Christina and Jenny’s father received medals of honour for his services to St John. He was a primary school chairman; he went on every school camp. But he was living a double life - one where he spent 10 years sexually offending against his own daughters. They spoke with reporter Jaime Lyth about their campaign for justice.
“You thought you were a god.”
Brian Stokes was the boss of his household. And he ran a house of horrors.
“Nowhere was safe,” says Stokes’ daughter, Christina Narayanan.
Sisters Christina and Jennifer Adams, who affectionately call each other Chrissy and Jenny, were sexually abused by their father as children from the late 1970s until the early 1990s.
They say Stokes “controlled the storyline”, so people saw him as an upstanding pillar of the rural Waitakaruru community where they lived, in the Hauraki and Waikato area.
Every Thursday for 23 years, he volunteered as an ambulance officer for St John, for which he was awarded a service medal from the Order of St John and a medal for the Membership of the Order, given to him by the Governor General on behalf of the Queen.
They recalled how he would come home and tell his family stories of his “healing hands”, how when he placed them on people in the back of the ambulance, they were instantly calmed.
“[He] would spout stories about how people could see an amazing aura around [him],” Jennifer says.
“Neighbours, people in the community thought he was this wonderful guy, but it was all just a front for what he was at home.”
Christina, Jennifer and their two older brothers lived on a dairy farm. Their mother would spend her days milking, and the kids were either left alone or with their father.
“My mother ran the farm, and my father found every excuse in the book not to do anything on the farm, so volunteering for the ambulance got him out of [working],” Christina says.
They describe Stokes’ rage as controlled, only revealing itself at home, and only directed at his two sons, two daughters and wife.
“He didn’t start sexually abusing me until I was probably around 7 or 8, but before then, I was always afraid of him,” Jennifer says.
“You’re too afraid to do anything, of course, say anything... I guess I just thought maybe this is normal.”
Jennifer told the Herald the abuse continued until she suffered a miscarriage at school when she was 13.
“I didn’t know what was happening, and it wasn’t till I was an adult and I suffered from a miscarriage [again], and it was exactly the same... it was like, ‘Oh my god, this is what happened when I was a kid’.”
Christina says she was first raped by her father when she was 5, and to this day she remembers the threat he made to her.
“He said to me, ‘If you ever tell anyone, you’ll never see your mum or your brothers and sister again’.
Christina and Jennifer both kept their vow of silence, thinking they were protecting one another by not mentioning the abuse.
“I would cry a lot,” Christina says.
“But I would never cry in front of anyone. I would cry at night when it was dark. I would use my pillow to muffle my sobs.
“I believed I was a bad child. I believed it was my fault. He was raping me [and] I believed I was responsible for it.” .
Christina describes her childhood as “starved of love”, and in hindsight, the lack of affection created the perfect environment for abuse.
“You felt special, and he was showering you with attention, and it was the only time he wasn’t yelling at you and cussing you off,” she said of the abuse.
Me Too
“I didn’t know anything had happened to her, and she didn’t know anything had happened to me,” Jennifer says.
In 2006, out of fear for the safety of Jennifer’s 4-year-old daughter, Christina revealed to Jennifer what their father had done to her.
“When my sister’s daughter was about 4 years old, I went to her, and I said, ‘I have something to tell you, and you’re either going to listen to me or you’re going to hate me for the rest of my life and not believe me’.
“I told her what he’d done, and she said, ‘Oh, my God, he did that to me too‘,” Christina says.
Jennifer broke down when she found out her sister had suffered the same abuse.
“Up until that stage, I wasn’t even willing to tell Chrissy, and when she told me it was just enough that it tipped me over the edge, and I just started crying, I just let it all out.”
They say the pain and anger of what they endured is easier to deal with now that they can work through it together.
“It’s a shared burden,” Christina says.
“Me and Chrissy talk about it quite often,” Jennifer adds.
One day in December 2021, Christina asked Jennifer another question that had long gone unspoken.
“Would you be happy to live with yourself knowing that we’ve never said anything to anyone, gone to the police and tried to get him into jail?
“Would you always regret it if he died and you hadn’t done anything?”
Jennifer replied: “Yes”.
“And we decided, ‘Right, we’re going to go and do it’.”
The day of reckoning that never came
At a Wellington police station, Chrissy went into one room with a police interviewer, and Jenny into another.
“It was scary to start off with, but they say to you, ‘Look, just start from the beginning’,” Jennifer says.
“I just presumed that they would prompt you with questions or stuff like that, and I just didn’t know where to start.
“You just put everything out there, and you just felt absolutely drained afterwards.”
When confronted by police about his daughter’s allegations, Stokes “declined to comment”, according to the police summary of facts.
Stokes was charged with 13 counts of indecency and sexual conduct spanning 11 years of sexual abuse against his daughters. If he had been convicted, he could have been jailed for up to 10 years.
The sisters say they waited through “delay after delay”. At one point, Christina was an hour away from completing the six-and-a-half-hour drive from Wellington to the Hamilton court hearing when she received a call from police telling her the hearing was cancelled.
On November 8, 2024 - three years after Christina and Jennifer told police of the childhood abuse they endured - it was finally time for their father’s day of reckoning.
“We didn’t get to read our victim impact statements ... I would have been freaking nervous doing it and speaking in front of people, but it would have made us feel a bit better. That we would be heard,” Jennifer says.
“It felt like such an injustice that we couldn’t read our statements,” Christina said.
Stokes was ultimately found unfit to stand trial due to his cognitive decline and mild dementia, and Judge Marshall decided to stay the court proceedings, which brought the trial to a close.
However, before the proceeding was stayed and after considering all of Chrissy and Jenny’s detailed evidence, Judge Marshall was satisfied on the balance of probabilities of Stokes’ involvement in all the charges.
A consultant psychiatrist found “there were no specific concerns with regards to public safety”, and Stokes was released back to his residential care home.
It was another devastating blow for the sisters.
Stokes’ lawyer declined to comment on the court’s findings when contacted by the Herald.
“We feel like we haven’t had much justice. We just feel like he’s got away with it, I can understand why people don’t come forward,” Jennifer says.
“We want our story to be heard,” Christina says.
Christina says people have asked why she chose to speak out now, so many years after the sexual abuse happened.
“We want people to know who he is. He is not a hero. He is a paedophile,” Christina says.
The sisters are now fighting to get their father’s St John medals and honours removed.
“He goes to every Anzac Day Parade and has his chest out proud and just makes you sick,” Jennifer says.
“We want to encourage other victims [of abuse] to come forward. A paedophile can be anyone ... they can look like a hero, but they can be quite different behind closed doors,” Christina says.
The sisters’ say their only regret is they didn’t come forward earlier.
A Hato Hone St John spokesperson told the Herald the organisation has received the sisters’ request and is currently working through an internal process.
“We take requests like this seriously and are working to understand the situation as quickly as possible. Due to privacy reasons, we will not be commenting on this matter any further at this time.”
Jaime Lyth is a multimedia journalist for the New Zealand Herald, focusing on crime and breaking news. Lyth began working under the NZ Herald masthead in 2021 as a reporter for the Northern Advocate in Whangārei.