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Newsroom.co.nz
Newsroom.co.nz
National
Melanie Reid

The Peter Ellis Series: The girl who retracted

The final episode of the Newsroom series Peter Ellis, the Creche Case & Me exposes the ongoing trauma the case has visited upon its victims.

In never-before-seen footage and interviews, our new series takes you inside one of New Zealand’s most controversial legal cases, when a kind of madness gripped Christchurch, resulting in a miscarriage of justice that would take 30 years to put right.

“I feel a lot of shame and a lot of guilt about it.”

Peter Ellis always said it would be the children who would end up paying the price for the Christchurch Civic Creche train wreck.

Thirty years of injustice later, what has life been like for the girl described as the most credible and compelling witness - the same girl who had lawyers, social workers and police visiting her house, was put through six specialist interviews and an extremely invasive medical examination, given toys and fast food as rewards for her disclosures, and told she was such a good witness she had helped put a bad man in jail?

What was life like for her when, a year later, she retracted and said the abuse never happened only to be disbelieved and ignored by those same judges, lawyers, social workers, police and government employees?

In her first ever interview, the now grown woman and mother is tearful as she describes the devastating impact on her life, and the the guilt and pain she still feels over what happened to her as a child, and to Peter Ellis as a result.

In this final episode, Peter Ellis makes his last legal stand in a three decades fight against power and politics.

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