Don’t name my rapist, says victim
A WOMAN raped in her hallway by a man who followed her home does not want him to be named because she fears it would ruin his life.
The 39-year-old offender, from Egypt, first sexually assaulted the foreign student on a bus from Dublin to Carlow after he sat beside her even though she didn’t want him to.
He groped her and then followed her to her home.
The man told her he would ‘give her the best ten minutes of her life’ before raping the then 27-year-old woman between July 7 and 8, 2016, the Central Criminal Court heard.
The court heard that identifying the man, who is an illegal immigrant and who has a previous conviction for masturbating in public, will not identify the victim but that she does not want him named because it will ‘destroy his life’. The man, who currently cannot be named at the direction of the judge, was found guilty by a jury of one count of rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of threatening to kill the then 27-year-old woman between July 7 and 8, 2016.
The jury returned the unanimous verdicts last November following a three-week trial. Judge Isabel Kennedy ordered that reporting restrictions would remain in place for now and that she would deal with the issue at the sentencing date on Wednesday of next week.
At his sentence hearing yesterday, the court heard the man has a previous conviction for exposing himself to two women in Harcourt Street, Dublin in 2013, Garda Sylvia Ryan said. The court also heard that a deportation order is in place but he is appealing against it.
Garda Ryan told the court the victim was living and working in Ireland for the summer of 2016. On the day in question, she took a bus from Carlow to Dublin to visit a friend.
She met the accused man on the bus and the pair got talking. They then visited Stephen’s Green together, where the man tried to kiss her. The woman rejected his advances and shortly afterwards she said goodbye to him and met her friend at Trinity College.
The victim was returning to Carlow that night and her friend walked her to the bus station. The court heard she was uneasy to discover that the man was going to be on the same bus home. Garda Ryan said the woman got on the bus first and put her rucksack on the seat beside her, but the man sat beside her anyway. During the bus journey, he sexually assaulted her by groping her, while she tried to fend him off.
The court heard the man then accompanied the woman to her home even though she asked him to leave her alone. Instead, the man came with her into her house.
He asked to use the bathroom and when he emerged, he started masturbating in front of her, the court heard. When she threatened to take a photo of him, he became angry and started groping her, before they fell on the stairs and he raped her.
‘He told her he would give her the best ten minutes of her life,’ prosecution barrister Pauline Walley said. The front door remained open throughout the attack. The woman screamed throughout and the man threatened to kill her if she did not stop. One of her housemates heard her and came to the landing of the house. The rapist fled but was arrested at a later date in Dublin.
In a victim-impact statement read out in court by Ms Walley, the woman said of the rape: ‘In that moment, I wished to be dead. After this man raped me, I felt empty.’
‘In that moment, I wished to be dead’