He was a celebrity pastor at one of Canada’s biggest megachurches. Inside the sexual abuse allegations that brought down Bruxy Cavey, an associate pastor at a prominent church in Toronto, he had become a “mild-mannered, soft-spoken, soft-spoken” man with a “very positive spirit, always smiling.”
His life ended with no one the wiser: His career as a pastor, after years of being promoted and lauded for his ministry, was suddenly ended after one victim came forward and said he was abused by Cavey as a teen-ager at a church in the middle of winter. Cavey was quickly indicted and charged, and a preliminary hearing at Toronto court began on April 27.
There was never any suggestion that he would escape prosecution. In fact, the charges against him were never about violence or sexual abuse. The charges have always been about sex: The alleged victim says he was sexually molested by Cavey for a period starting in his early teens and ending in his early 20s.
Now, with the charges laid out for the first time, the question for Toronto’s court is how to proceed.
In order to protect Cavey’s privacy, all details of his sexual assaults have been kept from the court and the public. In an effort to try to address this, the trial is also not to be released to the public. The judge overseeing proceedings, Justice Catherine Campbell, has issued an embargo on the release, saying it “would be unjust and inappropriate to comment or make public the character and nature of the trial and the facts in relation to the prosecution.”
Instead, there will be a pretrial hearing on Tuesday, in which media is allowed to attend, but the case will then be publicly released once all legal proceedings conclude.
It’s clear the case is about a pastor with a checkered past and no apparent sense of remorse who, like others with similar pasts, is attempting to use the system to escape criminal charges.
“The church is being portrayed in a very one-sided way,” said James