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The wife and female acolytes of a spiritual guru accused of systematic sexual assault allegedly helped him to perpetuate his abuse of a young girl while he was on bail with the help of a wig, fire stairs, a secret location and a burner phone.
Extraordinary allegations about the role played by the women who surrounded the late cult leader Ken Dyers are contained in court documents filed in a legal claim by his last victim, a now 33-year-old woman given the pseudonym XC. The case was confidentially settled last week, and the allegations have not been tested in court.
Kenja leader Jan Hamilton has settled in a court action brought against her by an alleged victim of her late husband.Credit: Louie Douvis
XC sued one male and nine female members of Kenja Communications, including her own mother, over the part they played in her sexual abuse, which she claimed led to chronic PTSD, anxiety, depression and other injuries. Wearing tidy clothes and sensible shoes, the women filled two rows of the NSW Supreme Court at a preliminary hearing last month. They denied all the allegations and said recently they settled without admission of liability to avoid further expense.
Kenja, an all-encompassing performing arts and social centre that continues to operate in Surry Hills and Melbourne, believes a person’s worldly troubles are caused by attached spirits that can be purged through meditation known as “processing sessions”.
Numerous girls who grew up in the cult alleged that Dyers abused them during these sessions.
Dyers was found guilty of aggravated indecent assault in 1999, but the conviction was quashed on a legal technicality, and he continued to offend until he took his own life in 2007 at the age of 84, while awaiting trial on new charges.
Ken Dyers pictured in 2006 with his partner Jan Hamilton outside court, where he faced multiple charges of sexual assault.Credit: Lisa Wiltse
It was during his final two years, while Dyers was subject to bail conditions that banned him from contact with children under the age of 16 or attending Kenja premises, that XC claimed she was sexually abused.
According to her statement of claim, the senior women of Kenja went to elaborate methods to enable Dyers to perpetuate his abuse, knowing that he was not allowed to have contact with minors.
XC was allegedly provided with a Nokia mobile phone for the sole purpose of arranging unsupervised one-on-one processing sessions with Dyers, and one of five women would send her the details of the appointments, which would be described as “a session with Blyth McLachlan”.
But McLachlan did not conduct the sessions. She was among the women that XC sued.
Arriving at Kenja’s Mary Street premises, XC was allegedly instructed to shower and dress in a disguise that consisted of a black bob-style wig, brown leather pants and a white top that she wore over her own clothes.
Blyth McLachlan (left) at a fundraising barbecue for Kenja.
She would then tell whichever woman was on reception that she was ready for her session with Dyers, and one of the other women would take her through the fire stairwell to the part of the building where his office was located, so she would not come into contact with other Kenja members, the statement of claim alleged.
Her phone was switched off, or she was allegedly asked to leave it at the Kenja premises. One of the women would then check the elevator was clear before she was taken down to the basement, asked to lie on the back seat of a car, covered with a blanket and driven to an apartment on Riley Street.
The statement of claim alleged that Dyers, then in his early 80s, would be waiting for her in the bedroom. She would be asked to brush her teeth and remove her clothes, and they would meditate for 15 minutes before he sexually assaulted her. He once used a pool noodle. The details of the other assaults are too graphic for publication. Sometimes he would ask her to imagine she was having group sex or being gang-raped.
“The meditation sessions were explained by Ken … in terms of being for the Plaintiff’s benefit, that if she meditated through it, it would not happen in real life, and she would clear the negative energy,” the statement of claim said.
After the session, according to XC’s claim, the woman who had driven XC to the apartment would be waiting in the lounge area, and a hot meal would be regularly waiting for XC on the dining table. She ate the meal opposite Dyers at the table, while he engaged in conversation with the driver and anybody else present. The disguise and car routine was then performed in reverse when she was returned to Kenja.
On at least one occasion, Dyers asked XC to take a pregnancy test, which was allegedly sourced by McLachlan, who also showed her how to use it. The test was negative, and XC alleged in her statement of claim that she showed it to Dyers, McLachlan and other members of Kenja in the lounge room.
About a month before Dyers took his life, he allegedly took Viagra before sexually assaulting XC in the apartment, causing her to scream in pain. He eventually stopped due to her screaming and shouted at her for making him stop. She was 14 years old.
Some years later, XC alleged that she asked Kenja co-founder and Dyer’s widow, Jan Hamilton, during a conversation about sex if she knew what Dyers had done to her. “Janice Hamilton replied to the effect that she did know and the purpose of the Plaintiff’s sexual experience with Ken were intended to release her negative energy so she would be focused at school.”
She was afterwards allegedly asked to sign a false statement to the effect that she had not been abused or assaulted by Dyers. She claimed that at the time of signing it, she had been verbally abused by Hamilton and the fifth defendant, Karli Stevenson, and was required as a member of Kenja to be obedient to them.
Ken Dyers and Jan Hamilton, the controversial co-founders of Kenja Communication. Credit:
One of the other defendants was Wendy Tinkler, who Dyers used as his alibi during the 1999 trial for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl. Dyers tendered evidence that he had been in a processing session with Tinker at the time he was alleged to have assaulted the girl.
He was convicted, but the High Court quashed his conviction in 2002 and ordered a retrial on the grounds that the trial judge should not have suggested to jury members that they could infer from the fact that his legal team did not call Tinkler as a witness that her evidence would not have helped this case.
The Director of Public Prosecutions declined to run a new trial after weighing up the expense, the time elapsed since the events, his age and the fact that it would have been his third trial after the first resulted in a hung jury.
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Dyers was arrested again in 2005, the same year that XC alleged he began abusing her.
The NSW Supreme Court heard last month that the complainant’s legal team planned to call upon or use evidence given at other proceedings by nine women who claimed they had been abused by Dyers when they were girls, to demonstrate his tendency to have sex with female children.
This included women whose allegations had resulted in 22 charges that were yet to be tried when he took his own life.
Kenja is the only organisation in Australia that has not signed up to the national redress scheme that allows victims to get compensation, an apology and counselling for historical child abuse, and which flowed from the 2013 royal commission into institutional responses. Hamilton has said that Kenja did not need to join the scheme because no sexual abuse occurred.
But several women have claimed over the years that other adults in Kenja were complicit in their sexual abuse.
Former Kenja member Michelle Ring, who was also abused by Dyers as a child, told a senate committee in 2021 that other adults in the group were aware of what was happening to her and that Hamilton gave her antiseptic lollies after each session to prevent her getting infections in her mouth.
Another victim, Alison DeCamp, said in a police statement, which was later tendered in civil proceedings, that another adult had been in the room when Dyers sexually assaulted her when she was 12 years old.
Hamilton said the defendants had argued in their defence to the recent proceedings that the allegations did not take place, were not capable of taking place, and that hospital records showed Dyers was in hospital for a week when a central allegation was said to have occurred.
She has previously said that the allegations against Dyers were manufactured by disgruntled former members of Kenja, and pointed out that he was acquitted of all the charges that were tested in court except for one, which was later quashed.
“I have no knowledge whatsoever of any sexual abuse by Ken at all, ever,” she said.
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