Ex-reverend tried to get woman to send him intimate photos
A FORMER church minister has admitted using a fake online profile to try to persuade a woman to send him explicit photographs.
David Finlay Macdonald, 29, admitted a charge of attempting to compel his victim by extortion to send him intimate images in 2010.
The former assistant leader at Back Free Church on the Isle of Lewis faces being placed on the sex offenders’ register after yesterday’s hearing at Stornoway Sheriff Court.
The offence took place before Macdonald had begun studying divinity or taken up his church role.
His victim testified yesterday how she had been contacted by someone calling themself ‘Eilidh’ on MSN Messenger and chatted with ‘her’ for two days.
But Eilidh was in fact the alias being used by the ‘manipulative’ Macdonald.
The woman told senior procurator fiscal depute Dev Kapadia how Eilidh had claimed that she wanted to ‘figure out if she was bisexual or lesbian’ and demanded explicit images. But the victim refused to comply and did not send any. In a statement to defence solicitor Robert More she said that she was left feeling ‘sickened to my stomach’. She added: ‘I felt I was being blackmailed.’
Later in the hearing, Macand donald admitted that he had set up the false identity.
The court accepted not guilty pleas to two other offences from 2015 relating to two other women.
Sheriff Gordon Lamont called for background reports deferred sentencing until January. At that time he will also consider submissions on whether Macdonald should be placed on the sex offenders’ register. His bail was continued in the meantime.
Macdonald was suspended from his post as an assistant minister in 2018 after the allegations ‘of a most serious nature’ against him emerged.
His suspension was announced from the pulpit at a Sunday service by the Rev Calum Macleod, clerk to the church’s Western Isles Presbytery.
A spokesman later confirmed that Macdonald had been suspended on March 1, 2018, pending an investigation. Macdonald, who had been ‘well regarded in the community’ according to an anonymous source, went on to resign from his position.
The allegations surfaced while his wife, Jayne, was expecting their first child and when the church was still reeling from the suicide of its ‘superstar’ minister and spiritual guide, the Rev Dr Iain D Campbell.
It followed the Daily Mail’s disclosure 53-year-old Dr Campbell had been found dead after accusations that he had been having affairs with several of the female members of the church.
‘Sickened to my stomach’