Paedophile Tory John Smart ruined my children’s lives, says mother

A MOTHER whose children were sexually abused by a preacher has spoken about how he ruined their lives. Former Holyrood Scottish Conservative candidate John Smart is in jail awaiting sentence after being found guilty this week of carrying out sex abuse against boys and a girl at various locations across Scotland.

The mother described how her sons had begun shoplifting to support drug and alcohol problems and said her daughter had self-harmed as a result of Smart’s systematic abuse.

“Life has been very stressful from the boys’ teenage years due to their drug taking and shoplifting to feed their habit,” she said. “Many a time I have been to the sheriff court with one or the other and paying fines on their behalf. One of them, as an adult, also turned to alcohol.

“My daughter suffers from depression along with her other health problems. She has also self-harmed at times. It hasn’t been and still isn’t easy.

“Since this has all come to light, I now have more of an understanding of perhaps why they have gone down the path they have, especially after listening to the psychologist.”

She felt a strong sense of guilt, she said, for allowing John Smart to take the children out, but had no reason not to trust him.

“He was, I thought, like an uncle to them,” she said.

“He took them places I couldn’t afford to take them as a single parent at the time. He also had very strong Biblical views and I thought he would be a good person to be around.”

Awaiting the trial over the last 18 months had been hard on the family, she explained, as they prayed that justice would eventually be served. Thankfully it was.

“Since the verdict a weight has been lifted from my shoulders and I know the kids feel the same way. They can now move on from this nightmare they have been living, and I hope this will make them stronger.

“John is now in custody where he deserves to be, but I truly hope that he will be able to cope and that no harm will come to him. I hope that he will one day find it in him to admit his guilt.”

Firebrand preacher and right-wing politician Smart, from Edinburgh, was found guilty on Tuesday of waging a 15-year campaign of sex abuse against children he met through church.

Smart was still abusing one child in the run-up to his bid to be elected a Conservative MSP for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh in 2003.

Smart took the children on trips so he could subject them to abuse away from their parents.

A jury at the High Court in Perth refused to believe his defence and found him guilty of a total of five charges relating to three separate victims.

One victim ended up homeless and living on the streets, while another told how he had ended up in jail after committing crime to feed a drug habit.

They described how they had had their lives ruined by Smart after meeting him at the Edinburgh City Mission where he impressed their parents with his hardline Christianity.

But Smart’s fire and brimstone sermons and high moral stance were an act to cover for his depraved interest in child sex.

Between 1987 and 2002 – just months before he stood for Holyrood – he systematically abused two boys and a girl at locations throughout Scotland.

He persuaded their mother to let him take the children on trips to play parks and leisure pools in Edinburgh, Peebles and Perth, where the abuse took place.

Smart – who has also been a Democratic Unionist Party election candidate and boasts of his relationship with the Reverend Ian Paisley – also had the children stay overnight at his home.

The mother told the jury: “It didn’t cross my mind that anything like that would be happening. If you thought something like that was going to happen you would not put them in that position.

“You trust someone and then it happens. They didn’t want to tell me. They didn’t want me to find out anything.”

A 38-year-old man, who later lived with one of the alleged victims, said his partner blurted out that he had been “beasted” by Smart as a child.

The mother, who said Smart had betrayed both her and the Christian Church, started to suspect his motives more than a decade after he first abused her three-year-old son.

The female victim’s medical records also showed she had been sexually abused, and the suspicions about Smart eventually led to his arrest.

The 48-year-old, from Christian Crescent, Edinburgh, will be sentenced by Lady Dorrian at the High Court in Glasgow on 18 January.