Stepfather denies sexually assaulting girl 15 times

A teenager testified in a trial yesterday that her stepfather — a youthclub supervisor — started sexually assaulting her from the age of eight and told her after the first alleged incident, "that’s a good girl".

A jury was sworn in to hear the case before Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin at Cork Circuit Criminal Court where the accused pleaded not guilty to 15 charges of sexually assaulting his stepdaughter.

Now aged 18, she claimed it started when she was eight, on a day when she was playing with her little brother who left the room when the accused came in.

“He sat down beside me and put his hand up my top and continued to put his hand inside my underwear and put his fingers inside my knickers inside my private parts. When it finished he said, ‘that’s a good girl’.”

Describing an alleged incident from when she was 14, she said the defendant picked her up from a disco with two of her friends whom he dropped home.

“Driving back home he stopped in this ditch. He started to lean over and attempted to put his hand down my underwear. I was trying to stop him, pushing him away. My tights were stopping him. I said, ‘Stop, you are ruining my night, I don’t want to do this, just stop.’”

Ciarán O’Loughlin SC, for the defendant, suggested: “What happened, in so far as anything happened, was just tickling and maybe horseplay.” She replied: “No, there was no tickling, that definitely was not tickling.”

Mr O’Loughlin pointed out some inconsistencies in evidence from the witness between what she said in the witness box and what she said in her statements to gardaí.

He suggested that from the age of eight when the complainant realised the accused was not her natural father she began to dislike him to the point of hating him. She agreed yesterday that this was so.

Mr O’Loughlin put it to the complainant that her aunt asked her if the defendant was abusing her and, “she in effect bullied you in to saying it”. The complainant disagreed.

The complainant’s mother recalled her daughter complaining her stepfather was giving her “wedgies” by pulling up her underwear tightly. She told her partner that the complainant was getting too old for that kind of game, she was getting uncomfortable with it and he should stop.