Sympathy? For this vile predator? No, he should rot in jail
MATT COOPER’S EXCORIATING COLUMN:
THE paedophile Tom Humphries, who has callously and casually wrecked the life of a vulnerable teenage girl, exploiting her for his own depraved sexual pleasures, has been sentenced to just two-anda-half-years in prison.
He belatedly admitted his crimes against this young girl, more than six years after they were first disclosed.
With remission, he might be out of prison by the end of 2018. The unexpected leniency of the sentence is astonishing and deeply disturbing: how little do we think of the victims of sexual assault and abuse – and of children – that we punish perverts so lightly?
Judge Karen O’Connor followed precedent and guidelines apparently in deciding her sentence. The charges of defilement only carried a sentence of five years at the time of the crime (since increased to seven, for what is effectively rape). However, the sexual exploitation charges to which Humphries admitted, offered the potential for a life sentence; O’Connor said the ‘headline’ figure she considered was just three years. It seems that an issue for our legislators and judges to consider, at the very least.
Judge O’Connor has been extraordinarily generous to the former Irish Times sports writer. Incredibly, she believes it is difficult not to have sympathy for Humphries ‘in relation to his current situation’. Well, take it from me, judge, many people have zero sympathy for him. We don’t give a damn that, as she said ‘the higher the profile and success of someone in our society, the greater the fall’. So, did the deserved public opprobrium he has endured contribute to a reduced sentence? If so, that would be appalling.
Serious as that is, it’s not what’s most important here: it is the young woman whose life was ruined and the example it sets to other young women who might give evidence in a court. That she has been harmed grievously is not an assumption on my part. Consider her own victim impact statement to the court: ‘I had to deal with sexual encounters at such a young age with a man three times my age, which made my physically, emotionally and mentally ill,’ she said. There’s lots more, but that is more than enough to be getting on with.
Humphries benefited from pleas for leniency from his two daughters, one of whom, shockingly, discovered the evidence of her father’s deviance on a phone he gave her. Remember, the abuse might never have been discovered, or punished, if she and her mother had not gone to the gardaí. Humphries would have remained free to prey on other young girls. It is not unfair to note that charges involving a second girl were dropped because evidence from a key witness could not be secured.
The victim in the case that came to the courts had first came into contact with the sports writer in December 2008. Hum2012, phries worked as a volunteer coach at St Vincent’s, a prominent GAA club in Dublin. The 14-year-old was a camogie player, known to be vulnerable because of an eating disorder. Humphries began to text her about school issues and camogie, but then those texts became sexual, graphic and explicit. More than 16,000 texts were exchanged in one three-month period. The sexual abuse of the minor began in December 2010 at an apartment where Humphries lived since he separated from his wife and family. It continued over the next 14 months.
Opprobrium
When gardaí began investigating him, he attempted suicide, the first of two attempts. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Dublin. He could not be questioned or arrested while in hospital but was eventually interviewed by gardaí in September 2012. He chose not to make any admissions in case he incriminated himself. The Director of Public Prosecutions instructed that he be charged in February 2014, leading to his eventual guilty pleas.
That timeline is important to the involvement of sportswriter David Walsh in offering public support many times to Humphries over the years. In late 2012, Mr Walsh published a book called Seven Deadly Sins, which outlined his campaign to unmask the cyclist Lance Armstrong as a drugs cheat. Armstrong was something of an icon, a cancer survivor who had beat all the odds not just to live but to become a champion. He used his status and profile to raise enormous funds for charity – leading many to lionise him. Mr Walsh did not believe that the good he had done in that regard mitigated his being a drugs cheat.
When I read the book, I had been very surprised to see Mr Walsh not just write about Humphries as a journalist but to describe him, despite the circumstances of an ongoing criminal investigation, in one four-word sentence as: ‘A fine man too’. I recorded an interview with Mr Walsh about the book on December 15, for broadcast later that day on The Last Word on Today FM. Unprompted, Mr Walsh introduced Humphries to our conversation. I responded that he had brought up the subject of Humphries and that I needed to be careful as there was much being said about him at that time that was not being aired on radio or appearing in print for legal reasons.
However, we returned to Humphries later in our conversation. No formal charges had been made at that stage, so Humphries was, in the eyes of the law, an innocent man and for me to have said otherwise would have been to risk an action against me and the station for defamation. I had to phrase my questions carefully.
To my astonishment, Mr Walsh called him a ‘great, great man’. When I asked him how he would react if people defended Armstrong on similar grounds, he said the comparison was ‘odious’ and ‘completely inappropriate’. Here is just some of the praise he delivered: ‘All I am going to say is I know a damn sight more about it than most people and I believe Tom is a fine man, and in the end, that will come out and people will understand he is a fine man. And I guarantee you, anyone who knows Tom and has remained in touch with him over the last two-anda-half-years, will offer you exactly the same view that I am offering. They will have no doubts and Tom has shown himself to be a fine man through this.’
Yesterday, belatedly, but after his character reference had aided his friend, Mr Walsh finally condemned Humphries and offered support to the real victim. Loyalty is usually a fine trait in a friend. It is good to know that somebody will be there to protect or defend you if you are in trouble. But there are times when loyalty is badly misplaced and this was one.
The other man to have given a reference was former Cork hurler Dónal Óg Cusack. Having gone to ground initially, Mr Cusack subsequently acknowledged and apologised for his mistake, when he said last week that ‘I absolutely condemn the crimes he has committed. I cannot begin to imagine the terrible suffering of the victim. I apologise for any hurt or offence caused by my action. My intention was to help a human in a dark place who asked me for help. I showed a lack of judgment ... for which I am genuinely sorry.’
That is a pretty comprehensive mea culpa, but it needed to be. Last night, he resigned from the board of Sports Ireland and his position on the coaching complement of the Clare senior hurling team. That was appropriate, given that Humphries abused his position within the GAA and should be the end of that for Cusack, who is not the real villain here, although the role of character references on behalf on convicted criminals is now a real subject for debate, as is the issue of appropriately long sentences to aid in deterrence, punishment and correction.
The criminal, however, is Humphries. He deserves that fact, and not his journalism, to be his epitaph. It is just a pity that he doesn’t have a longer time in prison ahead of him to dwell on that.