The jury in the trial of former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson has been told that the two women who allege he sexually abused them as children are not sufficiently reliable for the jury to return a guilty verdict.
A lawyer for the former MP concluded his closing submissions by telling the court there were “significant and fundamental issues” with the accounts of both alleged victims, reports RTE.
Mr Donaldson has pleaded not guilty to 18 sexual offences charges, including one count of rape.
Kieran Vaughan KC urged the jury of seven men and five women to “ignore the noise” surrounding the case and to “focus on the evidence,” reports RTE.
If they did so, he said, they would find there were “significant and fundamental issues” with each of the complainants, meaning they were “not sufficiently reliable enough in order to drive you to a sure conclusion that he is guilty.”
The barrister spent most of the morning dealing with the allegations of Complainant A, having addressed the other alleged victim the previous day, reports RTE.
Complainant A has alleged that Mr Donaldson kissed her with his tongue in her mouth, touched her breasts over a prolonged period, and on one occasion used a light, possibly a torch, to look at her genital area.
Mr Vaughan told the jury that Mr Donaldson described the light incident as “a misunderstanding by a young girl who was troubled at the time” and denied that the other alleged incidents of abuse took place, reports RTE.
The barrister said Complainant A had “proven herself to be a very, very unreliable witness” who he said was capable of leaving things out of her account or adding things in to suit her own purposes.
He said there were inconsistencies between what she said in police interviews and what she said in evidence during the trial, reports RTE.
The barrister put it to the jury that the woman had demonstrated during her evidence that she was “capable of telling the most awful of untruths.”
Mr Vaughan questioned why she had failed to tell police about an alleged incident of sexual abuse by another man during her childhood, saying there was “not a whisper, not a word,” reports RTE.
He told the court this was not an oversight but had “the hallmarks of a witness who is trying to portray a certain picture,” adding that her failure to mention it to police was “mind boggling” and “inexplicable.”
The barrister pointed out that Complainant A said during her trial evidence that Mr Donaldson’s wife Eleanor had witnessed an incident in which her husband rubbed the complainant’s chest with his hand under her clothing, but had not made this claim during police interviews, reports RTE.
He put it to the jury that this demonstrated she was a witness they could not safely rely upon.
Mr Vaughan also said Complainant A had failed to give police the proper context for a letter Mr Donaldson sent her in June 2020, reports RTE.
The alleged victim has claimed the letter was an apology for sexual abuse, but Mr Donaldson has said it was an apology for other unrelated matters.
He also said the claim that Mr Donaldson confessed to sexually abusing the alleged victim during a face-to-face meeting with her and her husband in May 2021 “just didn’t happen,” reports RTE.
In his closing remarks, Mr Vaughan asked the jury to note that the two complainants had met before making their allegations, went to police to lodge formal complaints on the same day, cited the same age range for the alleged offending and exchanged a text message stating that “two voices are better than one,” reports RTE.
He ended by telling the jury that if they agreed there were “significant and fundamental issues” with the accounts of the two complainants, those accounts were not sufficiently reliable to support a conclusion that he was guilty.
A barrister representing Mrs Donaldson then addressed the jury, reports RTE.
She has pleaded not guilty to five charges of aiding and abetting her husband’s alleged offending, and faces a trial of the facts as she was deemed medically unfit to stand a conventional criminal trial.
The jury will be asked to determine whether she committed the offences, though she cannot be found guilty or imprisoned but can be acquitted, reports RTE.
Ian Turkington KC told the jury his client had been properly found to be medically incapable of participating in the trial and that they should not hold her absence against her.
“Eleanor Donaldson has not chosen not to be here,” he said. “She has not chosen not to defend herself, and she hasn’t chosen not to come here to clear her name,” reports RTE.
He added that Mrs Donaldson had been denied the opportunity to look them in the eye from the witness box and give her own account of events.
The barrister said all the jury had to go on were the accounts of the two complainants, noting that some of the allegations were decades old and that in a case of this nature it was easy to make allegations and very difficult to mount a defence when they were vague, historic, or both, reports RTE.
He cited a number of reasons why he said Mrs Donaldson could not be found to have committed the offences, including what he described as the unreliability of the two alleged victims’ accounts, and questioned the allegations that she had witnessed some of the abuse and had been made aware of the alleged rape of Complainant B.
Mr Turkington described the prosecution case against his client as bankrupt, reports RTE.
He urged the jury not to assume the complainants were telling the truth, saying that false allegations were put before courts every day for a variety of reasons.
The barrister concluded by telling the jury they could bring an end to “this nightmare” for Mrs Donaldson by returning a not guilty verdict, saying that based on all the evidence, such a verdict was the only true verdict they could return, reports RTE.
The judge is due to address the jury the following day, summarising the evidence and directing them on points of law, before the jury retires to consider its verdicts on the 18 charges against Mr Donaldson and the five charges against Mrs Donaldson, all of which both deny, reports RTE.
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