‘C’ case victim speaks out: He ruined my life

RAPIST Simon McGinley destroyed the life of his youngest victim, the woman raped by him at the age of just 13 revealed.

Identified only as Mary, the now 25-year-old opened her heart on RTÉ Radio about the brutal attack that left her pregnant, forced into a succession of care homes and caught at the centre of an infamous legal battle over her right to have an abortion.

“He ruined my life and I am still coming to terms with that. My life is destroyed,” said the woman who has been in and out of psychiatric care since.

“I never got schooling or anything like that. I don’t know how many times I tried to kill myself but I have a little five-year-old son now so he keeps me going.”

Mary said she lived in constant fear and still received death threats. She was forced to call gardaí to her home in recent days after she received phone calls in the early hours of the morning – some silent but others threatening to kill her.

Her ordeal began as a 13-year-old schoolgirl in 1997 when she babysat for McGinley’s children and he insisted on dropping her home afterwards.

“He drove past the halting site [where she lived] and I said ‘where are you going?’ and he said ‘I’m going up the road to get matches and smokes’ and then he pulled into the side of the road and dragged me into the back of the van and raped me and started punching me around.

“He did it again. He did it about 20 times that night maybe. I tried to escape. I got out of the van and he ran after me, grabbed me by the throat and threw me back into the back of the van and raped me again and after he finished raping me, he dropped me home, put a knife up to my throat and said if I told anybody he’d kill me and all my family.”

McGinley’s wife had suspected her husband was up to something and followed the van. Word of what happened got out, despite Mary’s terrified silence.

The first she knew her secret was out was when gardaí arrived at her family’s caravan and she was taken into care. She only discovered she was pregnant when a foster mother took her to the doctor because she kept getting sick. “Next morning I woke up and there was all social workers at the table,” she said.

Her case hit the headlines when the Eastern Health Board went to court to seek permission to bring her to England for an abortion and her father, who originally supported her wish, then opposed it.

The case ended up in the High Court, which ruled that Mary was entitled to go to England because she was suicidal and she subsequently travelled with social workers to have the operation.

But she told Pat Kenny yesterday she didn’t fully understand the procedure and thought doctors were simply removing the baby. She said she thought she would be putting the child up for adoption afterwards.

Mary said her whole family had suffered and her father had taken his own life. McGinley was sentenced to 12 years for raping her but he was released early.

She said she felt compelled to go to court this week to see him put away again for the rape of his latest victim, an 86-year-old woman, although his protestations of innocence had made her feel sick.

“Hopefully, please God, that I will get over it eventually but it’s going to take time and help,” she said.