Saunders told the BBC’s Panorama programme that he found Beech to be ‘utterly credible’.
Yet Mr Saunders, 61, who argues that police should ‘believe’ those who say they have been sexually abused, last night admitted that he has never met Beech nor spoken to him on the telephone.
Indeed, the only contact ever between them was by email.