DP claimed that in 1971, aged five, he had been sexually assaulted in his family home in Port Fairy by Bryan Coffey, a Roman Catholic priest who died in 2013. He sued the Diocese through its current Bishop, Paul Bird, maintaining that it was vicariously liable for Coffey's actions and liable in negligence for failing to exercise reasonable care in supervising and controlling him and claiming damages for complex post-traumatic stress disorder and consequent loss of earnings. The Diocese did not admit the assault and denied vicarious liability, and while it admitted that it owed DP a duty of care it asserted that that duty had not been breached. In 1999, Coffey had been convicted on several counts of indecent assault, for which he had been given a suspended sentence of three years’ imprisonment, and the court accepted the evidence from other incidents that Coffey was a paedophile. J Forrest J concluded that Coffey had assaulted DP and that the Diocese was vicariously liable, but that DP had not established that the Diocese had been negligent.

On the specific issue of vicarious liability, the Diocese had contended that it could not be held vicariously liable unless it could be demonstrated that its priests were its employees and that if there was, in fact, a relationship that gave rise to vicarious liability, the assaults were unlawful and far outside Coffey's clerical role. J Forrest J noted that there was no presumption in Australian law that a cleric could not be an employee of his or her Church and that individual cases turned on their facts. However, although he was not convinced that Coffey had been an employee of the Diocese, absent any formal employment contract or arrangement, the issue of vicarious liability required ‘a holistic and broad inquiry’ into the circumstances surrounding the various relationships involved. The Diocese was vicariously liable because of the close nature of the relationship between the Bishop, the Diocese and the Catholic community, the Diocese's general control over Coffey's role and duties within the parish, Coffey's pastoral role in the Port Fairy Catholic community and the relationship between DP, his family, Coffey and the Diocese, ‘which was one of intimacy and imported trust in the authority of Christ's representative, personified by Coffey’. [Frank Cranmer]