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The other 13-year-old boy who was abused by Pell died in 2014 of a heroin overdose. He never spoke about the abuse.

His father was in the courtroom today, and spoke afterwards of his grief. He said he wanted to give the complainant, identified only as ‘J’ and who brought Pell to justice, “a hug”.

“Listening to the judge in there was hard,” he said. “I was angry inside. I felt like my son’s life was wasted, why was it wasted for some guy’s two minutes of pleasure. It’s not easy to describe, it’s not even easy to even stand here and talk.

“It’s stuff that destroys families, it destroys people.”

He described his son as “a typical boy” when he was a child.

“He got into mischief. He was honest. He liked helping his grandparents. He’d always disappear and I’d ring up my mum and she’d say, ‘Oh yeah he’s been here for the last two hours helping me cook’.”

He described sitting in the court and listening to the sentence as “extremely difficult”.

“I watched him [Pell] being walking out of that court and I thought to myself, ‘Well I’m going to sleep in my bed tonight. Where are you sleeping?’.”

But he added: “It’s not going to bring my son back”.

He remembered going to AFL games with his son, always sitting in the members’ area, and how his son would go and buy bottles of water for the elderly Carlton supporters that sat behind them.

“Every week they’d come along with containers of lollies and cakes and things and there would always be a cake there for my son,” he said.

