A leading sports coach has been found not guilty of indecently assaulting a now 43-yer-old woman who he trained as a teenager in the 1970s. Judge Yvonne Murphy told the 58-year-old father of a family, who cannot be named for legal reasons, he was free to go on day five of the trial.
The accused had denied 30 counts of indecently assaulting the woman at a Dublin school between June 1976 and January 1979 when she was aged between 14 and 16. The jury spent less than an hour deliberating before returning not guilty verdicts on 22 charges after Judge Murphy had also directed it to find the accused not guilty of eight of the charges.
The woman told the jury the accused would regularly "French" kiss her and feel her breasts and body. She was infatuated with him and believed they were having a relationship.
The accused denied the allegations. He agreed that after meeting her in a pub some years after she left school he formed a close friendship with her. They would meet for dinner and drinks until sometime in the mid-1980s when their friendship "began to drift". She had confided in him she had been sexually assaulted while abroad in the early 1980s, and he told her to report the matter.
The jury heard the woman also claimed to have been sexually abused by another sports coach while a teenager.