reported the survivor’s wife contacted the ACT Party<\/a>\u00a0on Facebook three months before Jago was charged, warning that Jago was a sexual predator.<\/p>\nA party staffer initially dealt with the message before ACT leader David Seymour personally responded and advised she contact a lawyer.<\/p>\n
He gave the woman the phone number of an employment lawyer and said she and her husband were free to contact them.<\/p>\n
The survivor’s wife wrote back to ACT saying her husband had decided to go to the police instead in the hope he could prevent further offending.<\/p>\n
Speaking on\u00a0Nine to Noon\u00a0<\/i>on Monday, Seymour was asked if he would do anything differently, including referring the survivor speak to the police at the outset.<\/p>\n
“No, we wouldn’t and again, you know, it will be easy for people to speculate without full knowledge of the facts,without having been there,” Seymour said.<\/p>\n
“I’m very confident that facing a very difficult situation, which, as it turns out, turned on some tragic circumstances, we did everything that we could that an organisation in our position faced.”<\/p>\n
The party first addressed the Jago case last on Friday, saying it had sought guidance from Paul Wicks KC at the time and followed that advice “to the letter”.<\/p>\n
Last week’s statement said there was “no way” ACT could have known Jago was an abuser as the offending occured 20 years before his involvement with the party.<\/p>\n
Speaking this morning, Seymour said attempts to link Jago’s sexual offending to the ACT party were “shameful”.<\/p>\n
“The people who are out there trying to somehow drive guilt by association when there were 20 years separating the events, frankly, I think is shameful.”<\/p>\n
Jago, currently in jail serving a two-and-a-half year sentence, plans on appealing his convictions and sentence later this month.<\/p>\n
Source: RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ACT leader David Seymour is standing by his party’s response to a warning its former president was a sexual predator. Ex-president Tim Jago sexually abused two teenage boys he knew through a sports club in mid to late 1990s. Minister for Regulation on his Bill to guide good laws He was convicted of eight charges […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":12597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12598,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12596\/revisions\/12598"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}