A meeting with my rapist... one woman’s quest for closure
❝ He was strangling, hitting, biting and sexually assaulting me
❝ When I walked in, I just saw a man and the fear evaporated
Ailbhe Griffith was just 21 when she was sexually assaulted on her way home from work. Nine years later, on what she calls ‘a wonderful day’, she confronted her attacker. A screening of a film of that encounter, with Ailbhe, now 35, playing herself, takes place at the QFT in Belfast on Monday as part of Restorative Justice Week. Here, Ailbhe tells Linda Stewart how the momentous meeting helped her find closure
A bus stop on a quiet leafy street. A set of house keys cushioned in wet grass. A lipstick in a clear plastic bag. All interspersed with flashes of a Garda report outlining the horrific details of a brutal sexual attack.
The opening moments of The Meeting are silent but awash with unbearable tension. Close-up images of painful bite marks. Evidence bags. A ticking clock. Rays of sunshine washing into a meeting room where a group of people wait, seated round a table. It isn’t until the 12-minute mark that anyone even speaks.
This is a film about a meeting between a young woman and the man who raped her. One man leans forward, his hands jittering nervously. His companion leans back emotionlessly. The drawnout shot leaves you studying the space, wondering which one it is. Then, the final participants arrive and the meeting begins.
This is the story of Ailbhe Griffith, who plays herself in the film, which re-enacts her meeting with the man who, nine years earlier, subjected her to an horrific sexual assault and left her seriously injured and fearing for her life. Ailbhe had hoped her account of the after-effects would be told at his trial, but instead she found herself sidelined and desperately in need of closure. This is a meeting that she now describes as the most wonderful day of her life.
The Meeting is being screened at Belfast’s Queen’s Film Theatre on Monday as part of Restorative Justice Week, and includes a Q&A with Ailbhe, director Alan Gilsenan and Dr Marie Keenan, a leading practitioner of restorative justice internationally.
Now the mother of an eightyear-old girl and working in the financial services industry in Dublin, Ailbhe tells me what happened to her in the summer of 2005. She had a summer job at a bar-restaurant in Dublin city centre and was living with her parents, travelling home every evening by bus.
“I’d been doing it for a couple of weeks, and on this particular night I had one of those experiences on a bus, of someone giving you a strange feeling,” she says. “He was just sitting really close beside me and looking in my direction.
“I got off the bus and kind of had a sense that he also got off, although I didn’t look round. I was walking down the street and could sense that somebody was walking parallel to me on the other side of the road.
“I turned to go into where I was living and, to cut a long story short, he ran up behind me, grabbed me by the throat and dragged me into a garden, a bushy area close to where I lived.
“He was strangling, hitting and everything, biting me and sexually assaulting me. It went on for a good while. At the end of that I hoped he would just run off or whatever, but he didn’t — he dragged me somewhere else. It was fortunate that two guys were walking down the street and noticed something happening. They shouted over, ‘Is everything okay?’ and the person that was attacking me ran.”
The man was arrested by gardai the next morning and eventually sentenced to nine years in prison, although he ultimately served around three-quarters of the term.
“It was a very, very difficult time,” says Ailbhe.” I was hugely traumatised by the whole thing. I found it very difficult to function at all — I was on a different wavelength to my normal self.
“All the things that people do when they have PTSD, I would have had — eating disorder, depression and everything that goes along with it.
“All I could think about was this event. My whole life existed around this event.
“If I was trying to read a book, I couldn’t get past the first sentence, because I would just start thinking about it again. I was looking forward to going to court, because I felt it was my chance to voice what this had done to me.
“I remember feeling very much like I wanted to use the victim impact statement to explain to him directly how he had made me feel and the impact it had on me, to confront him.”
But Ailbhe discovered that wasn’t how things work in the criminal justice system. Instead, she found herself very much on the periphery of proceedings.
“It wasn’t about me — it was all about him being punished for the crime he had committed. That process needs to take place, but what I am advocating is that something different needs to happen as well,” she says.
Years later, Ailbhe was still struggling with the negative feelings caused by the attack when she learned “accidentally” that she might be able to come faceto-face with her attacker as part of a restorative justice process.
It took a long time to set up, with numerous preparatory meetings to set out the structure and ground rules — what statements or questions could be included, what participants would be prepared to say, even where everyone would sit.
But nine years after that horrific night, Ailbhe finally got her meeting.
“I was overwhelmed — it was such a surreal experience to know that I was going to face him,” she says.
“I was very happy that I was going in, but very anxious. (There was) some fear, but that was overcome by my desire to do what I was doing.
“When I walked in, I just saw a man and the fear began to evaporate. Here was this man that had been a monster in my mind for all those years, who could have killed me and was so dangerous. Everything that you would fear and there he was, sitting like a normal man.”
The film retells this hugely intense encounter with ‘Martin Swann’ (his real identity has been kept confidential), and is packed with a variety of unspoken emotions.
Using prepared notes, Ailbhe recounts to Swann the impact the attack had on her, how it had changed her perception of the world, her experiences after the attack and her confusion about why she was singled out.
She tells him she believed that most people, most of the time, meant the best for others.
“I don’t think that anymore,” she says.
“You did not see me as human — for such a long time, I didn’t understand that. You were not seeing me as me.”
Ailbhe describes herself to Swann as “obliterated” in the wake of the attack.
“I would wake up every morning and for three seconds everything was okay, then I’d remember and I’d wish I’d never woken up.
“I replayed it over and over again. I became emotionally numb. I felt nothing for myself, my family, my friends.
“I felt like I was in a big white room with nothing, no colour, no shade, this emptiness. Then I was depressed and I was falling from that big white room into a big black hole. You understand what that feels like, don’t you?
“I never believed somebody would harm me unless I harmed them, but that’s not true. I’m the same person I was, but my perception of reality has changed. My relationship to the world has changed.
“Now I see the fragility of life, my own fragility. I realise now that I’m not strong. None of us are and neither are you — we are all fragile, all of us.”
The Meeting features a stunning performance by Terry O’Neill, who plays Martin Swann, virtually speechless at first but gradually opening up and answering questions — and noticeably addressing Ailbhe by name towards the end.
He tells her how he read the account of the attack over and over in prison.
“I couldn’t believe it, just all the stuff. Little things, like. I couldn’t believe it. I read it again and again, all the details. I remember reading it and my heart... bang.
“I always wanted a normal life, (to be) just an ordinary guy (with) ordinary things. I never had a girlfriend and could never seem to get one. I was pretty lonely growing up. A bit of a loner, a Johnny-no-mates. I used to sometimes wish there was something wrong with me to explain it all. It’s just a mystery to me.”
Ailbhe tells Swann how she is plagued by negative thoughts.
“These negative thoughts are a burden on me and I don’t want to feel that way anymore,” she says.
“Meeting you today was about making you a human, making you less of a monster. I can only feel compassion for you — I believe that you are a human.”
The benefit of the meeting for Ailbhe is that it has transformed her traumatic feelings about the attack into something quite different.
She tells me she used to feel nothing but anger when she thought back to the attack, but now those memories are associated with the meeting, with a sense of compassion and being able to let go of the trauma.
“I am not left with the negativity of the experience anymore — I’m left with the positivity of making this negative experience something that is empowering me,” she says,
“Here I was, able to sit across from this person, talking to him without fear. There was no control or imbalance of power. It was being respected as a person.
“At the end, he started to use my name. All of a sudden, I was a person in his eyes. He couldn’t avoid facing my humanity because I was sitting there.”
During the meeting, Ailbhe asked Martin why he singled her out and attacked her and whether he intended to kill her. I ask her if she is satisfied with the answers she got.
“The questions I asked were the main questions that I needed answered,” she says.
“I was conscious that, realistically, I was never going to get a reasonable, rational explanation for this, because there is no reasonable, rational explanation.
“But I got an answer and I did get the truth of what he saw. For me, that is actually closure. “Some people wouldn’t care less about knowing it, but I am
the kind of person that wants to know why.”
After her meeting, Ailbhe worked closely with Marie Keenan, often going along with her to tell her story and show how restorative justice had helped her to heal.
Marie’s research would suggest that the greater the impact of the crime, the greater the benefit of the meeting for the victim.
From Ailbhe’s point of view, the criminal justice process lacks a much-needed mechanism to allow the victim to seek answers and achieve closure. “It’s not an alternative to justice — it’s an additional justice mechanism for victims of violent crime and sexual crime,” she says.
When Alan Gilsenan asked her about showing the experience in a film, she felt there could be no better way to advocate for restorative justice than to show it in action.
Originally her role was going to be played by an actress, but she agreed to play herself.
“Instinctively, I felt it would be such an interesting thing to do,” Ailbhe says.
“I felt the authenticity of that meeting would especially come through. The film was really close to how it was in that room,.
“Terry was amazing as an actor — he’s a really talented guy. He just did a really spectacular job, just really nailed it.”
It’s hard to imagine that a meeting about a violent attack could feel positive, but the experience captured in the film shows that Ailbhe is right — there is a palpable sense of relief by the close for both victim and perpetrator.
“When I think back to my real meeting, it was a really positive day,” she says.
“It was a wonderful day in my life that I’ll never forget — and we were re-enacting that wonderful day.”
Meeting you was about making you seem human, less of a monster
The Meeting will be screened at the QFT at 6.20pm on Monday, November 19, with a Q&A session