A JURY heard allegations today (Monday) that a father held a knife to his daughter’s throat and threatened to kill her “stone dead” if she told anyone about his abuse towards her.
The accused man is facing 25 charges for alleged offences on dates between January 1 and 31, 2017, when his daughter was 11 years old, and June 20 and July 6, 2020.
It’s alleged that the father committed five acts of oral rape, two attempted rapes, one count of causing a child to watch sexual activity (pornography), two threats to kill, and 15 counts of sexual assault.
The alleged offences were said to have happened at two locations in County Limerick.
The 39-year-old is denying all charges.
The young girl was interviewed by Gardaà in September 2023. The Central Criminal Court, sitting in Limerick, viewed DVDs of the interview with specially trained Gardaà in which she wept as she described allegations of abuse in which she claimed her father repeatedly assaulted her, committing oral rape, and attempting to have intercourse with her.
If she refused to do what he told her in removing her clothes or to “give him head”, the girl said in her interview, he would “slap me in the face or give me digs”.
On one occasion, she described how he “dragged me by the hair of the head into his bedroom” and another on which he told her “if I want to rape you, I’ll rape you, and you can’t stop me”.
After another alleged assault when she was aged 13, in the kitchen of the family home, the girl said that her father went to the kitchen drawer and “got a big knife”.
“He had me up against the kitchen counter and held the knife to my throat and he told me ‘if you tell anyone I’ll kill you stone dead,'” she told GardaÃ.
On another date when she was 15, she claimed, her father gave her cigarettes to smoke and forced her to watch porn with him.
She said that several times after he had allegedly abused her, her father apologised.
Wearing her school uniform in the interview, the girl said that she felt “disgusted” when her father touched her intimately.
“I felt used. I felt there was no way I could stop him doing this to me. It makes you feel rotten about yourself,” she said.
The girl said in interview that the first person she told about the abuse was a primary school teacher and then her friend and the friend’s mother.
After hearing the allegations, the friend’s mother called the girl’s mother to come to her house and sat with her while she repeated the allegations.
The alleged victim’s mother contacted social workers the next day. Her father was “thrown out of the house” in July 2022, she said.
The trial continues tomorrow before Judge Kerida Naidoo and a jury of seven women and five men.