You can never really know other people, or at least know them completely. What we think we know is an image or recollection based on fragments of personal or vicarious experience--it would be foolish to maintain that people are identical to our images of them. There are the public images we hold of celebrities, people in the media, and the private images of people we are acquainted with personally. In neither case can we be at all sure that our images will remain intact: it happens time and time again that they are shattered by some unexpected revelation or series of revelations. Biographers dig the dirt on popular and historical heroes, toppling them from once proud and impressive pedestals. Apparently happy marriages end bitterly when long-running infidelity is discovered. Highly-reputable men are denounced as abhorrent lechers, pilferers from the public purse, or something equally immoral or repellent. And on it goes. Does everyone have a dark and secretive side, known only to themselves until someone discovers it and tells all? Is everyone guilty of something they'd rather the world didn't know about? The Christian would answer in the affirmative, that we're all guilty of "original sin". That means nothing to me, as an agnostic. But these simplistic repetitive lyrics, from Somebody to Love by Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane, keep going through my head:

When the truth is found to be lies And all the joy within you dies Don't you want somebody to love Don't you need somebody to love Wouldn't you love somebody to love You'd better find somebody to love.

Doctor Morgan Fahey, former Deputy Mayor of Christchurch, New Zealand and mayoral candidate, was looking for somebody to love, in a sense. But not necessarily in the way Grace was thinking of way back in the 60's - somebody to sexually abuse, molest, and even rape, more accurately. The 68 year-old was held up as an upstanding pillar of the establishment, a good man dedicated to noble deeds, with a long list of exemplary credentials including an OBE (Order of the British Empire) awarded in 1977. He had been a city councillor since 1980; Deputy Mayor since 1989; initiator of a scheme to provide pre-hospital emergency care for road accident victims; chairman of the New Zealand Roadshow Trust; a director of the Accident Compensation Corporation; president of the World Association of Emergency and Disaster Medicine; and a medical adviser to the Surf Life Saving Association and the airline Ansett New Zealand. Impressive by anyone's standards.

Fahey has since fallen from grace (no pun intended on Slick), and his name is slime, contemptible everywhere. He is now known as "Fingers" Fahey the sexual predator, the doctor who abused the trust and vulnerability of many of his women patients - the exact number will probably never be known, as only eleven brought charges against him. (The epithet "Fingers" was bestowed by airline stewardess applicants subjected to his groping of their breasts, part of their mandatory medical examination.) It is poetically fitting, if we are to see this story as a modern-day cautionary tale, that an ostensibly caring and public-spirited man bound by the Hippocratic oath should be unmasked as a vile, loathsome hypocrite. The truth according to Fahey was found to be lies when he sobbingly pleaded guilty to all thirteen charges, including one of rape, one of sexual violation, and eleven of indecent assault. His victims could finally feel some joy that their accusations had been vindicated; in one case thirty years after the assault with a vibrator had occurred.

The allegations first surfaced publicly in 1998 on 20/20, a current affairs TV program. Fahey, then still Deputy Mayor, strenuously denied any wrongdoing. Instead he announced he would be taking defamation action against TV3, the producers of the documentary, and accused his political opponents of conducting a smear campaign against him, which had caused "irreparable damage to my reputation and a great deal of pain to my family" (The Press, 7 October 1998). His wife's and family's pain must be so much greater in light of his subsequent humiliating confession and conviction. If his conviction had not been accompanied by a confession, then it would have been possible to keep believing in him. Where there is room for doubt, there is still room for belief, however much evidence to the contrary. Fahey's confession dispelled any lingering doubt that he is indeed guilty.

The people of Christchurch thought they knew their Deputy Mayor, but they had been taken in. All they knew was the façade, the shiny public image held up to shield the real Morgan Fahey. The façade was revealed as a mirage, a fictional identity that gradually evaporated into nothingness, leaving behind only a shell, a hollow vestige of the once important man that no longer exists. The physical, living man is still here, but the man of substance, of social standing, has disappeared. One wonders: what is a man, what is a person, what does identity amount to if the same person can be reduced, by his own folly, from that  to this?

For thirty years or more there have been two Fahey identities coexisting in the one man: the 'good' public persona and the 'bad', perverse, hidden abuser. The good Fahey denied the existence of the bad right up until the trial, at which point he finally broke down and admitted his guilt, allowing his bad self out of the closet for the first time. Possibly he had been in denial up till then even to himself. The good persona was then completely eclipsed by the bad in the public eye: he had mutated from being above reproach to beneath contempt, and there was no more questionmark hanging over his head. The public could breathe a sigh of relief that certainty had been restored, ambivalence and doubt banished once more into the night.

But do we know him any better now than we did before? No. We've simply replaced one public image with another, condemning him to abject humiliation for the rest of his life and in posterity, albeit deservedly. How much good he did means little or nothing to us now, only how much bad. We - society - are compelled to see him as utterly disreputable, beyond redemption; the more highly we thought of him before, the less we must think of him now. There but for the grace of God go all people of high standing, especially those that dedicate themselves to the betterment of society. Even more especially doctors entrusted with the care of vulnerable patients.

Copyright © 2000 Max Podstolski All Rights Reserved

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