One month in jail is disappointing, says ‘Zumo’ actor’s ex
THE former girlfriend of an ex-Fair City actor who was jailed for just one month for a brutal attack on her has said his short sentence will not encourage victims to come forward.
Sarah Behan said she was convinced her expartner Patrick Fitzpatrick, who played Zumo Bishop on the soap, ‘was going to kill me’ as he attacked her in 2016 in front of her five-year-old son.
She said: ‘He completely flipped, pinned me up against the wall, started to choke me.’
She said he repeatedly hit her and that as her son tried to come to her aid, she jumped on him to protect him, but Fitzpatrick went on to punch her ‘full force at the back of the head’.
Ms Behan said that at one point during the attack almost two years ago she considered jumping out her flat window to flee Fitzpatrick.
The actor pleaded guilty to the assault and was jailed last week for just one month. It came just two months after he was spared jail for punching and biting another ex-partner.
Ms Behan, from Blanchardstown, Dublin, said she was disappointed about the sentence. She told RTÉ’s Today With Miriam he got an ‘extremely short’ term.
‘I was disappointed it was only a month,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t send a great message to the public in general. It sends out a really bad message that the sentence was so short.’