Looking down . . . In one of Sonny Chin’s social-media videos, the painting of himself on the ceiling of a treatment room is visible. PHOTO: SUPPLIED

On the ceiling of Sonny Chin’s studio is a painting of him, surrounded by a celestial glow, his palms outstretched in a pose of formidable benevolence.

For several women, it was one of the last things they saw before he molested them.

Chin, 65, was jailed for three years three months after a jury found him guilty of 10 indecent assaults against seven victims.

During his March trial in the Dunedin District Court, his former clients told strikingly similar stories of visiting the self-proclaimed ‘‘qi master’’.

Most were suffering debilitating pain due to long-standing injuries which were often underlaid by a lifetime’s psychological trauma and insecurity.

They went to Chin to heal, and they were hurt.

While their words reverberated, the speakers remained anonymous.

The women have been known only as ‘‘the victims’’, protected by a statutory suppression afforded to all those who complain of sexual abuse.

At the trial’s outset the diminutive Chin turned to the media bench and smiled confidently as he stood in the dock.

Even after a fortnight, as the guilty verdicts rolled predictably in, he wore the same cheery countenance, gently shaking his head.

The face of the case has always been Chin’s.

Until now.

Locked up . . . Sonny Chin was jailed for three years three months after being found guilty of 10 indecent assaults. PHOTO: ROB KIDD

Their names are Tee (Tania) Murtagh and Kristy Ovens.

They described to police in meticulous detail what had happened to them, they told a courtroom full of strangers their story and weathered fierce cross-examination in which it was suggested they misinterpreted Chin’s touch, that it never even happened.

Now, after voluntarily having their name suppression lifted, they are finally uncensored.

‘‘I’ve got no shame, I’ve done nothing wrong and I’m very proud to be speaking up and standing up and going through this and I want to highlight that it is OK to come forward and go through this, and be strong and be vulnerable at the same time,’’ Ms Murtagh said.

‘‘By not having a name, we’re just spectators too. But names are powerful. As soon as my name’s there and I’m allowed to speak my story in the way that I want to speak it, it takes the power away from the perpetrator and the system and gives it back to me.’’

Ms Ovens was unaware her identity was even protected by suppression, less still that she could reject it.

Her decision was guided by pragmatism rather than idealism.

She wanted to support Ms Murtagh and had been vocal about her experience on Facebook. Why bury something that was never a secret?

There can be no mistaking the legacy of the Chin family in Dunedin — it looms over central Dunedin in vivid colours, 20 feet tall.

Chin Fooi — his stern visage an eerie contrast to his grandson’s disarming smile — came to the city in the early 20th century and opened a laundry in Rattray St, where a mural was painted in 2015 to celebrate his role in integrating Chinese families into our community.

Sonny Chin formerly ran his business from a nearby property in the same street before relocating up the hill to Mornington.

The family influence endured and Chin, the youngest of six children, established his niche as a healer with mystical abilities, developing what he dubbed the ‘‘Hang Sun Technique’’.

Ever the self-promoter, he appeared in advertorials, created a slick website featuring an avalanche of gushing testimonials and made a Facebook page describing himself as a ‘‘digital creator’’ with numerous videos in which he demonstrated his skills.

Chin was not averse to giving impromptu energy readings in public either.

Ms Murtagh repeatedly received such treatment as she passed him while walking her dog along John Wilson Ocean Dr and eventually relented.

She agreed to attend a group session but was not without her reservations.

Decades earlier she had gone for a massage from Chin but it had been ‘‘too rough’’.

While Ms Murtagh enjoyed the supportive atmosphere among like-minded people, the man started to undermine her confidence.

He commented on her weight, claimed she could not sustain a loving relationship, was too controlling.

‘‘He started getting in my head even at that stage.’’

Ms Ovens had also known Chin for years. Her uncle went to school with him, and her first encounter with him was similarly inauspicious.

She recalled a self-defence class he had been running when she was a teenager.

‘‘He punched me in the face,’’ Ms Ovens said.

‘‘He said ‘this is what pain feels like’ ... I never went back.’’

But plagued by a tear in a disc and nagging hip pain, coupled with glowing recommendations from friends, in 2016, desperate for relief, she went to see Chin.

The first session, Ms Ovens said, was unremarkable.

There was an offsider who was observing and Chin manipulated her back and stretched her over a Swiss ball.

It did little to dull the pain but she returned, ever hopeful.

This time, alone, Chin told Ms Ovens she had been violated by her cousin when she was 14 — wildly specific and untrue.

But when she stressed that had not occurred, he pressed on.

‘‘You’ve blocked it out. This is your problem: you’ve blocked it all out. That’s why you’ve got these massive blockages,’’ Chin said.

After telling her she was sexually repressed, he smacked her pubic region and said ‘‘wake up’’.

Ms Ovens was rattled.

Afterwards, she sat in her car, wondering whether there was maybe some elusive trauma buried deep within her psyche that Chin could help her unearth.

But in her final session, his motives became clear.

Chin resumed the interrogation: why was she unable to open up? Why did she consider herself unlovable?

At the end of the session, after focusing on her sternum, he pulled down her bra and bit her nipple.

Ms Ovens said she was staggered by the audacity, frozen in fear, questioning the reality of what had just happened.

Friends told her to report the offence, but how could she?

‘‘I said ‘I can’t go to the police. He’s got testimonies on his wall from All Blacks and cops ... They’re not going to believe me. Why would they?’’’

I can’t go to the police.
He’s got testimonies
on his wall from
All Blacks and cops . . .
They’re not going
to believe me.
Why would they?

More than three years later, Ms Murtagh went to Chin’s Hawthorn Ave premises and their first meeting, focused purely on the physical, yielded immediate results.

Her migraines stopped.

Just like Ms Ovens, the next session had a distinctly darker tone.

Chin told Ms Murtagh her father — recently dead, and whom he had known — had had sex with her.

It was his way of showing love and she needed to accept that, Chin said.

He had found the emotional pressure point and as the woman lying on his treatment table questioned her entire upbringing, he molested her.

‘‘For Sonny to play on that wounded me deeply in ways that there’s just no words for. Every time I think about it, I still feel his touch on me. [But] the words he spoke were worse than the actual touch,’’ Ms Murtagh said.

‘‘It’s not just the physicality of the trauma, it’s not just the sexual groping. I don’t even think that’s a thing for him. It’s you being in pain and him having power and control in that moment. Because him groping my breast, and the way he did it with those hard dagger-like fingers, that wasn’t sexual. It’s about pain and that he’s got one over you.’’

It became a theme of the trial.

Chin would soften his victims under the guise of exploring and treating their emotional difficulties.

They hated their body, they could not love, they could not be loved, they had been sexually abused.

He picked at the seams of their lives until a thread came loose and he pulled, and he pulled.

Ms Murtagh had one word for it: ‘‘grooming’’.

She believed Chin carefully selected his victims, constantly probing to see who was vulnerable enough to exploit.

‘‘That’s why some people don’t get chosen by Sonny and some people do. It was my inability in those moments to say ‘don’t touch me that way’.’’

Ten women gave evidence against Chin for the Crown, but there were others the jury did not hear from.

As the case progressed and news of the allegations spread, several women contacted the Otago Daily Times, most of whom had followed the coverage from overseas.

One of them was Melissa*, now living in Australia, who went to Chin for a massage in 2018.

She said her second session took a bizarre turn.

‘‘He didn’t tell me what he was about to do. He told me he was healing my heart,’’ she said.

With funnels connected to plastic tubing, Chin and his protege blew on to the woman’s breasts, supposedly creating healing vibrations.

She filmed the incident with her cellphone as she lay on the treatment table, capturing the moment as the men pulled away, giggling.

‘‘I was definitely shocked,’’ Melissa said.

‘‘I thought it was weird but I just laughed it off.’’

After suffering chronic exhaustion, Tina* booked an appointment with Chin in 2012 for an ‘‘energy cleansing’’, following a suggestion by a friend.

I remember instantly
feeling incredibly
uncomfortable.

Speaking to the ODT from the UK, she said the healer directed her to lie on a treatment table and made comments about her chest, asking whether her mother shared the same build.

‘‘I remember instantly feeling incredibly uncomfortable,’’ Tina said.

In a tactic the court heard Chin employed on other clients, he told the woman she had to explicitly ask for the cleansing to begin as though establishing some tacit consent for what allegedly followed.

‘‘He then proceeded to ‘clear energy’ from my chest area, which became fondling my breast, stroking and squeezing them,’’ she said.

The session ended when Chin allegedly slapped her three times on the forehead.

Tina said the rigours of life as a mother diverted her from making a police complaint but she contacted the Dunedin officers in charge of the case during the trial.

Dunedin Adult Sexual Assault Team officer in charge Detective Sergeant Hamish Barrons said other women had approached police during the trial to offer assistance with their testimony.

There were, however, no ongoing investigations.

‘‘I think many of them took solace in the fact that Chin was found guilty of so many of the charges and subsequently received jail time,’’ Det Sgt Barrons said.

‘‘Of course it also validates what happened to them as being entirely due to Chin’s predatory and opportunistic sexual behaviour.’’

Those who had come forward more recently had been offered specialist support.

‘‘Dunedin police would like to thank all the brave women that came forward, who together made it possible to put Chin behind bars and put a stop to any further victimisation,’’ Det Sgt Barrons said.

Even after weeks in court, the question remained: Why?

What drove Chin to systematically exploit the women who had come to him seeking respite from crippling pain?

Was it an escalating desire to feel control over another person, a manifestation of his narcissistic bent, a gross sense of entitlement or did he just do it because he could?

For Ms Ovens, the answer was more simple.

‘‘I think he’s depraved. He’s ... a sexual predator.’’

If the women were looking for clues in Chin’s three-sentence apology letter they would have been disappointed.

Brief . . . Tee Murtagh requested a copy of Sonny Chin’s ‘‘apology letter’’ after he was jailed.
PHOTO: SUPPLIED

‘‘It was not my intention to cause harm,’’ he wrote to Ms Murtagh.

The lacklustre response ended with an oddly perky: ‘‘I hope you are on the mend. I wish you all the best for the future’’.

Despite the conclusion of the court case, another date loomed.

April 2024 is when Chin will see the Parole Board for the first time.

Ms Murtagh will be there too, vehemently opposing early release and keen to hear how Corrections planned to rehabilitate the sex offender.

‘‘He’s a prime candidate to come out and keep on offending,’’ she said.

‘‘I have concerns about that, real concerns.’’

Ms Ovens said her opinion of her abuser would never change.

‘‘It doesn’t matter what he says [to the Parole Board] I’ll not believe him, because he’s a slimy little critter. I don’t believe he’ll ever change.’’

Chin, though, will inevitably be freed, and when he does there is nothing to stop him resuming his former work.

In 2021, then health minister Andrew Little announced the passing of law which would regulate the practice of Chinese acupuncture, herbal medicine and tui na massage, effectively bringing them under the same legislative umbrella as nurses, dentists, chiropractors and other more mainstream health practitioners.

But Chin’s mish-mash of qigong, reflexology and massage means he will not be subject to such oversights or required to prove he is a fit and proper person to deliver such services.

Ms Murtagh called on law-makers to address the loophole.

‘‘There are lots of new healing forms arising, I don’t want that to stop, but we still need to have a place we can hold people to account,’’ she said.

Should nothing change, she would consider taking more drastic steps, Ms Ovens said.

‘‘I feel like standing outside his house and making sure no-one goes in,’’ she said.

‘‘But I’ll probably get arrested.’’

Meanwhile the New Zealand Qigong and Traditional Chinese Medicine Association released a statement last week distancing itself from Chin and condemning his actions.

‘‘The defendant in question was not and has never been affiliated with our association, and we wish to make it clear that the practice of qigong is no justification for the behaviour described within the court case,’’ it said.

Association vice-president John Munro said qigong translated to ‘‘work with energy’’ and much of the practice could be done without touching the body at all.

He urged people to use only practitioners who were members of a professional organisation.

Mr Munro said some of the association members were ‘‘very, very upset’’ Chin’s crimes had been connected to their discipline.

Forebears . . . A mural of Chin Fooi — Sonny Chin’s grandfather — was painted in Rattray St in 2015. PHOTO: GERARD O’BRIEN

Original designs for the Chin Fooi mural included a whakatauki nestled in the top corner, which was eventually excluded when the paint hit the wall a couple of months later. It read:

‘‘Kia whakatōmuri te haere ki mua. To walk into the future our eyes must be fixed to the past’’

For the women who were sexually assaulted by Sonny Chin, they may wish they could forge a path ahead and leave the painful past behind without ever looking back.

Ms Ovens still keenly feels the residual shame and guilt of the ordeal but she is stronger for it.

For Ms Murtagh, it is equally nuanced.

‘‘What I’ve done is become a hermit. I’ve moved to the country to get away from people. I was so suicidal that that was really my only option. I’m frazzled inside,’’ she said,

‘‘At the same time I’m a lot stronger too because it’s pushed me to do more trauma work ... My life’s got smaller, but it’s also got bigger because I’m more concrete in what I want out of life.’’

For all the devastation awaiting the delivery of justice, the soul-searching, the uprooting of her life and the toll on her health, would she do it again?

‘‘Absolutely. The reason I did it was so his name’s out there; so it stops.’’

*Names changed to protect sources’ identities

rob.kidd@odt.co.nz