Meet the priest making peace with a traumatic past

Looking for an answer to her prayers?

An Anglican priest bullied as a teenager has revealed that she has “made peace” with her past. Reverend Joanna Jepson came to prominence in 2003 when she publicly objected to what she claimed was the unlawful termination of a foetus with a cleft palate. The cleric, born with a jaw deformity, was tormented at school and church for years.

It sounds like she had a tough time of it...

She underwent several operations from the age of 17, which involved removing her back teeth and breaking and cutting various facial bones.

And bullied on top of all that?

“Faces are the litmus test against which a person [is] judged,” she writes in her book A Lot Like Eve: Fashion, Faith & Fig-Leaves: A Memoir, published on Thursday. She recalls the time somebody in her church youth group slipped a note in her Bible that read: “You are so ugly, why don’t you just kill yourself?”

How horrendous – and not very Christian, either…

Rev Jepson, 38, who lives in Wells, Somerset, with her husband and their two-year-old son, said she no longer feels an outsider.

So she’s turned the other cheek?

She said she has finally “made peace with what happened”.

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