A FORMER employee of Leicester diocese, Kat Gibson, has said that she felt “silenced by the diocese”, which had, she said, prevented her from warning others about the “abusive, deeply unhealthy” behaviour of her former colleague Venessa (Vee) Pinto, who was later convicted of stalking a churchwarden (News, 4 July).
Ms Pinto was employed and paid by the diocese to work as an intercultural pioneer minister. To carry out this work, she was licensed by the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow. Last month, the BBC reported on the case of Jay Hulme, a churchwarden at St Nicholas’s, Leicester, who was stalked and harassed by Ms Pinto over 19 months in 2021 and 2022. Both were in their mid-twenties at the time.
In a statement published on the House of Survivors website last week, Ms Gibson and her husband, Ben, describe being put in a “very traumatic situation” by the diocese. The couple had raised concerns about Ms Pinto’s behaviour as early as 2020, a year before Ms Pinto met Mr Hulme.
“It grieves us deeply that it came to the point of speaking out publicly,” they write, “but we refuse to be complicit in the coverup that has taken place.”
Their statement quotes emails that Mr Gibson had sent to Ms Gibson’s and Ms Pinto’s then line manager, now the Bishop of Willesden, the Rt Revd Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy. Before his consecration, Bishop Nsenga-Ngoy was the BAME Mission and Ministry Enabler in Leicester diocese.
This includes one email, reportedly sent in May 2021, in which Mr Gibson writes: “It seems very clear to me that things can’t be allowed to continue on the way they have been; it’s abusive, deeply unhealthy, and not sustainable for anyone involved. I am also very concerned that [Vee] might start treating others at [our worshipping community] in similar ways to how she has treated Kat.”
Ms Gibson, their statement says, received an inconsistent response to these concerns. “Sometimes Lusa seemed to take the situation seriously and view Vee’s behaviour as abusive, and on other occasions he would seem to frame it as an interpersonal dispute or clash of cultural communication styles between Kat and Vee.
“At times she felt that she was being blamed, that it was being implied that her difficulties with Vee were the result of her own cultural prejudices, and that her suitability for ministry was even called into question.”
Mr Hulme met Ms Pinto in the summer of 2021, when she began attending his church. When she asked him out, he was, he told the BBC, “very taken aback because I didn’t know her” and because, although he told her that he was gay, “she asked me if it was because she was black.”
This, he said, was the beginning of a long campaign of harassment at a time when he had been exploring a vocation to the priesthood. He made a formal complaint to the Church, in January 2022, triggering an investigation, which concluded that Ms Pinto was behind the abuse. His vocation was reportedly “slowed down” by Bishop Snow, who disagreed with the investigation’s conclusion.
Mr Hulme also reported the harassment to Leicester Police twice; the second report, in December 2022, led to Ms Pinto’s conviction.
In May 2024, Ms Pinto, then 29, pleaded guilty to stalking involving serious harm or distress, admitting to 103 unwanted communications sent to Mr Hulme, including sexually explicit messages. She was sentenced to an 18-month community order with 280 hours of unpaid work and ordered to pay £350 in court costs. A restraining order of 12 months was granted by the court at Mr Hulme’s request.
In response to the BBC article, the diocese of Leicester issued a series of statements about the case, which refer only to Mr Hulme’s complaint in January 2022.
The Gibsons report that the diocese has since told them that “senior members of staff in the diocese were not aware of the extent of the concerns that we and others had raised about Vee in 2020 and 2021, and that it appeared that Lusa and others had failed to pass this information on to them.”
One diocesan statement said that Bishop Snow had asked Ms Pinto to withdraw from ministry on 30 June 2022 (legally, her employment could be terminated only by the diocesan board of finance). The next month, the statement said, “new evidence came to light which led the bishop to immediately remove Ms Pinto’s licence and inform other church bodies with which she was involved. . .
“Although Ms Pinto remained formally employed by the diocese for a further four months, she was on leave for the duration of this period and asked not to engage in any ministry. She was also asked to not contact any members of the worshipping community where she had served, at their request. An agreement was reached to end her employment in November 2022.”
The Gibsons write: “This means that the diocese kept Vee in a position of leadership in our worshipping community, without suspension, for five months after becoming aware of serious criminal allegations with substantial evidence against her, after diocesan staff had already received serious concerns about her from multiple people over the course of two years.
“We didn’t learn about the criminal allegations until Jay reached out to us in September 2022. We were absolutely horrified to learn that the diocese had kept her in post for so long after becoming aware of Jay’s allegations, and felt that they had knowingly put us and our community at risk.
“It was the worst betrayal of our lives, and it’s still very painful for us today.”
The Gibsons also write that, despite the agreement, Ms Pinto “continued to contact some members of our worshipping community anyway. . . We were told by the diocese that we couldn’t tell them the real reasons why she had left or the fact that her licence had been revoked. This continued indefinitely once the diocese reached their agreement with Vee, as it included a clause meaning that neither party could speak ill of the other. We felt silenced by the diocese, and that they had taken away our ability to share our story and to warn others who may have been at risk.”
At one point, Ms Gibson “became aware that Vee had applied for a job that would involve working with vulnerable people” and “wished to warn this prospective employer, but was told by a member of staff at the diocese that she must not do this”.
While they acknowledge that the diocese had supported Ms Gibson — by, among other things, paying for two years of counselling sessions, a retreat, and six weeks of leave — the Gibsons believe that it failed to support others. “This includes Ben,” who suffered from chronic stress, they write.
Ms Gibson’s support, they write, was also “counterbalanced by the fact that the programme board overseeing the project we were part of decided not to recruit a replacement for Vee. This put enormous pressure on Kat as she tried to do the work of two people by herself, at a time when she was still trying to recover from this very traumatic situation.”
Despite “pleading” with the board, they write, the funding for Ms Pinto’s role was pulled. Ms Gibson was informed in July 2024 that she would be made redundant in 2025.
Another “betrayal”, they say, was the positive tone of the diocesan statement announcing Ms Pinto’s departure in 2022, which “recognises the positive contributions that she has made” and “wishes her well in the future”. This meant that colleagues “cheerfully” asked Ms Gibson about her former colleague, causing further distress.
During the time of Mr Hulme’s harassment, Ms Pinto, then 26, was elected to the General Synod (News, 22 October 2021). Soon afterwards, she was elected as a central member of the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC).
A comment on the website Thinking Anglicans points out that Ms Gibson gave an endorsement of Ms Pinto at that time, saying that she would “be an excellent candidate for the General Synod” who had a “fresh perspective” and “deep passion for justice”.
In response, Mr Gibson writes: “Kat deeply regrets writing that endorsement. The impact that Vee’s abuse had on Kat meant that she was living under severe chronic stress and anxiety. Vee’s behaviours were highly manipulative and coercive. She was skilled at making people question their own reality.”
She had been “terrified” of the consequences, had she not agreed to write it, he says. “She feels terrible about it, and it brings back memories of a very dark and painful time.”
The Gibsons’ statement concludes: “The impact that going through all of this has had on us both has been enormous. We have both experienced anxiety attacks and PTSD symptoms.”
While there were “so many wonderful Anglican churches full of lovely people . . . over the past few years it has been horrifying to realise how common and widespread it is for bullying and abusive behaviour to be mishandled and covered up in the Church of England.”
Asked for a response to the Gibson statement, a spokesperson for the diocese of Leicester told the Church Times on Thursday: “We are very sorry that this matter continues to cause such hurt and distress, but it would not be appropriate, nor are we able to comment on the details of their statement, not least because we do not wish to cause further upset to those involved.”
Church House have also been contacted for comment.
