A GIRL who claims that her father attempted to rape her, sexually assaulted her multiple times, and that he held a knife to her throat with death threats if she revealed the alleged abuse, admitted that she retracted her original allegations.
Giving evidence before the Central Criminal Court, sitting in Limerick, the alleged victim, who was 11 years old when the alleged assaults began, said that several days after initially making the allegations she retracted the claims against her father.
This occurred in 2018 and, as a result, the court heard, the girl’s mother did not give Gardaà permission to interview 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.
After first retracting her claims, the girl made fresh claims about the abuse to a friend’s mother in August 2023.
She also agreed that in interviews with social workers from Tusla following the later claims, she said there were voices in her head telling her what to do. She agreed this past Tuesday (January 27) in direct evidence this was not true and there were no voices.
The woman she confided in in 2023, who is a foster parent, also gave evidence that she contacted the young girl’s mother and Tusla.
Under cross examination by senior counsel for the defence, Brian McInerney, instructed by Sarah Ryan solicitor, the woman agreed the teenager revealed that she had withdrawn her original allegations.
“She said she had been told to tell a lie (that the allegations were false),” the witness said. Asked by whom, the witness responded: “She was told to tell lies by her father, who held a knife to her throat.”
Asked why the alleged victim had elected to tell her friend’s mother rather than her own mother, the witness said that “she told me she was afraid she wouldn’t be believed”.
Giving evidence, the alleged victim’s mother told prosecuting senior counsel, Diana Stewart, that her relationship with the accused was not a happy one.
She gave evidence of following the accused upstairs on one occasion and finding him in their daughter’s bed.
She said the accused then physically attacked her. She said the relationship had been marred by physical and mental abuse “but he would apologise and things would go back to normal until it happened again”.
She said she had told the accused to leave the house after discovering he had been cheating on her.
She agreed her daughter was aware of marital difficulties. The mother said in the witness box that when her daughter first made claims of abuse, she told Tusla workers that she did not believe them.
A Garda officer giving evidence confirmed transcription of interviews with the accused in which extracts from scripts of his daughter’s accusations were read to him .
He answered that it was “all lies” and alleged that his ex-wife had “put her up to it”.
The court previously viewed DVD recordings of the girl’s original interview in which she described allegations of abuse, claiming 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, the girl said that her father went to the kitchen drawer and “got a big green 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.
The trial continues before Judge Kerida Naidoo.