“My father abused 130 children and finding out the truth was terrible”

“I have forgiven him, but that doesn’t take away the pain or justify it. I no longer feel as affected or ashamed, but that doesn’t lessen the horror of what he did,” she said.

“He showed no signs of remorse. I apologize on behalf of my father for what he did to these children.”

Warning: This story contains disturbing content and references to child abuse.

Rugg remembers an oppressive childhood marked by “hypervigilance” in the face of his father’s unpredictable mood swings.

“I think the prevailing feeling was fear for as long as I can remember,” he recalls.

“I was afraid around my father, who was very unstable. He was very quick-tempered, so I had a feeling of emotional fragility, I walked on eggshells and wondered what mood my father was in. As a child, I felt guilty because I didn’t love my father and sometimes I hated him,” she said.

Rugg said her father “completely ignored” her throughout her childhood, to the point that she questioned her own judgment about his “volatile” character.

“What I saw was confusing to me,” he said. “He was so scary, so angry and cruel, so difficult to confront. I wanted to get as far away from him as possible, but what I saw were people who adored him.”

As Smyth laughed and played outside in the sunshine with children and teenagers, she watched him from the window and was told to stay away as he was an “unwelcome distraction”.

“We experienced a completely different John Smyth than the one he projected to the world,” he explained.

“When you’re young, it’s natural to come to the conclusion, ‘He must be right and I must be the problem. I’m the one who doesn’t see it right.'”

Smyth came to Winchester College in 1973 through the school’s Christian club and began abusing students after inviting them to his house for Sunday lunch.

He forced his victims to strip naked and endure severe beatings in a soundproof shed in his home, where he beat them so severely that they caused them to bleed.

Smyth, an evangelical Christian, justified abuse as a form of punishment and remorse for “sins” such as pride or masturbation.

An internal investigation by the Iwerne Trust brought the scandal to light in 1982. It described the attacks as “frequent, brutal and horrific” and detailed how eight of the children had suffered a total of 14,000 blows.

But rather than alerting the authorities, senior evangelical figures in the Church of England facilitated Smyth’s discreet departure from the United Kingdom, allowing him to evade justice for decades.

When his family moved to Zimbabwe in 1984, Rugg said his father portrayed it as a “noble job” in which he sacrificed his “brilliant career” to become a missionary.

But his trail of destruction followed them around the world, and he soon opened Christian camps where he forced young men to strip naked and beat them.

The following year, tragedy struck when a 16-year-old boy named Guide Nyachuru was found dead in one of Smyth’s camps within 12 hours of his arrival, leading to a manslaughter charge. However, the case was dismissed.

When Smyth’s daughter returned to England at the age of 18, she began to ask more and more questions about her father.

“When it came out that I was his daughter, I saw a hint of concern on people’s faces,” she remembers.

“People didn’t react with ‘what a nice guy’, but quite the opposite. There was dead silence. There seemed to be very little connection to the UK, which I found strange.”

She confronted her father about the rumors on Christmas Eve and he erupted in a blind rage, accusing him of being “disloyal” to the family for daring to question their integrity.

“His reaction was so extremely violent that I thought, ‘Now I know for sure.’ When the river babbles, it carries water,” he said.

Allegations of abuse by Smyth first became public in February 2017 through an investigation by British broadcaster Channel 4.

One night, Rugg turned on the news and saw his father’s face on the screen, his name in large letters against a backdrop of heinous crimes.

“These were vulnerable young people, other people’s children, whose lives were ruined. I have a son too,” he added.

“As cruel as I had seen him, I had no idea he had committed such serious criminal abuse. It was horrific and shocking, but it made sense.”

“His whole life was about ‘the work of the Lord.’ He justified everything with his Christian faith, and that hypocrisy seemed truly abhorrent to me.”

In August 2018, Smyth received a summons from Hampshire Police to return to England to give evidence, under threat of extradition.

But he died of heart failure just eight days later, at the age of 77.

Rugg said he can now talk about his father “without bitterness or hatred” and that he finally feels at peace.

“In my experience, if you face what your father did, you can heal and forgive,” he explained.

“There are moments of sadness, but when I think about my father, I no longer feel that knot in my stomach, and that’s progress. It’s not something I have to carry or that controls me.”

“It’s gone from something that was forced on me to something that I decide what to do with it.”

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