Reverend June Dolley Major has slated the Anglican Church's tribunal, saying its findings – exonerating Reverend Melvin Booysen of rape charges – were a travesty of justice, and an abuse of process.
The tribunal found Dolley Major’s account to be inconsistent with a series of circumstantial factors in her story that Booysen raped her.
He faced charges of sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual immorality, cause for scandal or offence and violation of the Constitution or Canons of the Anglican Church. Reacting to the judgment, Dolley Major said: “It is nothing but a travesty of justice, and an abuse of process that the tribunal, led by retired bishop Peter Lee, has fumbled and struggled to protect the church at all costs and, in the process, have found with baseless diffidence that my accusation of rape by the Reverend Melvin Booysen, 19 years ago, in Makhanda, was untrue.”
Dolley Major said she was saddened that the clergy she once looked up to had so “brazenly distorted” the truth and chose to deny the help, support and protection which she needed. The tribunal, however, did find Booysen guilty of breaching the Resolution of Permanent Force 5, which governs ministerial conduct for clergy and lay leaders in this Church, “by apparently invading the complainant’s private space in their lodgings.”“Major continues to represent herself as an active Anglican priest in good standing, which by her own choice, she has not been since she resigned some years ago.
“Major claimed in her evidence that she never reported this alleged rape, as she was instructed by Counsel to remain quiet. This does not take into account that she only told Counsel about the alleged rape three or four years after the event, in her own version.
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