A FATHER has been found guilty of 25 charges of sexual assault on his daughter, including attempted rape, oral rape, and defilement of a child by making her watch pornography.
The offences happened on dates between January 1 and 31, 2017, when the girl was 11 years old, and June 20 and July 6, 2020.
The victim wept after the jury announced a unanimous guilty verdict on each of the charges.
The Central Criminal Court, sitting in Limerick, heard evidence of 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 39-year-old denied all charges.
During the three-day trial, the court viewed a DVD of a statement made by the victim to Gardaà in September 2023.
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 said, he told her “if I want to rape you, I’ll rape you, and you can’t stop me”.
After another 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 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.
On another date when she was 15, the court heard, her father gave her cigarettes to smoke and forced her to watch pornography with him.
She said that several times after he had abused her, her father apologised saying “I shouldn’t be doing this. You’re my child I’m meant to protect you.”
The girl said in her Garda interview 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.
Giving evidence to the trial in person, she agreed that she had retracted her accusations relating the events of 2018 shortly after originally making them. She also agreed she had lied when she told Tusla workers that she had heard voices in her head telling her what to do.
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, 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 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 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.
A Garda officer giving evidence confirmed transcripts of interviews with the accused in which extracts from daughter’s accusations were read to him.
The court heard that after hearing what his daughter said in relation to each of the charges, he said “it’s all lies” and claimed the girl’s mother had “put her up to it to hurt me” because he had begun a new relationship after the marriage broke down and because it was revealed he had kissed another woman while still married to the girl’s mother.
The trial also heard that the girl was brought for examination to a sex assault clinic but that no scarring or evidence of damage was found in her genital or anal area.
The doctor who carried out the examination, however, said this was not unusual in children of her age who had been sexually abused.
The defence did not call witnesses but, in summing up, Mr McInerney SC explained to the jury that they did not have to as it is “the prosecution’s job to prove guilt beyond the very high standard of reasonable doubt”.
He said there was “no corroboration in 24 of the charges and in the 25th, her mother is the only one. But is she a reliable witness?”
After almost five and a half hours of deliberation over two days, the jury returned the guilty verdict.
The man was remanded to prison until March 9 when Judge Kerida Naidoo will sit in Dublin to hear a victim impact statement and impose sentence.
None of the parties can be named in order to protect the anonymity of the victim