A paedophile priest has admitted to sexually assaulting six more children from his bed in prison, bringing his total known victims to 78.
Gerald Ridsdale, 90, appeared before the Bendigo Magistrates Court via videolink to plead guilty to eight additional sexual assault charges against the children.
The frail paedophile admitted to the sexual penetration of a person between 10 and 16 and indecent assault of six male victims.
The crimes were committed across the rural Victorian towns of Inglewood, Ballarat, Apollo Bay, Horsham and Mortlake between 1973 and 1981.
‘I’m guilty,’ Ridsdale told Magistrate Medan Aumair on Wednesday, 9News reports, marking the seventh time he has admitted to historic sexual assaults.
Ridsdale abused children between 1961 and 1988 while he worked as a Roman Catholic priest in churches and schools across the state.
The paedophile is currently serving a maximum 40-year sentence for the litany of offences which, if he were to live long enough, would see him in prison until he was 100-years-old.
He is scheduled to reappear before the court on February 17, 2025 for a plea hearing.
Ridsdale was ordained at St Patrick’s Cathedral in his home town of Ballarat in 1961, the same year that the first complaints about sexual misconduct were received by the church.
He would go on to hold 16 different positions during his 29 years as a priest, having often been moved by the church after further complaints were revealed.
It wasn’t until 1993 when Ridsdale was arrested while working at St John of God Hospital in Richmond, NSW, that the extent of his crimes were unveiled.
The following year he pleaded guilty to 30 counts of indecent assault against nine boys aged between 12 and 16 between the years 1974 and 1980.
Ridsdale faced trial just weeks into the 12-month sentence and pleaded guilty to 46 charges of abusing 20 boys and one girl between 1961 and 1982.
The plea would see him imprisoned for a further 18 years.
He would go on to admit to 108 further charges across four pleas between 2006 and 2023, being told he would ‘probably die’ behind bars on the last occasion.
One of his victims told the Victorian County Court in 2017 that he had assaulted her on the altar of a Ballarat church.
Another victim, who at the time was a nine-year-old boy, said Ridsdale told him God would punish his family if he told anyone.
A government inquiry into child sex abuse held that same year found his frequent relocations were evidence of the church covering up his crimes.
The inquiry found that the late n Cardinal George Pell, who became the third-highest ranking cleric in the Vatican in 2014, knew Ridsdale had been sexually abusing children years before his arrest.
Pell, who had been close with the Ridsdale family in Victoria, denied any previous knowledge of criminal allegations against Ridsdale.
Pell spent 13 months in prison before his own child abuse convictions were overturned on appeal in 2020. Pell died in January last year.