Georgia Straight alleges VANOC CEO John Furlong abused Aboriginal high school students

Abraham sits at a Burns Lake restaurant. It’s licensed, but she hasn’t touched alcohol in years. It’s part of her healing journey. Her food remains untouched; she says nausea swells up when she thinks about Furlong.

“Young girls started drinking. My friends and I started drinking at age 12. I do believe it was because of his abuse. If we didn’t do what he said, he’d grab us by the shoulders. ‘Do you understand me!’ Smack on the back of the head; smack in the front.”

Abraham closes her eyes and fights tears. She says Furlong regularly made the same four girls—her and three friends—stay behind after phys-ed class, one at a time. The three friends were the ones who started drinking with Abraham. She says the three committed suicide in later years. “Every time I started phys-ed, I was honestly always afraid. He stood by the change-room door. [A nun] would say, ‘Okay, girls, come on.’ We were just afraid to go. He really degraded our name and our inner self. No wonder they call us drunks. Why did we drink so hard? Immaculata School.”

Ronnie Alec, a hereditary chief, also filed an affidavit about Furlong. The Olympic CEO’s image on television brought disturbing flashbacks for Alec. “When you’re not doing too good in basketball, all of a sudden you get kicked in the butt or slapped on the head,” he wrote in his affidavit. “It was a hard kick, and he backed up to make the slap, so it hit hard. He could stand in front of us and, unexpected, he would slap us on the head.…With his big eyes, I can picture him, and then, next thing: boom, a hard slap to the head.”

Alec says that after he saw Furlong on TV, he called his office to try to confront him before the Olympics began but he never heard back from him.

Alec’s voice is joined by Cathy Woodgate’s in her affidavit. “I was slow and weak. I got hit by a ball, whipped in the calves, yardstick thrown at me—all by John Furlong. I was very shy, very low in self-esteem. I grew up with low self-esteem and decided not to take part in any physical activities because of this nightmare of phys-ed class.”

Later, at age 29, Woodgate was diagnosed with a type of muscular dystrophy. She had it as a child, which was why she was always at the back of the pack while the children were being forced to run extraordinarily long distances—more than 30 laps of the school field or a run up and down Boer Mountain, a good eight kilometres—with no water. Furlong “saluted” Immaculata’s few white pupils who made it to the top but ignored their First Nation classmates, according to former students.

Students from 1969-70 say Furlong screamed “Lazy Indians!” at them and physically abused them in different ways because, in his mind, they had committed some offence that needed punishment. He did not, they say, see them as children who were afraid of a tall white man who communicated through beatings and screaming in English. He is remembered as a gratuitously violent bully who taunted children, beating them in front of the class if he felt they were too slow, fat, or inattentive.

Richard Perry, another hereditary chief, said in an affidavit that he is convinced he suffered brain damage because of Furlong’s repeated beatings, and he struggles to comprehend what he reads even today.

“I was hit on the head all the time. I was hit with a ruler: a metre stick in the legs. I remember one day talking to another Native person in my language. I said, ‘What are you learning in school?’ John Furlong hit me for that. Those days there was not too much learning. I remember John Furlong chased me home one day.”

First Nation families who went to school authorities about Furlong’s abuse say nothing changed. If students complained to the nuns, they were strapped for lying. When they tried to skip classes or stay out of school, the RCMP brought them back—to more punishment.

“Another time, he [Furlong] took me to a private room where the furnace was,” Perry declared in his affidavit. “It was really noisy so no one could hear.…I watched them take kids one by one to the basement and beat us [with the strap]. I got too much abuse, too many hits all the time.”

Other students talk about the furnace room—a much feared place. Furlong, they say, grabbed children by the hair and dragged them there for strappings, usually by a priest or nun.

Paul Joseph and his cousin Richard also went to Immaculata. “Richard was pretty much the same age as I am,” Joseph said in a phone interview from Burns Lake. “On the John Furlong side, he hit me so hard once when we played basketball, right on the back of the head with a full hand for no reason. Another time I didn’t hear him say [something] to me while I was playing basketball. He came from behind and grabbed my hair from the back—almost on top of my head. He punched me in the back of the head and I went flying. I was unconscious for 15 minutes. I remember then I was crying. Everyone was too afraid to help me.”

Joseph says the abuse was unrelenting. “I played lots of hockey. John Furlong hit me right at the back of my head with a hockey stick. After this, I didn’t want to go to school. I was too afraid of what he would do. If he doesn’t get his way, he will hit us really hard. My cousin Richard and I just walked around outside in the cold. We didn’t have anyone. My parents were dead and I was 13. If we went to the priest, he would say we were lying. He would put our hands on the desk and hit us so hard. It feels like our hands are broken.”

The chief executive of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics has been accused in B.C. Supreme Court documents of hitting children on the backs of their heads with a hockey stick and locking children out of an elementary school in the middle of winter while he taught in Burns Lake, B.C., more than 40 years ago.

The Georgia Straight newspaper's Jan. 14, 2013 response to John Furlong's Nov. 27, 2012 defamation lawsuit contains the names of 25 people who say they were physically abused, bullied and/or racially taunted by Furlong when he worked as a volunteer physical education teacher at the predominantly aboriginal Immaculata Catholic elementary school.

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The Georgia Straight is represented by Roger McConchie, who has written a widely used legal manual on libel and is considered one of the top libel lawyers in Canada. McConchie was hired by ex-Liberal MLA John van Dongen last year to be a friendly intervenor in the auditor general's lawsuit seeking the agreement that absolved guilty ex-Liberal aides Dave Basi and Bob Virk from $6 million of legal bills after an October 2010 plea bargain. The charges stemmed from the 2003 sale of BC Rail to CN.

Furlong is represented by John Hunter and Claire Hunter of Hunter Litigation Chambers. John Hunter's resume includes representing the Vancouver College Foundation, Parents and Alumni Association in a 2002 B.C. Court of Appeal matter in which abuse victims from a Christian Brothers orphanage in Mount Cashel, Nfld. sought compensation. Hunter's firm includes William Berardino, the special prosecutor in the case against Basi and Virk.

jas wrote:

Furlong blames [Georgie Straight] article for wife's death

The Georgia Straight hits the streets on Thursdays; Furlong said he talked with his family in the week before the article appeared. But his wife woke up early and disappeared.

He said he became worried, but then she returned and admitted to having followed the newspaper's delivery van around the city.

She said she spent the morning emptying newspaper boxes and loading them into their truck. It was filled to the ceiling with copies of the free alternative weekly.....

Furlong said the stress became too much for his wife, who confronted a stranger in a checkout line who was reading an article about him and made derogatory comments.

That's when they decided to go to Ireland.

So, she died because they could afford to go take a holiday in Ireland.