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Hillsong founder Brian Houston says the extent of his serial paedophile father’s offending will probably never be known, but he did not cover up his father’s crimes.
The former leader of the international Pentecostal mega-church dismissed allegations levelled against him as a “targeted attack” as he was acquitted in court of concealing his father Frank’s abuse.
“If I wasn’t Brian Houston from Hillsong, this charge would never have happened,” he said on Thursday.
The 69-year-old was cleared in Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court of concealing a serious indictable offence for not reporting his father’s abuse of Brett Sengstock to police.
Sengstock, 61, said outside court he had received a life sentence of trauma for the abuse he experienced as a boy.
“Today I have received some recognition for a seven-year-old child who was brutally abused at the hands of a self-confessed child rapist and coward, Frank Houston.
“His legacy remains a faded memory of a paedophile.”
Houston did not report his father to police after he admitted abusing Sengstock in 1999.
Frank Houston died in 2004.
The charge stemmed from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, however Houston described his prosecution as a “targeted attack”.
“I have been found not guilty today, but in fact I have always been not guilty,” Houston said.
He added he felt genuine sadness about what his father did to Sengstock and the other people he abused, describing him as a serial paedophile.
“We probably will never know the extent of his paedophilia,” Houston said.
“But I am not my father, I did not commit this offence.”
In 1999, Houston told the national executive committee of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal church association he presided over, that his father had admitted abuse.
Word of the elder Houston’s confession eventually reached Sengstock, but he could not remember who told him, telling the court “it was gossip everywhere”.
Houston argued he never told police about his father’s abuse because Sengstock did not want it reported and was by then an adult who could have disclosed it himself if he wished to.
Sengstock said he never told Houston he did not want the abuse reported.
But magistrate Gareth Christofi said the Hillsong leader had knowledge of the abuse survivor’s attitude towards an investigation.
He found Houston not guilty because he had a reasonable excuse not to report the abuse to police.
“Victims of sexual abuse ought to feel safe to confide in others without being concerned they are exposing those others to a criminal offence,” Christofi said.
The prosecution said Houston adopted a convenient excuse in order to protect the church and his father.
Proving that beyond reasonable doubt was “a tall order indeed”, Christofi said.
It was also submitted Houston had used vague language speaking publicly about his father’s abuse and subsequent removal as a minister.
Houston might have been “euphemistic” when talking to thousands of people in sermons later televised, but it was obvious what he was talking about and anyone left wondering needed only to ask around, Christofi said.
The fact he was speaking “widely and freely” about the abuse perpetrated by his father publicly indicated he wanted people to know.
“That is the very opposite of a cover-up,” Christofi said.
Houston in 2022 resigned as leader of the mega-church he founded in Sydney’s Hills district after internal investigations found he had engaged in inappropriate conduct with two women.
