The on-going campaign to discredit my wife’s professional reputation has just derailed a major international collaboration she has been working on.

As some MENZ readers will be aware, I am currently staying with her in London while she is on sabbatical from her position as Head of Department and Goodfellow Postgraduate Chair of General Practice and Primary Health Care at Auckland University.

We have just learned that a UK sociologist has been busy ringing all the other academics involved in the project, drawing their attention to the smear campaign that Sunday Star-Times journalist Tim Hume fabricated back in 2010.

Felicity’s past criticism of the NZ sexual abuse industry, and particularly her exposure of the “recovered memory” scam has made her lots of enemies among counsellors and therapists whose access to taxpayer funding has been greatly reduced as a result.

Ironically, the repeated claims by sex abuse counsellors that she was hired by ACC to justify their moves to reduce fraudulent claims for counselling are simply false. She certainly supports any moves to ensure that ACC protocols be evidence-based, but so do many other responsible health professionals.

However, because counsellors were not able to mount any credible opposition to the ACC reforms, they chose to launch an ad-hominen attack on Felicity using her association with me and my past connection with Centrepoint Community. Here is Felicity Goodyear-Smith‘s response to this attack.

The wikipedia page on Centrepoint has had most of the previous information about the community removed, and a section added intended to mislead readers into believing that she lived there, that she “turned a blind eye” to the criminal activity, and that her work on sexual abuse is connected to the subsequent convictions of some members (including me) for sexual contact with minors. [Edit 25th Aug 2013: it looks like this misinformation has now been removed]

Many feminist websites and blogs have repeated this misinformation, and linked to the Sunday Star-Times beat-up. As a result, Google searches now feature this information prominently, as was clearly intended.

In fact, the criminal activity took place in the late 1970s and early 80s, when Felicity was working overseas; long before she met me. I sincerely regret my actions, and when my father died last year I took the opportunity of saying so publically.

When I became aware that some feminist activists were running a campaign to spread the message that paedophiles were:
a) very unlikely to get caught
b) that if they did they would get support from members of this website, and
c) that Felicity would use her knowledge to “get them off” criminal charges,

I set up this information page for paedophiles to make sure my position was on the record. As far as I know, no feminist site has ever linked to this page.

You might think that academics would be aware that uncritically believing everything one reads on the internet is true, but sadly this seems not to be the case.