Donaldson to Be Sentenced for Rape and Child Sexual Abuse
The former leader of the Democratic Unionist Party will be sentenced at Newry Crown Court today for eighteen sex offences against two women when they were children, including one count of rape. The offences were committed between 1985 and 2008. The judge has told him to expect a lengthy sentence. Papers have been lodged for an appeal.
The counts break down into one of rape, thirteen of indecent assault and four of gross indecency, and both women gave evidence at the trial earlier this year. Extracts from their victim impact statements were read at a hearing last month, where his barrister Kieran Vaughan said his client was a man of “previous good character” who “did achieve significant things”, but that “these convictions obliterate all those achievements he has made in his life”. He has been held at Maghaberry Prison since the trial ended, was stripped of his knighthood by the King in July and resigned from the Privy Council. His wife Eleanor, who is sixty, was found after a trial of the facts, granted on mental health grounds, to have done the acts in all five charges against her, four of them of aiding and abetting; she cannot be imprisoned, and the judge will decide later between a treatment order and an absolute discharge. She is appealing that outcome. Three reviews have followed the conviction, by his party, by the party he belonged to for twenty-one years before it, and by the Northern Ireland Assembly, which found nothing requiring further investigation.