In 1989, J.S. Ayliffe was asked by a senior Catholic official to help conceal clerical child abuse. He kept that secret for twenty-five years, until Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. 

Betrayal — A Personal Story 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 readers of Witness and The Altar Boy, and for anyone grappling with questions of institutional accountability, moral courage, and the long arc of justice.

The front cover cartoon is provided courtesy of Sydney Morning Herald cartoonist, Cathy Wilcox.