Natasha Johnson, ABC News
Sarah Ferguson spends her working life wading through murky waters, tackling difficult, confronting and harrowing stories but none has tested her like the project that consumed her for the past year: Revelation — a three-part documentary investigation into child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, in which she comes face to face with two of Australia's most notorious serial paedophiles.
"Throughout the long-running scandal of clerical abuse in Australia, there was one voice we hadn't heard and that was the perpetrators."I wanted to ask them how they led their double lives and how the church enabled them, but how do you interview men whose crimes are so vile and disturbing, who've committed crimes against vulnerable children? "It was a struggle not to let my revulsion at their crimes drag me off course."
In a series of television firsts, Revelation (airing weekly from Tuesday, March 17 at 8:30pm on ABC TV and iview), features in-depth interviews with an ordained priest and a religious brother convicted of historical child sexual abuse, and, with unprecedented access granted by the courts, films their trials as they unfold.
Read the rest of the ABC Backstory by Natasha Johnson here