'I'm victim of sex predator Barry Bennell & my wife is one of Horizon scandal 555' says former PNE player

One of David Lean’s last private conversations with his father was a heart-breaking apology.

His dad had taken him to stay with Barry Bennell, the football coach who sexually abused him more than three decades earlier.

“Our last private conversation together the day before he died was him apologising to me for taking me,” Dave recalls.

It was guilt his dad had carried for years, much like the hurt Dave had kept bottled up for all that time.

“I’ve never blamed either of my parents,” Dave says. “He [ Bennell ] was that good at what he did.”

For the 59-year-old former Preston North End youngster, it remains a painful memory. But almost 10 years after the football abuse scandal erupted in the national headlines, he is determined to tell a story he believes was largely overlooked: how his challenge to a decision by the Crown Prosecution Service helped put Bennell back before the courts.

It is the driving force behind his new memoir, Public Interest: English Football’s Biggest Scandal, due to be published on Wednesday (October 28).

“Well, now’s the time. If I’m ever going to do it, it’s now,” he says of his decision to write the book.

Born and raised in St Annes, Dave lived for football. He went on to spend time in Preston North End’s youth and reserve ranks, but in 1979, aged 11, his ambitions seemed to receive an extraordinary boost during a family holiday at Butlin’s in Pwllheli, North Wales.

There he met Bennell, a talented junior coach whose enthusiasm and connections made him an almost irresistible figure to a boy dreaming of playing professionally.

“I was obsessed with football,” Dave recalls. “It was my entire life and my entire world.”

Bennell cultivated the youngster’s trust and that of his parents. In 1980, when Dave was 12, he was sexually abused during a two-night stay connected with football training. Looking back, Dave can recognise the grooming. At the time, Bennell appeared to offer everything a football-mad child could want.

“He then knew which buttons to press,” he says. “When you’ve got somebody who’s as obsessed with sport as I was in football, then it’s very easy to say, you know, come and stay with me for a couple of nights, get some extra training in.”

Even the photograph of Bennell on his new book’s cover was a deliberate choice, despite one of Dave’s brothers questioning why his abuser should appear on it.

“I wanted people to see that sex offenders can look like a 24-year-old man who is physically fit, well-groomed, athletic,” he explains.

Dave kept the abuse secret for more than 30 years.

In 1997, after learning that Bennell had abused other boys, he was furious that nobody had approached him during the investigation.

“Why has nobody contacted me? Why have I not had a chance to disclose?” he recalls asking himself.

But when his mother asked whether anything similar had happened to him, he denied it, and her response made him determined to remain silent.

“Thank God, as I am not sure how, or if, I could have coped if it had!” she told him, according to his memoir.

“I know it would have absolutely destroyed my mum, which is sort of why I didn’t do it,” he explains.

“I just put it back into its box and tried to get on with things again.”

But the secret continued to haunt him, particularly as his own children grew older.

When his mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2012, Dave knew the time was approaching when he would finally tell the police.

At her funeral in January 2013, he included a cryptic line in a poem he had written: “I promised I would keep it secret, Mum, but it’s almost my time.”

On February 4, he walked into Macclesfield police station to report what had happened more than three decades earlier.

Then came a second ordeal. The CPS decided not to prosecute because it was not considered to be in the public interest, despite Dave being told, he says, that the evidential test had been met.

“They didn’t want to prosecute him,” he recalls. “I went into a meeting with CPS, and they refused point blank.”

The decision devastated him. Bennell had already been convicted of abusing other boys, and Dave could not understand why his case should be different.

“For that to get through the evidential stage, and for me to be seen as credible, and then for it to be turned away on not seen as in the public interest, I just couldn’t live with that.”

He took his case to the newly established Child Sexual Abuse Review Panel. His case was subsequently referred back to prosecutors under new guidance, changes Dave believes his challenge helped bring about.

In April 2015, Bennell pleaded guilty to four sexual offences against Dave and was sentenced to two years in prison. He would later be convicted of numerous further offences against other boys, receiving lengthy additional prison sentences before his death in 2023.

The victory, however, did not bring Dave the public recognition he had hoped for.

When former footballers began revealing abuse in November 2016, he watched the scandal unfold, frustrated that his own fight to bring Bennell back to court was barely mentioned.

“Being brutally honest, I’m just Dave. And nobody’s going to write a story about me after an event that’s happened two years earlier or something,” he says.

Eventually contacted by Sky News, he waived his anonymity and told his story.

“I felt like I dug a tunnel, a big, long, hard tunnel, and somebody came and turned the light on,” he says.

Following the broadcast, he received private Facebook messages from 13 people he knew, all disclosing their own experiences of abuse.

“It just blew my mind,” he says.

Dave believes his fight with the CPS, and the changes to prosecution guidance that followed, have been largely overlooked in accounts of the football abuse scandal.

“I want to set history straight,” he says. “If you put in football abuse scandal, 2016, my name’s not even there.”

Throughout the ordeal, Dave has had the support of his wife Teresa, who has been fighting an extraordinary battle of her own.

“I’ve put my wife through probably years of hell, to be honest,” he admits.

She was among the 555 sub-postmasters who brought the landmark group legal action against the Post Office over its faulty Horizon accounting system.

Dave reveals that, on one of their first dates in 2009, Teresa told him: “I may be going to prison.”

She was never convicted, but spent years challenging allegations of a financial shortfall at her branch, eventually receiving justice in 2025.

“And the last few years have been pretty chaotic for us, because Teresa is actually one of the 555 from the Post Office scandal,” Dave says. “That’s really consumed us again for certainly the last few years.”

In his memoir, he reflects on the extraordinary coincidence of their two struggles.

“What were the chances of us both being embroiled in two of the biggest scandals within the UK,” he writes, recalling how each was unaware of the other’s ordeal when they first met.

Dave, who worked for Fylde Coast YMCA for 35 years and later retrained as a counsellor, now devotes much of his time to raising awareness of child sexual abuse.

He fears complacency, particularly in grassroots sport.

“Would this happen again? Or could this happen again? And the answer for that, for me, is 100% yes.”

He believes professional football has tightened protections, but worries parents at junior clubs seldom ask to see safeguarding policies or evidence of staff training.

“Does anybody ever ask to see policies? Does anybody ever ask to see the safeguarding policies, the staff training? What’s going on? No.”

And he is adamant that the book is not an attempt to profit from his experiences.

“There’s no profit in this book for me. There’s no money in this book for me,” he says.

Any profits will instead be donated to help survivors access counselling, while Dave intends to continue speaking publicly about abuse, grooming and safeguarding.

“I really want to raise awareness around safeguarding,” he says. “Around abuse. Around grooming. Around offenders.”

“I don’t think that’s anything that’s ever going to stop, if I’m honest.”