‘Sex addict’ nurse guilt y of sexual assault of co-worker
Judge found accused’s denials ‘not credible’
A ‘SEX ADDICT’ nurse has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a co-worker in his car after ‘persistently’ offering the woman a lift and boasting about threesomes.
Leonard Iliuta, 36, told the victim he was ‘a sex addict’, and quizzed her about her love life before touching her on her upper thigh several times, Dublin District Court was told.
He pleaded not guilty to sexually assaulting the healthcare worker in the incident, which happened in the past five years.
A non-jury hearing convicted him after Judge John Hughes found his denials ‘not credible’.
Iliuta, of Seaview Mews, Seatown West, Swords, Co. Dublin, was remanded on bail pending preparation of a victim impact statement to be presented at his sentence hearing later this month.
The woman told the court she had been working the same shifts as Iliuta, and she usually left before him to avoid his ‘quite persistent’ offers of a lift home in his car. On the day of the incident, she ‘reluctantly’ accepted.
Initially, they chatted about him having a left-hand-drive car, she said, adding that during the journey that the ‘conversation shifted to a kind of sexual nature’, and he brought up the subject of addiction.
She testified that ‘he stated that he was a sex addict and there was nothing he had not done’, including cheating on his girlfriend, threesomes and he had previously been with a man. She alleged he did not seem ashamed of it.
She said the accused mentioned that she shared a flat with another woman. The witness said he asked her if they ever had sex and if she had sex with a named male.
She said she was uncomfortable, and Iliuta ‘put his hand on my left knee, lingered for a few seconds and then put it back on the gear stick’.
The woman told the court that every time he touched her leg, his hand lingered, and it slid up, close to her vagina. She recalled that the car stopped at traffic lights, and she asked to get out so she could walk. However, he pulled her legs back to him when she tried to move away. The court heard he put his hand on her left knee and once more moved up her thigh.
The woman remembered being ‘fairly shaken up’ when she got home and immediately told her flatmate what had happened. She then notified the gardaí and her employer.
State solicitor Niamh McKernan asked how it had made her feel; she replied that she had been reluctant to take the lift.
She described Iliuta as being over-friendly at work, but she felt pressured to accept the lift and ‘I could not get over how uncomfortable I felt’.
The court heard she no longer works with Iliuta, who had no prior criminal convictions.
She was cross-examined about her evidence that he had offered to drive her home 18 times over three weeks. Defence counsel Garrett Casey said work records showed they had the same shifts on five dates, and she agreed. She rejected the claim Iliuta’s relationship with her was entirely professional but accepted she sent him a message of congratulations on the birth of his child.
Iliuta denied the allegations and denied talking about sex. He claimed they just spoke about him having a foreign car and that she told him she was stressed, and that she and others at work were taking drugs.
Asked if he notified his employer about drug abuse among other workers, he said no and claimed it was ‘none of my business’.
Questioned by Ms McKernan, he admitted he sent the woman a message via Facebook saying he missed her, but claimed that was a work-related remark.
Ms McKernan put it to him that he had spoken about being addicted to sex and that he kept touching the complainant’s leg and moving his hand toward her vagina, which he denied and maintained never happened.
He claimed to have been shocked when he learned of the allegations and that it was character defamation.
‘Put his hand on my knee and lingered’