Journalist Michael Bachelard recounts years of legal threats from the Exclusive Brethren

A journalist who has reported on the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (PBCC), formerly known as the Exclusive Brethren, says he received a legal threat last year from a Sydney solicitor acting for the church’s leaders. The letter came after he sent questions to the church about the affairs of its leader, Bruce Hales, following a raid by the Australian Tax Office on companies run by church members. The solicitor’s letter said the questions were defamatory and that the Hales family was considering legal action. The journalist counts it as at least the 13th threatening legal letter he has received from the group over the years.

The PBCC was founded by John Nelson Darby in the 1820s. According to the journalist, the church teaches its members to keep separate from the outside world, and he writes that its teaching treats outsiders as contaminating. He also reports that, although members do not vote, the church lobbies conservative politicians and receives welfare and charity payments, government grants and federal funding for its schools. Hales is said to teach that the Brethren assembly, which he says is attended by about 50,000 people, is the “highest court” with power to overrule other judgments.

The journalist’s first legal letter from the church came in 2006, after he and a photographer tried to attend a service at the church’s public place of worship in Melbourne. He reports that they were asked to leave by several men, that a young member then drove a car towards them, and that the next morning they received a letter accusing them of trespass. Later he wrote a book, *Behind the Exclusive Brethren*, and received further letters. A 2015 letter from another Sydney solicitor described him as a “professional defamer” of church members, including Hales.

That 2015 letter followed questions he had sent to Hales about remarks Hales reportedly made to his global congregation. According to the article, Hales suggested that a troubled young member, who had sent occasional emails to a sister who had left the church, should kill himself, and named arsenic and rat poison as means. The journalist reports that the church regarded the emails as a breach of its doctrine of separation. After he published that story, the church’s monthly Prayer Agenda, the article says, asked members to pray that “journalists who are publishing defamatory material against Christians may be silenced.” Other letters, he says, warned him against breaching Victoria’s racial and religious tolerance act and against defaming the church’s schools, which receive $40 million a year in federal funding.

The church twice took legal action against the journalist and the publications involved after he wrote in 2016 about how it had covered up the sexual abuse of children. One of his sources was the church’s former spokesman, Tony McCorkell, who went on the record to say he had carried out some of the work involved in the cover-up. The article reports that Australian Brethren assemblies prayed for the “removal” of McCorkell and the journalist while the cases were before the courts. Protecting children from abuse and those who speak up about it is a matter the reporting raises, and it is one of the reasons the journalist says he continued to pursue the story (Proverbs 31:8-9).

According to the journalist, three days after a defamation writ was lodged, Lloyd Grimshaw, a senior church elder who is now its spokesman, signed an agreement to pay McCorkell $920,000 over 10 years. The article says McCorkell later renegotiated the deal for $275,000 in cash up front. The journalist reports that the deed was intended to stop McCorkell from giving information about the church to him, and also purported to prevent McCorkell from giving evidence in the defamation case. When the journalist asked the church for comment, he says it responded with a legal warning suggesting he might be in contempt of court. He published the payment details anyway, along with what he describes as other payments the church had proposed over the years to keep him quiet. The court case was ultimately settled.

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