Man jailed for seven years for raping woman in his flat

An Armenian man was jailed for seven years yesterday for raping a woman at his apartment in a case where the sentencing judge noted the gratuitous violence and threat of him raping her again.

Mr Justice Paul Carney imposed a nine-year sentence on Artek Khachatryan, 36, who had denied raping the victim at his flat in a Co Cork town on September 16, 2011, and suspended the last two years of the sentence.

In powerful victim impact evidence, she said her life has been destroyed by the attack: “I don’t enjoy being a woman anymore. It brought my life to a full stop. I was taking a lot of medication just to function on a day-to-day basis. I found that the medication had to be increased just to survive. My will to live had just gone. I didn’t want to face what I had been through.

“Every day of my life, I relive what Artek did to me on that day and I pray for the day that I don’t remember. I can’t sleep at night. I am afraid to because of my nightmares about being raped and being raped again. I would be happy not to sleep at all. The only time I sleep now is when I am totally exhausted.

“My daughter is the main reason for me trying to get back my life and trying to put what happened to me behind me.”

She said she had been in a relationship with a very kind man at that time but that it ended because of issues she had after being raped.

“I find myself now as only a mother and a student and not a partner for any man,” she said. “I am very angry and hurt by what happened to me. I don’t enjoy being a woman anymore.”

She said she found the cross-examination during the case like being hit by a hammer again and again.

Last December, a jury found the accused guilty of raping the woman in a 10-2 majority verdict.

By way of background, she said she met the accused in an Eastern European shop in Cork two years previously and they went on a date, talked and got on well but had no sexual contact.

She was shocked when he told her that night that he had a girlfriend and she told him not to ask her out again. They used to greet each other in the area where she lived and he ended up moving into the apartment complex where she lived. She said he asked her to go to his apartment on September 16, 2011, and she thought it was to interpret a document for him.

“He started to kiss me, not stopping,” she said. “I was covering myself with my handbag. He says that I can shout and I can scream, it depends on you how long you will be back home because nobody will listen, it all depends on you.”

She said he lifted her into the bedroom, pushed her on to the bed. She said trying to get him to listen made him more aggressive.

He told gardaí it was not rape and that he had consensual sex with her on the evening in question.