The former Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in Dunedin — already jailed in 2011 for a $666,000 fraud — has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a teenage boy more than three decades ago. The case raises fresh questions about safeguarding failures in the Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Jonathan Richard Kirkpatrick, 68, the former Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, Dunedin, was found guilty last week by a jury of sexually violating a teenage boy at his cottage on the shores of Lake Coleridge more than thirty years ago. The verdict, returned on Friday 20 March 2026 after a week-long trial, lifts the curtain on the most serious chapter yet of a troubled career that has already seen Kirkpatrick serve prison time for large-scale financial fraud.
The conviction follows the collapse of a suppression order. Kirkpatrick’s lawyer had indicated an intention to seek permanent name suppression after the verdict, but the interim order expired at 4 p.m. on 26 March without any application being filed. New Zealand news organisations, including the Otago Daily Times and RNZ, immediately named Kirkpatrick, whose identity had been withheld during the trial.
At the time of the offending, Kirkpatrick was Vicar of St Michael and All Angels, Christchurch, having arrived in New Zealand from England in 1991. The victim — then aged approximately 18 — told the jury that as a teenager he would regularly visit Kirkpatrick after school to smoke marijuana at his house. The young man was aware that Kirkpatrick was gay but said he had no concerns about his intentions until the night in question.
On the night of the assault, the pair drank alcohol and smoked cannabis at Kirkpatrick’s cottage. The victim told the court he became so intoxicated that he believed he may have been drugged. Kirkpatrick put him to bed, and the young man woke to find the priest sexually violating him.
The victim did not report the assault to police until 2020 — nearly three decades later. Crown Prosecutor Penny Brown told the court that by that time the man’s own life had derailed and he was facing sentencing for serious offending of his own. He said he decided to come forward after encountering others in prison who had been abused and who had found benefit in speaking out. Kirkpatrick now remains in custody pending sentencing on the sexual assault conviction.
Kirkpatrick’s Career: A High-Profile Rise in the New Zealand Church
Jonathan Richard Kirkpatrick was born in England in February 1958. He earned a first-class honours degree in theology from the University of London and was ordained as a priest in London in 1985, beginning his ministry as a Church Army officer before moving into parish work. He came to New Zealand in 1991 with his long-term partner, Tim Barnett, to take up the position of Vicar of St Michael and All Angels in Christchurch — the parish where the sexual assault of the young man occurred.
In 1996, Kirkpatrick was appointed the 10th Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in Dunedin, working under New Zealand’s first female Anglican bishop, the Rt Rev Penny Jamieson. He was openly gay and positioned himself as an advocate for the inclusion of gay and lesbian people within the Anglican Communion — a role that brought him considerable public attention in the New Zealand church of the 1990s. Kirkpatrick’s partner, Tim Barnett, remained in Christchurch, where he was elected to Parliament that same year as the Labour MP for Christchurch Central.
His tenure as Dean was not without controversy. In 1998, Kirkpatrick dismissed Dr Raymond White, who had served as Director of Music at St Paul’s for nearly twenty years. The entire all-male cathedral choir subsequently walked out in protest. A television documentary produced by TV3 — provocatively titled Sex, Lies and Videotape — explored allegations of misconduct within the cathedral hierarchy. Multiple complaints about the documentary’s accuracy and framing were filed with the Broadcasting Standards Authority. The BSA upheld some complaints against TV3’s reporting, but the affair served to cast a shadow over Kirkpatrick’s deanship. That same year, Kirkpatrick broke his back when Barnett fell asleep at the wheel during a drive from Invercargill to Dunedin.
Kirkpatrick also obtained a Master of Business Administration from the University of Otago during his time as Dean. He left the Dunedin deanship in 2001, relocating to Auckland, where he eventually became priest-in-charge of St Alban’s Church in Balmoral. He also took up a senior executive role at Auckland University of Technology, serving as Chief Executive of the university’s Business Innovation Centre.
In July 2011, accounting discrepancies at AUT came to light while Kirkpatrick was on holiday in Thailand. A colleague discovered a bank statement for one of his fraudulent companies lying on his desk; invoice templates were also found. Kirkpatrick resigned immediately upon his return.
He was arrested in early August 2011 and charged with 82 counts of making false invoices and other fraud-related offences. Appearing at Auckland District Court on 17 August 2011, Kirkpatrick pleaded guilty to seven representative charges of fraud involving more than $665,000. He had been authorised in his role to issue invoices of up to $15,000 without supervision, and over eight and a half years he used that authority to write 82 fraudulent invoices payable to shell companies he had established — “Eventure” and “Halsey Consulting” — for work that was never done. The money was spent on what Crown Prosecutor Rachael Reed described as “a lavish lifestyle”.
Judge Alison Sinclair sentenced Kirkpatrick on 7 October 2011 to three years and two months in prison. She described the offending as a gross breach of trust and said Kirkpatrick had “nothing to show” for the money taken. The total cost to AUT and its insurers exceeded $1 million. Kirkpatrick was ordered to pay $20,000 in reparations — the proceeds of the sale of his house — an amount Judge Sinclair described as “a drop in the ocean.” His lawyer Russell Fairbrother told the court that what had begun as an “impulsive itch” had become a compulsion, and that Kirkpatrick was undergoing psychiatric counselling to address the “demons” and emotional issues that had driven his behaviour.
Kirkpatrick was released on parole in October 2012 after his first appearance before the New Zealand Parole Board, having served a third of his sentence.
Kirkpatrick’s conviction arrives as the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia continues to reckon with its institutional response to abuse. In December 2020, Archbishops Donald Tamihere and Philip Richardson issued a statement ahead of the Faith-Based Redress Hearings of New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. The archbishops acknowledged forthrightly that “the evidence will show that people have been abused within the Anglican Church, our schools, our agencies and organisations” and committed the church to an “unequivocal” apology and tangible redress.
In January 2021, the church introduced a new Ministry Standards Commission — a streamlined, church-wide body to receive and adjudicate complaints against any officeholder, from parish wardens to bishops. As Anglican.ink reported in September 2021, the commission is headed by a Registrar who is a retired High Court judge and is composed of legal and mental health professionals drawn from across the church’s three tikanga (Māori, Pākehā, and Pasifika streams). The commission’s jurisdiction explicitly includes historical cases of sexual misconduct, for which the ordinary three-year limitation does not apply.
The offending for which Kirkpatrick has now been convicted occurred in the early 1990s, decades before these reforms. At the time, complaints were handled — or not handled — within individual dioceses, with no centralised oversight and no requirement to refer matters to civil authorities. Whether any complaint relating to Kirkpatrick’s conduct with the young victim was ever made to church authorities, and if so how it was handled, has not been reported.
The Kirkpatrick case asks the question why the institutions around him asked so few questions for so long.
In the 1990s, the Anglican Church in New Zealand had staked a great deal of its self-image on progressive credentials. Bishop Penny Jamieson of Dunedin was the Communion’s first female diocesan bishop — a figure of global significance in the battles over women’s ordination. Kirkpatrick, as an openly gay dean appointed to serve under Jamieson, was woven into that same progressive narrative: a church that had the courage to look different from the rest of the Communion. In that environment, Kirkpatrick was an asset. His sexuality was not something to manage quietly; it was something the Diocese of Dunedin advertised as evidence of its enlightenment.
That status seemed to confer protection. When the 1998 TV3 documentary raised uncomfortable questions about conduct within the Cathedral hierarchy — including an alleged comment by Kirkpatrick about Samoan boys, and his role in dismissing a longstanding Director of Music under disputed circumstances — the Diocese’s response was to complain vigorously to the Broadcasting Standards Authority about homophobic framing. The BSA upheld some complaints against the broadcaster. But the underlying questions about Kirkpatrick’s conduct in relation to young men were buried in the procedural aftermath. He left the deanship in 2001 with his reputation intact and moved seamlessly into a senior position at a major university.
The dynamic of not looking too closely at progressive icons continued with the 2011 fraud. Kirkpatrick spent nearly a decade systematically looting a university that had trusted him, while continuing to serve in ministry at St Alban’s, Balmoral. During his trial for fraud, a psychiatrist told the court Kirkpatrick had a “misaligned” personality behind his confident exterior. The church, apparently, had never noticed.
Sentencing is expected in the coming weeks. The charge carries a maximum of ten years’ imprisonment under New Zealand law. Kirkpatrick, already a convicted fraudster who served prison time at 53, now faces further imprisonment at 68.