SYDNEY —
Hillsong Church founder Brian Houston will plead not responsible to illegally concealing alleged little one abuse by his father, his lawyer advised a court docket on Tuesday.
Houston didn’t seem at Sydney’s Downing Heart Native Court docket when his cost was talked about earlier than a registrar for the primary time. His lawyer advised the court docket Houston can be pleading not responsible to the cost of concealing a critical indictable offense of one other individual, his late preacher father Frank Houston.
The case will subsequent be earlier than the court docket on Nov. 23.
Police will allege that Frank Houston indecently assaulted a younger male in 1970.
Court docket paperwork allege that Brian Houston believed his father had dedicated the crime. Police will allege that the youthful Houston didn’t disclose data to police that might assist safe the prosecution of his father.
Since being charged, Houston has stepped down from the board of Hillsong, the church he based with spouse Bobbie in Sydney in 1983. Now a world empire, the church says 150,000 folks in 30 international locations attend its companies and 50 million folks sing its songs every week.
Houston, 64, was in the US in August when detectives served his Sydney attorneys with a discover for him to seem in court docket.
He stated in an announcement on the time he welcomed the “alternative to set the file straight.”
Houston returned to Sydney final month and was launched from 14 days’ lodge quarantine final week.
An Australian authorities inquiry into institutional responses to allegations of kid intercourse abuse present in 2015 that Houston didn’t inform police that his father was a toddler intercourse abuser.
The inquiry discovered that Houston grew to become conscious of allegations in opposition to his father in 1999 and allowed him to retire quietly moderately report him to police. His father confessed to the abuse earlier than he died in 2004 at age 82.
