Sometimes people talk about “historic” offences.
Abhorrent as they were, they happened a long time ago.
Life moves on, doesn’t it?
This week, a 78-year-old serial child rapist was in the dock. Derry O’Rourke already has a catalogue of convictions for serious sexual offences against young girls back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and has served many years in prison.
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His last stretch inside ended in 2007.
Now there is a new case. The offences happened between October 1989 and September 1990.
But nothing historic about it. The pain he inflicted continues.
“You made me create a mask for myself,” his victim told him in court. “One which kept me silent, one which would not let me speak, one which moulded my life for years.”
O’Rourke pleaded guilty before – there were 11 victims in one instance, but for this latest trial over two decades later there was just one victim, and he denied all charges, sentencing the woman whose life he ruined to years of investigation, followed by retraumatising interrogation in the Central Criminal Court.
He was convicted on July 17th. His sentencing hearing was this week.
Derry O’Rourke: Ireland’s most convicted child sex abuser
Then, and only then, did he instruct his lawyer to accept the jury’s verdict and admit his crime, asking to apologise.
“Too little too late,” said Ms Justice Melanie Grealy. “It rings hollow.”
Proper order.
Just another mitigating factor to go with his “multiplicity of health complications”, including the fact that he suffers from “sleep disturbance”.
So the notorious Derry O’Rourke can’t sleep at night.
Really?
Tell that to the many women whose lives he callously shattered. The women who still suffer nightmares about the unspeakable things he did to them when they were kids, and looked up to him as a trusted and wise mentor.
Tell that to the 48-year-old woman who, just a few years ago, finally found the strength buried deep within her wounded 13-year-old self to face down this demon and reclaim her life.
On Tuesday, in a powerful victim impact statement, she also talked about sleep.
After the highly regarded international swimming coach raped her on the floor of a cluttered boiler room at her school’s swimming pool, she told nobody.
She remembers the noise of the machinery and the smell of the gym mats and the heavy weight of this man’s body on top of hers.
But she was a very thoughtful child and didn’t want to cause any upset at home because a family member was ill at the time.
She stored up the hurt and anger and shame, repressed her feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, and attempted to end her own life by taking an overdose.
“To go to sleep into the dark safety of forever,” she said.
Why?
“To feel nothing. To feel nothing. For it not to matter what you did to me.”
How must it have felt to hear in court that the man convicted on one charge of raping her and 11 counts of sexual assault is having difficulty sleeping?
“You left me little room to breathe – never mind to sleep,” she told him from the witness box.
On Wednesday, before sentencing the unblinking O’Rourke to 10 years in jail, Judge Melanie Greally praised his blossoming survivor for the way she had conducted herself during the trial and on her victim impact statement, delivered “with immense courage and dignity”, confronting her abuser with the consequences of his abuse by telling him directly how his actions had left their mark on every area of her life.
It was, indeed, a compelling exposition of his wickedness. A moment of reckoning for him and, with each crisply enunciated word from her, a sense of growing liberation from the malign grip he had exerted over her adult life.
“You. Took. My. Voice.”
Not any more.
Calm and dignified, she spoke slowly in an unwavering tone of controlled anger and disdain, as if gaining a little more strength with each important line.
He took her childhood and her innocence and the life she had dreamed lay ahead of her. He almost broke her spirit. Almost. But 35 years later, she came looking for justice.
When the woman who left the country because of him found the courage to come back and fight back, and called him out publicly for what he is, you could sense her spirits lifting.
She left the witness box and walked straight past her abuser without a glance, shoulders out, head high and a smile spreading across her face as she joined her family and supporters in the back of the courtroom.
The verdict was delivered at lunchtime on Wednesday.
O’Rourke, as ever, sat impassively in the dock. But he was listening to everything, slowly turning his head to hear the various lawyers and the former child he raped, whose name he cannot remember, speak.
What is it with these monsters and their warped opinion of themselves? Taxi rapist Raymond Shorten who was jailed last week was the same.
O’Rourke had such confidence and brazenness that he even got in touch with his victim’s father when she didn’t return to training after he had raped her, saying she should rejoin the team because she had great potential (he had never chosen her for his elite team and purposely isolated her for individual coaching).
But she stuck to her guns and refused to go back.
The abuser said he was abused by a teacher when he was a child, but never elaborated. His victim, in her statement, had the perfect riposte – she had been abused too, but unlike him, she chose not to continue the vicious cycle.
“It was your choice... Now I want to hand that burden back to you. It is all your fault.”
[ Gardaí suspect ‘predator’ swim coach Derry O’Rourke abused more victimsOpens in new window ]
Are victim statements worth it? It won’t matter a jot to serial offenders like Derry O’Rourke, but giving his victim the chance to impart her distressing side of his sordid history was so obviously important and helpful to her.
“You changed my world and my entire existence, and it was for the worse. With complete and utter disregard, you deliberately used me for your own personal gratification... Your brutalisation of me has been and continues to be incredibly painful.”
The sense of relief radiating from her afterwards was touching to witness. Outside the court, she laughed and smiled with her legal team.
As she said the day before: “I finally found my voice.”
None of this is historic.
The legal term ended on Wednesday. That day in the Central Criminal Court, 12 rape cases were listed.
And in the Parisian sunshine, in a poignant postscript to a story on how the innocent hopes and dreams of potential Olympians can be exploited by a manipulative sexual predator in a position of authority, the brilliant side of Irish sport shone luminously against the warped appetites and actions of Derry O’Rourke.
A paltry old man, with his nauseating last-minute admission of guilt, who doesn’t deserve a good night’s sleep.
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