On Sunday 29th June, the BBC released a radio documentary named Stalker in the Church, as part of their File on Four Investigates strand, as well as an accompanying article.
It describes how Venessa Pinto, a woman employed by the Church of England Diocese of Leicester, and licensed by the Bishop of Leicester, caused untold misery and distress to colleagues and others.
Kat and Ben Gibson, a couple who shared their experiences as part of the investigation, have released a statement which can be read in full here.
On Sunday 29th June, the BBC released a radio documentary named Stalker in the Church, as part of their File on Four Investigates strand, as well as an accompanying article. It describes how Venessa Pinto, a woman employed by the Church of England Diocese of Leicester, and licensed by the Bishop of Leicester, caused untold misery and distress to colleagues and others. Pinto later pleaded guilty to stalking and served a community order.
The way that the situation was handled by the Diocese caused additional distress to those involved. They include Kat Gibson, who was employed by the diocese at the time, and her husband Ben. The Diocese have made a series of statements defending their actions.
Following the release of the documentary and Leicester Diocese’s response, Kat and Ben Gibson issued the following statement on 3 July 2025.
We are thankful to Aleem Maqbool and Steve Swann from BBC News for giving us the opportunity to share our story and advocate for change in the Church of England. We have been consistently impressed by the professionalism and care they have demonstrated throughout this process. We are also thankful to Jay and Gerry for their boldness in speaking out about their experiences. We wish to share some additional thoughts and experiences that didn't make it into the radio documentary. Between us, we were interviewed for around 3 hours, so inevitably there was much we wanted to say that there wasn't time to include. We also wish to respond to parts of the statements put out by Leicester Diocese in response to the article. It grieves us deeply that it came to the point of speaking out publicly, but we refuse to be complicit in the coverup that has taken place.
Support from Leicester Diocese
Firstly, a response to the following quote from Leicester Diocese's statement: "Pastoral support and counselling were offered to those affected throughout the process".
We are thankful for the support that the Diocese offered to Kat following Vee's license being revoked. They paid for her counselling sessions for over two years. Bishop Martyn personally gave her six weeks of paid leave to recover from the situation, gave her a retreat, and he and another senior member of clergy met with us both to listen and offer support on several occasions. We felt that Bishop Martyn genuinely cared and wanted to improve things, and that out of the several parties implicated in the situation he was the only one to take personal responsibility for his part in it or to offer an apology.
However, we were consistently disappointed by the lack of support or follow-up offered to the other people we knew to have come forward to the Diocese to share their difficult experiences of Vee Pinto. We invite Leicester Diocese to clarify whether anyone other than Kat or Jay was actually offered counselling sessions, as we know of several people who definitely weren't. This includes Ben, who made the Diocese aware in writing on several occasions that he had needed counselling as a result of the situation and wasn't offered any help with this. In total he has spent well over £500 on counselling sessions focused primarily on this situation.
The support that Kat was offered was significantly 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. We got to the point of essentially pleading with the programme board, telling them we weren't coping and that they were making our worshipping community (this term essentially refers to an informal church project) impossible to sustain, but they went ahead and reallocated funding for the role.
The worst betrayal of our lives
In their statements, Leicester Diocese have chosen not to make any reference to the concerns that were raised prior to 2022. Kat and others raised serious concerns about Vee from as early as 2020. Here is a quote from an email that Ben sent to Kat and Vee’s manager at the time, Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy, on 26/5/21:
“…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.”
When Kat raised her concerns, she felt that 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. This has obvious parallels with Jay and Gerry's suitability for ministry being called into question when they raised their concerns, and it seems to be a common experience for survivors of abuse in the Church of England.
We have since been told by senior members of staff at the Diocese that, at the time that Jay’s allegations were being investigated, they 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.
According to their timeline, Leicester Diocese first became aware of allegations against Vee involving online harassment in January 2022, and an official complaint was made in March, before she was asked to withdraw from ministry on 30th June. 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.
Ongoing nightmare
Here is another quote from Leicester Diocese’s statement:
“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.”
This is all true. However Vee continued to contact some members of our worshipping community anyway. We wanted to warn them about the allegations against her and advise them not to be in touch with her, but we were told by the Diocese that we couldn’t tell them the real reasons why she had left or the fact that her license 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 Kat became aware that Vee had applied for a job that would involve working with vulnerable people. Kat wished to warn this prospective employer, but was told by a member of staff at the Diocese that she must not do this.
When Vee finally left in November 2022, the Diocese put out the following statement:
“Venessa (Vee) Pinto will be leaving her post as inter-cultural pioneer minister with the diocese from 30 November to pursue alternative vocational opportunities. The Diocese recognises the positive contributions that she has made to its work over the past two and a half years and wishes her well in the future.”
Note how incongruent this statement is with the following quote from Leicester Diocese’s 29/6/25 statement:
“We remain deeply appalled by the serious criminal behaviour that led to Venessa Pinto’s conviction and our thoughts and prayers are with those affected by her actions.”
The positive tone of the former statement felt like an extraordinary betrayal to us and everyone who had been affected by Vee’s behaviours. It felt like we were all being gaslit and discredited, and like they were trying to cover up what had happened. After this, Kat was regularly approached by people, including colleagues at the Diocese, who cheerfully asked after Vee, assuming that they were good friends. It was horrible for Kat to have these regular reminders about her traumatic experiences, from well-meaning people, and to not be able to tell them the truth about what had happened.
Please note that after Vee’s license to minister was revoked by Bishop Martyn, any decisions related to her employment and role ending were the remit of the Diocesean Board of Finance, who were Kat and Vee's employer, not the Bishop's Office. They are a separate legal entity.
We felt very distressed about all of this, and still do to this day. We felt silenced by the Diocese, unable to speak up about our experiences or to warn others. We felt that Lusa had made serious failures in his handling of the situation but faced no accountability, and was rewarded by being made a bishop. These factors, combined with the fact that a replacement had not been recruited for Vee, meant that we felt no sense of resolution to the situation. It was not a difficult experience that had finally come to an end, it was an ongoing nightmare feeling trapped inside an institution that had totally betrayed us and had chosen to silence us from speaking up about the abuse we experienced.
Since then, we have tried hard to advocate for accountability and change, initially within the
Diocese, then at a national level. In June 2024, Kat had conversations with the C of E’s National Safeguarding Team, as well as the bishop who oversees safeguarding nationally, having been advised to speak with them by the wonderful charity Safe Spaces. We were so shocked by two things that the representative of the National Safeguarding Team said that Ben raised a formal complaint. They told Kat that in many cases bishops can’t be held accountable for things they did before they became a bishop. They also told Kat that there was essentially no process for dealing with situations of bullying and abuse that didn’t meet the criteria for a Clergy Disciplinary Measure or Safeguarding issue, and that realistically it might be 10-15 years before an adequate process is in place. Again, we felt so betrayed, and saw the extent to which we were dealing with problems that were national and not just local.
One of the parties that Kat spoke with suggested that she could ask Leicester Diocese to call for a process called a lessons learned review, in which somebody external to Leicester Diocese would be brought in to investigate what went wrong and make suggestions for how they might improve their processes. On 1/7/24 Kat emailed Bishop Martyn, asking whether he had already commissioned a lessons learned review, and what the learning had been if so. Shortly afterwards, Bishop Martyn announced that he was calling for one of these reviews. The Diocese have chosen to omit from their statement the detail that they did not take the initiative to call for the review until prompted by Kat, 19 months after Vee left.
In its statement on 30/6/25, Leicester Diocese said:
“The Independent Reviewer did not offer any specific criticisms of the bishop or any other member of staff.”
The Diocese have seriously misrepresented the nature of the lessons learned review in their statement. The HR consultant who conducted the review made it clear that criticism of specific staff members or holding people to account was not part of its remit - the purpose was for recommendations to be made on how Leicester Diocese might improve its processes, communications, support frameworks, and ways of enabling people to feel confident in raising any concerns. The results were submitted to Bishop Martyn and the Chief Executive of the Diocese of Leicester, who had control over how and which parts of its contents were disseminated. We can evidence these things through an email exchange with the HR consultant that took place between 22/9/24 and 21/10/24, which includes a description of the remit of the review in the consultant's own words.
The review produced some helpful recommendations around processes, but we were disappointed that it offered no prospect for accountability, and we felt that the major issues with the Diocese and Church of England more broadly were much bigger than its remit. At this point we felt that we’d exhausted every available avenue to pursue accountability and positive change internally.
On 31/7/24, Kat found out that she was going to be made redundant in 2025.
A deeply sick institution
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. Kat had a breakdown at the end of 2022. At times felt like a shell of the person she had been. Her difficulties with chronic pain and fatigue got so bad that Ben was worried that he was on the path to becoming her carer. Ben developed chronic stress problems that affected his physical health. When Kat’s role finally ended, Ben crashed and had to take several weeks off work with stress. We have both needed extensive counselling in relation to this situation.
There are so many wonderful Anglican churches full of lovely people and communities. However, 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. At the same time as we were going through all this, we knew others who were going through similar experiences in other Dioceses. It was horrific to see them feeling crushed and betrayed in parallel with our own situation.
As we have shared our experiences with people over the past couple of years, it has been disturbing to see the sheer number of people that have responded by sharing their own similar experiences with us. Even just over the past few days since the BBC documentary came out, so many people have messaged us thanking us for speaking out because they have been through similar experiences, both in Leicester Diocese and elsewhere.
This is the main reason we decided to speak out publicly. This is not just a problem with Leicester Diocese, this is a national crisis of accountability within the Church of England. It is a deeply sick institution, and its systems and structures are geared towards prioritising protecting the institution over protecting victims, and towards covering up abuse. Here is how one abuse survivor put it, in a 2022 Leicester Mercury story:
“However, the bureaucracy I encountered was harder to deal with than the initial abuse I’d experienced. The process took many months and each stage was painful, drawn out and felt heartless. Again - I speak of the institutional process rather than the local diocesan support I had.”
In response to the recent BBC article, there has been much anger directed towards Leicester Diocese, and rightly so. But this story is just a small part of a wider picture of the Church of England's failures at a national level. This is the bigger issue that needs to be discussed and addressed, and about which we must demand change. If you have been a victim of abuse or bullying which has been mishandled or covered up by the Church of England, we urge you to consider speaking out publicly about your experiences. There are so many of us. We join with Matt and Beth Redman, and so many others, in saying let there be light.
For support and advice related to experiences of abuse in the Church of England, we recommend getting in touch with the wonderful charity Safe Spaces.