A family says they became a target of false criminal allegations as payback for helping expose a sex abuse scandal in a Queensland government aged care home.
Warning: This story contains distressing content.
A federal MP backed the claims of the Lennox family, saying they were “slurred as abusers” after speaking out about Eventide Home’s failure to stop an employee preying on residents.
The state-run Rockhampton facility took five years to report the alleged abuse of Nancy Lennox, who has a brain injury and cannot speak.
Its employee went on to abuse another vulnerable resident, was convicted and received a suspended jail sentence in the Rockhampton District Court.
Weeks after her family spoke out to the ABC, police began investigating allegations by Eventide staff that Mrs Lennox had also been abused by her husband Trevor and son Mark.
Those allegations were never substantiated and federal MP Michelle Landry said both men were subject to an “ongoing campaign of discrimination”.
Advocates said it was a rare case but new federal whistleblower protections showed Australian families feared reprisals from speaking out about mistreatment of loved ones in aged care.
Adding to the distress of Mrs Lennox’s family, the former Eventide worker has avoided going to trial over her alleged abuse, with prosecutors dropping the case over concerns about witness accounts and the admissibility of his prior conviction.
Mark Lennox said the system had failed his mother and “made our lives a living hell … to get even for us going on TV”.
“We’ve been falsely accused and no one’s been held to account for what happened,” he said.
“It just blows my mind.”
Trevor Lennox said finding himself under investigation alongside a convicted sex offender accused of targeting his wife was “the most traumatising thing that’s ever happened in my life”.
The Central Queensland Hospital and Health Service (CQHHS), which runs Eventide, has conceded it failed to protect Mrs Lennox but defended its subsequent reports to police against the family.
Sexual assault support lines:
- 1800 Respect National Helpline: 1800 737 732
- Men’s Referral Service: 1300 766 491
- Lifeline (24-hour crisis line): 131 114
- Victims of Crime Helpline: 1800 819 817
- Full Stop Australia: 1800 385 578
“We follow strict processes in any allegations of ill-treatment of a resident, which includes reporting any serious incidents to police for their investigation,” CQHHS chief executive Lisa Blackler said.
Ms Blackler said she was “deeply concerned about the prior mistreatment of Mrs Lennox at Eventide Nursing Home in 2016 and offer my sympathies to the resident and family involved”.
“This should never have happened.”
Tragic family history
Nancy Lennox was only 50 years old when a suicide attempt left her with a permanent brain injury, unable to walk or speak and fed by a tube into her stomach.
If you or anyone you know needs help:
- Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467
- Lifeline on 13 11 14
- Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander crisis support line 13YARN on 13 92 76
- Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800
- Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636
- Headspace on 1800 650 890
- ReachOut at au.reachout.com
- MensLine Australia on 1300 789 978
- QLife 1800 184 527
Her only child, Mark, said in hindsight she was likely dogged for years by undiagnosed depression.
For two decades since, Mrs Lennox has been a resident at Eventide, one of the few facilities in Rockhampton that can provide the round-the-clock care she needs.
Mark, who is now his mother’s financial administrator and healthcare guardian along with his father, said she “hasn’t got much quality of life”.
“But I go as much as I can. And my father, he goes every day … [Eventide] keep her alive but there’s a lot of things to make her comfortable that my father does that they don’t.”
Eventide has a chequered record.
CQHHS confirmed three of its staff were currently suspended but said the details were “confidential”.
Two of its other employees — who asked not to be named because they were not authorised to speak — said it was over alleged elder abuse.
In 2019, an Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission inspector found Eventide failed to meet “four expected outcomes … [that] placed the safety, health, and wellbeing of consumers of the service at serious risk”.
But the regulator signed off on the facility months later.
Two years later, CQHHS sent in troubleshooters just as Australia’s aged care sector was bracing for royal commission findings.
They found signs of a “toxic workplace”, according to one insider.
This included a failure by previous management to act on a staff member’s account of witnessing a male colleague allegedly abuse Mrs Lennox in 2016.
Eventide broke the news to the Lennox family in February 2021.
“You want your mum to have the best care she can get,” Mark Lennox said.
“When I found out, I was horrified.”
What the family did not know then was that the alleged perpetrator, Leslie Robert Hotz, went on to be caught abusing another Eventide resident in 2018.
The ABC revealed Hotz was given a suspended 18-month jail sentence in 2019 for “wilful and unlawful exposure of a person with an impairment of the mind to an indecent act [as a] guardian/carer”.
“I was disgusted how they can sweep things like this under the rug,” Mark Lennox said.
Media exposure and accusations
Sixteen days after the ABC story, on March 11, 2021, Trevor Lennox arrived for his daily visit to Eventide only to be met by two police officers.
They questioned him over an alleged sexual assault witnessed by a staff member days earlier.
Mr Lennox denied assaulting his wife, saying instead he had rubbed cream into her legs to prevent skin rashes.
Police also launched an investigation of an anonymous complaint to the federal aged care regulator in 2018 alleging Mr Lennox had abused his wife.
Mr Lennox, 71, said he fell ill in the wake of the allegations and spent several days in hospital.
“I’ve never been treated so appallingly,” he said.
Eventide staff told police that Mrs Lennox had been driven to attempt suicide by domestic violence at the hands of her husband.
Mark Lennox said this was “absolute garbage”.
“I was there for the whole time. I would have called police myself … I would have disowned [my father],” he said.
Mrs Lennox’s sister, Ruth Davidson, said she rejected Eventide’s allegations against her brother-in-law.
“I wished I was there when they said it. I would have told them they were liars,” she said.
Ms Davidson said any suggestion that Mark Lennox had mistreated his mother was “absolutely wrong”.
One CQHHS employee, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly, said the abuse allegations against Trevor Lennox were based on false rumours among Eventide staff.
The ABC understands police and CQHHS had no previous reports of domestic violence in the Lennox family.
Son questioned by ’embarrassed’ police over assault claim
Mark Lennox said when he took over daily visits of his mother in March 2021, he noticed his mother had a black eye.
He said he put the injury down to his mother’s involuntary movements in her left arm, but questioned staff, who said they knew nothing.
His diary notes a phone call from police the next day.
“The policeman said to me, ‘Are you Mark Lennox? We received a complaint about an incident that happened at Eventide last night. Your mother has a black eye,'” the note says.
“I was lost for words, so I said to the policeman, ‘You can’t be serious’.
“I could hear it in his voice he was embarrassed to have even said it.”
Mark Lennox said at the time he was “a wreck, I probably needed counselling myself”.
Code of behaviour
Police laid no charges against the father or son — but the home restricted Trevor Lennox’s visiting hours and imposed a “code of behaviour”.
“You must not say or do anything that makes the staff feel uncomfortable, pressured or intimidated,” it said.
Mr Lennox, who had regularly complained about his wife’s care, including about staff not bathing her regularly, was also forced to leave the room when nurses attended to his wife.
“Any breaches to any of the above will result in security being called to the facility and he will be asked to leave IMMEDIATELY,” the code said.
Federal MP calls out ‘pattern of discrimination’
Mark Lennox said the response from Eventide was “just really an utter deflection from the actual problem at hand”.
“The problem at hand was the staff member, who is already a convicted sex offender, was sexually abusing my mother, not my father,” he said.
In November 2021, federal MP Michelle Landry wrote to then-Queensland health minister Yvette D’Ath, noting the allegations against the Lennox family followed the ABC’s reporting.
“While Mr Lennox was very distressed to learn of the historical sexual assault, he was further distressed to learn that Eventide levelled an assault allegation against him,” Ms Landry wrote.
Family and domestic violence support services:
If you need help immediately call emergency services on triple-0
- 1800 Respect National Helpline: 1800 737 732
- Women’s Crisis Line: 1800 811 811
- Men’s Referral Service: 1300 766 491
- Lifeline: 131 114
She said that “all allegations against Trevor and Mark Lennox were proven false” but they had been “slurred by staff as abusers and have had their visiting hours severely constrained”.
“It is evident that there is an ongoing campaign of discrimination directed at Trevor and Mark Lennox and I urge you as Queensland Health Minister to ensure the discrimination ceases immediately and that Trevor Lennox is permitted to visit his wife during the same hours he did prior to the assault allegation.”
In April 2022, Ms Landry asked the aged care regulator to include a note in its complaint file that assault allegations against Trevor Lennox were never substantiated.
The regulator said the note was added and the file “closed”.
After Landry’s intervention, the home restored an extra half-hour visiting time to the Lennox family.
“Then the security guard would kick us out,” Mark Lennox said.
Eventide reports ‘any serious incidents’ to police
Craig Gear, the chief executive of Older Persons Advocacy Network, said the organisation did not know of any comparable case.
But other families and loved ones had faced reprisals for complaints about aged care providers.
“That might be when their meals came, their freedom of movement in a facility, or who was allowed to come and visit them,” he said.
Mr Gear said it underlined the need for “significant increased protections for older people” in aged care reforms passed by federal parliament last week.
“It is rare, but it does happen, and that’s why we need these protections in place to make sure that there isn’t ramifications for when someone makes a complaint,” he said.
“We do not want people to be fearing raising complaints.”
CQHHS chief executive Ms Blackler said Eventide had “zero tolerance” for abuse and took “our responsibility to care for vulnerable communities, especially aged care residents, extremely seriously”.
“We remain committed to fostering a culture of positive care delivery and learning from these incidents,” she said.
“We follow strict processes in any allegations of ill-treatment of a resident, which includes reporting any serious incidents to police for their investigation.
“It is vital our vulnerable aged-care residents receive the best possible care, and we are committed to this. The comfort and safety of Mrs Lennox and all the residents at Eventide Home remain our priority and we are committed to work with families and visitors to create a caring and welcoming environment.”
Case against former Eventide employee dropped
Hotz, the former Eventide worker, was already a convicted sex offender when he was charged with abusing Nancy Lennox.
The case dragged out for several years, with 17 adjournments, before Hotz was committed last October to go on trial in the Rockhampton District Court.
But then in March, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) dropped the charge.
A spokesman for the ODPP said that “based on the admissible evidence, a decision was made that Crown did not have a reasonable prospect of success”.
“That consideration included clarification of a written account made by witnesses about their observations and the admissibility of the defendant’s previous conviction to address,” he said.
Mark Lennox said when told of the decision, “I thought, ‘Well, that’s this crap'”.
“If he went to trial, got found not guilty, I’d accept their decision — but for him not even to stand trial just disgusts me.”
Mark Lennox said the “whole system — from Eventide to the police, prosecutor … everyone’s failed us”.
“The way we’ve been treated from the [Eventide] management, we got no offer of counselling, no apology,” he said.
“They just accuse me and my father of elder abuse … there’s not an inkling of evidence, no one would come forward, and this is them making baseless allegations.
“But this Les Hotz guy, the staff member, they had an eyewitness that was willing to come forward, to give evidence, and they still didn’t act on it [for five years].”
Mark Lennox said the family had considered moving his mother to another home but Eventide remained the best-equipped facility in Rockhampton to deal with her “high care need”.
Queensland Health Minister Tim Nicholls did not respond to questions from the ABC.
But Mark Lennox said the new state government needed to “overhaul” the way Eventide was run.
“They had that royal commission not so long ago but they must have skipped Eventide because it’s still broken,” he said.
