Waterford man jailed for 8½ years for rape of 16 year old

A 28-year-old Waterford man has been jailed for eight and a half years for raping a 16-year-old girl.

In January 2019 the man, who cannot be identified to protect the victim’s anonymity, had called to the home of the victim’s older sister in Waterford city. He found the teenager alone and the defendant pushed his way into the flat.

He then picked the girl up carried her into a bedroom and raped her. The teenager asked him to stop but he ignored her.

Afterwards, he asked her if she was she okay. When she replied “are you serious” he told her “shut up or it will happen again”. He told her that if she told anyone about what happened he would kill her.

The man stayed in the flat and the frightened victim rang her sister to ask her for help in getting him to leave. She later told her sister what had happened and they went to gardaí.

Gardaí arrested the man who then claimed that the victim had come on to him and he had pushed her away, telling gardaí­: “I have five kids”.

He denied he had any physical contact with the girl and said he had no idea why she would make the allegations which he said were “sick”.

In a later interview the gardaí showed the defendant results of forensic analysis which detected his semen on the victim’s clothing. At that point, he tried to claim the DNA was from his saliva that the victim had wiped off the floor.

He said he wouldn’t “put it past” the teenager to have artificially picked his semen off the floor and wiped it in her clothes.

The man was sent forward for trial at the Central Criminal Court where on October 19th last he pleaded guilty to a charge of rape on January 12th, 2019 at a place in Waterford city.

‘Going through hell’

In her victim impact statement the woman said that “you spent this time living your normal life as though you had not committed the crime of raping a child”.

“While those 1,003 days I spent just existing and going through hell. That night you threatened me if I ever told anyone you would kill me and I believed you,” she said.

The woman said she still doesn’t feel safe, despite the man now being in custody.

“I wish I could say I go to college there (in Waterford) and I meet up with friends in the park or buy my shopping there. But I don’t. I cannot do any of those things because of the anxiety and fear it brings of simply not feeling safe. I don’t feel safe. I never feel safe.”

However, she suggested she had been determined to see the case through. “Maybe you believed I would be like the two out of three rape victims that do not report what has happened to them or the 50 per cent of victims who withdraw their statements?”

The man’s 85 previous convictions include theft, drug offences, criminal damage and one for threatening to kill or cause serious harm, Detective Garda Ann Marie Myler told Antonia Boyle BL, prosecuting.

Paul Greene SC, defending, told the court this his client is now remorseful and knows “it shoudn’t have happened”.

He said his client was intoxicated at the time and asked the court to consider his history of self harm and mental health issues.

Ms Justice Eileen Creedon noted the profound impact of the offence on the victim. She also noted that after pleading guilty the man continued to minimise the offending telling probation officers that the teenager had consented to sex.

The Probation Services assessment placed him at a high risk of committing further sexual violence.

Ms Justice Creedon set a headline sentence of ten years. Noting the mitigating factors of his guilty plea and his late apology she reduced this by six months and suspended the final year.