Courts

Man who raped unconscious wife repeatedly with objects jailed for 11 years

Judge said perpetrator engaged in an ‘egregious breach of the normal trust between a married couple’

Mr Justice Burns handed down a sentence of 12 years, with the final year suspended, to the man who raped his unconscious wife at the Central Criminal Court on Monday.

Isabel Hayes
Mon Jan 15 2024 - 12:26

A man who repeatedly raped his wife with various household objects while she was passed out in an “egregious breach of the normal trust between a married couple” has been jailed for 11 years.

The Dublin man (49) was found guilty by a jury last month of 11 counts of sexually assaulting his wife by penetrating her vagina with various objects.

The abuse occurred in the family home on unknown dates between January 2005 and September 2014.

The verdicts were handed down following a retrial, after the jury in the first trial returned not guilty verdicts to four counts and was unable to agree on the remaining counts.

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It was the State’s case that the now 50-year-old woman was unconscious and unable to give her consent when her husband, who cannot be named to protect her anonymity, carried out the rapes. He has no previous convictions.

In her victim impact statement which she read out at a previous sentence hearing, the woman described her shock at discovering her husband had been using her for his “sick fantasies”.

The woman said that the moment she discovered, in 2019, the “perverse, indecent, hideous images” on her husband’s home computer of him raping her with various implements - “It was like a bomb went off in my head”.

“He changed my past, my present and my future,” she said.

The woman said she felt she was married to a stranger, who had inflicted “the most heinous and violent abuse” on her.

Sentencing the man on Monday at the Central Criminal Court, Mr Justice Paul Burns said it was difficult to convey what the woman had gone through.

He said not only had she discovered that her husband and the father of her children was someone “completely different” to the man she thought he was, but that she also had to sit through a number of trials where “degrading and dehumanising images” of her were shown to the juries.

She bore these trials “with immense courage and dignity”, the judge said.

The judge noted there was little that could be said in mitigation for the man, who continues to maintain his innocence. He engaged in an “egregious breach of the normal trust between a married couple” by raping his wife repeatedly and over a protracted period of time, he said.

Mr Justice Burns handed down a sentence of 12 years and suspended the final year on a number of conditions, including that the man engage in a course on sexuality and consent upon his release from custody.

A local detective previously told Eilis Brennan SC, prosecuting, that the abuse came to light when the woman discovered images her husband had taken of her on his computer in March 2019.

She asked him to leave the family home and made a complaint to gardai. The couple were married for over 20 years and have children together.

In the woman’s victim impact statement, she said in the wake of the marriage breakdown, she suffered from anxiety, depression, sleeplessness and panic attacks. She said she struggled with financial issues and had to ask her family for money. “It was unbearable,” she said.

She said she deleted every memory of the man from her family home. “But I can’t delete the pain, humiliation and degradation he put me through,” she said.

The man’s sister took the stand at his sentence hearing and outlined his family background. The court heard the man came from a hard-working family. He was privately educated and previously had a good career, the court heard.

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