Man denies 21 sex assaults on stepdaughter
The accused denies all the charges and his trial began at Cork Circuit Criminal Court before Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin and a jury of seven men and five women.
The complainant said she was 14 when her stepfather suggested she would sleep in his bed when her mother was working nightshifts.
She said she felt violated and disgusted and not the same person as a result of what allegedly happened.
“I was woken when he got into bed with me,” she told the court.
“I felt really uncomfortable. He put his hand on my upper right thigh. My heart just stopped, froze. He moved his hand closer to my vagina and put his hand down my clothes. I jumped out of the bed at that time.
“I can remember going to school the next day and coming home feeling sick. He made it feel normal.
“It became more frequent for him to be at me when I was asleep. When I would wake up, his fingers would be inside me. He would act like it was really normal and did nothing wrong.”
She told the court her stepfather would put his fingers into her vagina and that this would happen two to three times a week when she was in second year in school in 2007 and 2008.
She said it was not as frequent in third year. “I would stand up for myself a bit more. But it would happen once a week or once every two weeks.”
She confronted him about it one night when she was in college when he came in to her room and put his fingers in her vagina. He would constantly feel her breasts, she testified.
Marjorie Farrelly SC, defence, said the man denied entirely the allegations and, furthermore, there were serious discrepancies between her statements to gardaí and what she was saying in the witness box.
The jury were shown video of the accused being interviewed by gardaí and he replied: “Lies. I didn’t do it, like. Not at all, no way. It’s all feckin lies.”
At one stage in the video, he calculated that, on the basis of what was being put to him, he was being accused of sexually assaulting her 300 or 400 times.
The case continues today.
