It has taken decades for Tamzin Ford to see any sort of justice for the abuse she suffered as a teenager.
She had asked a court to lift the automatic suppression for a victim so she can fully tell her story.
And to this day she showers with the lights off at night as she did to avoid the notice of Maurice Dagger when she was 13 and living in his Porirua family home.
Ford says the former school teacher and Anglican priest had spent his whole life portraying himself as a Christian man when he was really a perverted creep.
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On Thursday, Dagger, who is now 73, was sentenced on one charge of indecent assault encompassing multiple occasions over 18 months between 1990 and 1991.
Porirua District Court Judge James Johnston sentenced him to five months of community detention and to make an emotional harm payment of $3000.
He said Dagger had become increasingly infatuated with Ford, inquired about her kissing and sexual experience and that of her friends, and discussed his own sexual experiences.
Judge Johnston said he wanted Ford to know she had been heard.
Former teacher and Anglican priest Maurice Dagger was sentenced to home detention.
Ford, who is now 44, was a teenage girl when she ended up being taken into the home of Maurice Dagger in 1990.
After her mothers marriage to a vicar failed, Ford wanted to stay living in Wellington to finish school. Her mother was forced to move back to Blenheim.
Dagger and his family offered through the Newlands church to host her.
It did not take long for Dagger to begin his behaviour.
He would come into her bedroom at night and sit on her bed and rub her back but Ford said she would play dead. She would jam things under the door to stop him entering.
He would enter the bathroom while she was showering and she would use a towel under the bathroom door.
While being tutored in a rumpus room at Daggers home he would hold the door closed, press her up against the door frame and make her kiss him before he would let her out.
He also would ask her to sit on his lap for tutoring.
He would have sexualised conversations with her, talking about his own marriage.
Ford managed to stop it by telling a school counsellor.
Dagger had been with several Anglican churches in the Wellington diocese.
Judge James Johnston at the sentencing of former teacher and Anglican priest Maurice Dagger.
Fords victim impact statement was read to the court. She said she feared hearing his footsteps.
I still shower at night with the lights off, she said.
She said Dagger took away her innocence and gave her a road to hell of shame.
Ford said the church was aware of the allegations at the time but did nothing meaningful.
She said in 1991 the complaint made to what was then Child, Youth and Family relating to Daggers sexual abuse was investigated incorrectly and the complaint was never filed with the police.
Porirua District Court, where Maurice Dagger was sentenced on Thursday.
It was agreed for Dagger and his wife to have joint counselling. The church also said they would offer him counselling but Ford says no records exist showing it happened.
Ford discovered three years after her complaint that the Wellington Anglican diocese had ordained him as an Anglican priest while knowing about the complaint.
In 2018, during investigation of her complaint, people who were nominated through the Wellington Anglican diocese to be Fords support were friends on Daggers Facebook page.
Ford said even though she had been in two minds about accepting the money, she would do so and put it to organisations which helped rescue, rehabilitate and rehome animals.