By J.S. Ayliffe

Betrayal—A Personal Story

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In 1989, a senior Catholic Church official asked author J.S. Ayliffe to help cover up clerical child abuse, a secret held for 25 years until exposed by the 2014 Royal Commission into Institutional responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Betrayal chronicles betrayal, denial, and lack of empathy by Church leaders.

It is a deeply personal reckoning with complicity, conscience, and the long cost of institutional loyalty. Ayliffe's account is interwoven with the voices of survivors, including Australians Chrissie Foster and Ian Lawther, whose lives were shattered by the very Church that claimed to protect them.

This is not simply a story of wrongdoing. It is a book about what happens to those who stand at the edge of it; who know, and say nothing, and must one day account for that. And it is, finally, a cautious meditation on whether institutions that have betrayed trust can ever truly rebuild it.

For anyone grappling with questions of institutional accountability, moral courage, and the long arc of justice.

Thanks to Cathy Wilcox for the use of her illustration in the cover design. 

More Information

  • Format: Paperback
  • Published:  March 2026
  • ISBN:  978-1-923236-42-4
  • ISBN: 978-1-923236-43-1(ePub)
  • Weight: 0.3kg 
  • Size:  216x140mm
  • Pages:  180 (TBC)
  • Imprint: Pepper Press

About the Author

J. S. Ayliffe is a novelist and non-fiction writer whose work includes fiction, biography and local history. A former advertising executive in Australia and the UK, he later turned to writing full-time. His books include The Priest’s Woman and Other Stories, Blind Man’s Bluff, My Brother’s Eyes(with David Ayliffe) and Icons. He lives on Sydney’s Northern Beaches and continues to write fiction.

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$32.99
$32.99
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