The Rape Crisis Centre is 'sickened' by defence lawyers' treatment of victims who testify. One victim tells Kitty Holland of her rape and subsequent ordeal in court
It was a Monday morning and was meant to be "at last, a hopeful day" for Marie. The man she said had violently raped her three years ago was to face justice. The case was coming before the High Court and gardaí had told her it was a "cut and dried" case.
"But I didn't think I was going to be that way I was on the stand," Marie says. "I didn't think I was going to have chunks torn out of me, for three whole days. I didn't think I was going to be made out to be someone I'm not, to have that taken from me."
The young man was found not guilty by the jury after a two-week trial, his counsel having established reasonable doubt on the issue of consent. Nevertheless, Marie's retelling of the hour or so at the hands of the man makes for harrowing listening. Giving her account of her three days at the hands of the High Court is as distressing.
The event which brought her to taking the stand as a witness to her own nightmare happened the night of a surprise 50th birthday for her mother. She had a fight with one of her sisters towards the end of the night and decided to walk home.
"I went to the top of the road to see could I get a taxi but there was none, so I decided to walk," she says. The almost childlike face of the 33-year-old woman slowly crumples as she continues.
"I got to a set of traffic lights. It was a long walk. I saw a little shadow but kept saying: 'It's nobody. Keep walking.' I walked and walked but this person walked faster."
She knows now the person was a young man, in his late teens, who had gate-crashed the party.
"I was getting nervous. I kept walking and the person kept coming nearer and nearer and then he was right beside me."
The man said to her it was a "nice night out".
"And I replied it was a nice night out because I didn't know what to do or what to say. I was terrified."
When he started pushing her through a gap in a wall to a field adjoining a pub, she was, she says, screaming, asking him to leave her alone.
"He pushed me and I knocked my knee out. I got up and, crying, I said, 'Please, I want to go home.' And he said: 'You're not going anywhere'." She describes a "big round, circular hole" in the grass.
"He pushed me back onto the ground, with my head in the hole. He opened my buttons and he started mauling me. And the only things he said all through the night was: 'It's a nice night out.' "
In an ordeal which she thinks lasted about half an hour, he bit her several times, undressed himself and, she says, raped her.
"To me it lasted forever. When he was finished he stood up. He was getting dressed and he looked down at me. He just said: 'You're a good ride.' "
It took her sometime to gather herself, before staggering out to the main road. Unable to flag down a car, semi-dressed and her clothes muddied, she eventually came upon two women sitting on a wall.
"I said: 'Please help me. I was raped.' " One of them called the gardaí. She was taken to the local Garda station and then home briefly to get a change of clothes. She was then taken to the Sexual Assault Unit at the Rotunda Hospital, where samples were taken from her hair, under her fingernails, her vagina.
"All I wanted to do was get in a bath and scrub and scrub and scrub myself," she says. In the days that followed she felt "dirty and filthy. It wasn't my body any more. Someone took something from me that I didn't say they could have".
She was put in touch with the Rape Crisis Centre through an outreach worker who saw her in the Rotunda and she has been seeing a psychotherapist, Jenny Mooney, there since. "Only for her," Marie says, "I don't think I'd have got this far."
The Garda arrested and charged the man involved in the incident about a fortnight later.
"I remember the morning because I was putting rubbish out into the bin and the Special Branch car came up. The guards came in and said: 'Marie, we have caught him.' My legs went then because I didn't think they were going to get him. Parts of me were thrilled but really, I didn't know which way I felt."
A date for the trial was set for two years later, which angered Marie, "because I knew that person was out there for the whole length of time and my life was wrecked".
In the intervening years, she has had spells of wanting to commit suicide and of binge drinking. The ordeal has affected her whole family. She has flashbacks and nightmares and cannot go out alone. A single mother, she worries about her 10-year-old son, who tells her 'I'll look after you mammy' and worries "too much" about her.
Marie was the first person to take the stand, to be cross-examined by the defendant's counsel.
"He seemed at first to be just trying to get the story but kept going over and over about different bits - the distance to the wall, where it happened, going over and over it back and forth, back and forth, like he was trying to break me," Marie says. "To me, it meant he was trying to make me out to be a liar. I knew where it happened. I knew where he [the defendant] brought me and he [defence barrister] tried to say it wasn't there. He tried to get me slipped up, said I'd said something different earlier."
He questioned her on her views on oral sex, saying that because she did not think it wrong, she would have no problems doing it anywhere, with anyone.
"He kept saying I consented. I said no, I asked him to stop. He said: 'No, you consented.' Over and over."
Referring to the state of her clothes when she met the women on the wall, he said: "Isn't that what happens when you make vigorous love in the grass?"
Questioned for four-and-a-half hours on the first day, she covered about half of the hour when the incident happened. She needed several breaks each day and on the second day, during one of the breaks, she had an epileptic seizure. When this happened the defence barrister sought to have the trial adjourned, though neither the State barrister nor Marie wanted this. The judge would not adjourn.
Jenny Mooney, her psychotherapist, who was in court, said that at one stage investigating gardaí approached her "after one particularly harrowing day".
"They were concerned that Marie wouldn't be able for another day, asking me to give her further support and not to let the case fall apart. They were very concerned by the strain she was under."
The State solicitor, says Mooney, "said very little during the trial".
"And I'm angry about that," says Maria. "I would have liked him to do more. I was on my own; there was no-one speaking for me. I do think you should have your own solicitor."
The judge at one point, says Mooney, did intervene to speak of the "unusual and in-depth cross-examination".
The verdict was returned at 6 p.m. Maria was waiting in an adjoining room with a volunteer from the Rape Crisis Centre when "the solicitors came out and said that the jury were back".
"The judge asked them had they got a verdict. And they said 'yes'. And then all I could hear was 'not guilty'."
Lowering her head into her hands, she repeats: "Not guilty. Not guilty. And a big smile on his [the defendant's] face. I left. I had to get out because I was going to get sick. I was in the toilets and I just broke down, just kept saying it wasn't fair.
"The guards couldn't look at me. I have never seen guards look sick. The next day they came and saw me. They hugged me and told me they were very proud of me, that I was a very strong girl.
"I just can't believe that was justice, that I was torn apart and made to be someone I wasn't, that all these people had done this to me."
The chief executive officer of the Rape Crisis Centre, Muireann O'Briain, said this week that therapists at the centre who provided victims with support throughout the legal process were "sickened by the aggression towards them from defence lawyers".
"We are more than ever convinced that separate legal representation is necessary throughout trials for rape and sexual assault."
Maria still has suicidal thoughts sometimes, but knows she cannot contemplate that because she has to be there for her son, Michael.
"He's all mixed up because I am. He's walking on eggshells a bit," she says.
"If I'm having a bad day and he goes to my sister's, he comes back and asks if I'm all right.
"I do worry about him, the way he picks up on things - you know, 'I heard you crying last night ma'. A child shouldn't have to say that."
If anyone who had been raped and was considering taking the case to court had been in the court, says Maria, "they wouldn't take a case. Girls in cases like me should have their own barristers".
"They should have someone there to fight for them. I didn't have anyone and you can't say the State barrister was there for me. The State didn't do anything for me."
Names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals
