Mountjoy officer fails in defamation claim over affair with inmate's wife

A prison officer at Mountjoy Prison has told the Circuit Civil Court he had a relationship with the wife of a prisoner who was behind bars in the Dublin jail at the time.

Paul Moles, (aged 41) of Park Lane, Grangerath, Colpe Road, Co Meath, today failed in a €50,000 defamation claim against the Irish Star newspaper which, in April 2010, exposed his affair. He now faces a legal costs bill of more than €20,000.

Judge Jacqueline Linnane said The Star’s lead story that an unidentified married prison officer at Ireland’s toughest jail had been suspended over allegations he had slept with an inmate’s wife was true.

She said the newspaper’s claims that the alleged affair was exposed following an investigation at Mountjoy Prison and that the officer could face serious disciplinary procedures were also true.

Judge Linnane told Star barrister Shane English that Moles had admitted in cross-examination that the article, under the headline “Jailer’s ‘Sex with Con’s Wife,’ was, in the main, true.

The judge did not accept that a reference in the article to complaints against the prison warder by other women, that he asked for their phone numbers, was capable of inferring the defamatory meaning Mr Moles alleged.

Judge Linnane said Mr Moles had not been identified in the article and three of his friends and colleagues, ex-soldier and best man at his wedding, Peter Murphy; P.O. John Brennan and P.O. Pat Brompton had been able to identify him only because they had previous knowledge of his suspension from his job pending an investigation.

Seamus O’Tuathail, S.C., counsel for Moles, claimed the article contained defamatory remarks and innuendoes regarding him and had held him out to be a “sexual predator.”

Moles told the court he had met the unidentified prisoner’s wife outside a shop near the prison. He had later received a phone call from her.

He had developed “a liaison” with her which had lasted for about six months. She had told him she was separated and her husband had obtained a court order to bring the children to see him in Mountjoy Prison. He and his wife had difficulties and were parted.

For several months he had been out of work sick between August 2009 and March 2010 and on his return he had gone to the Governor to inform him he was seeing a girl whose husband was locked up. He did not know the prisoner.

Moles said that when the Star story broke the following day on Saturday, April 3, 2010 he was suspended pending an investigation and the prisoner concerned had been transferred to an open prison.

He said he remained suspended on pay for a year and on return had lost an annual increment in pay.

He told Mr English in cross-examination he was a married man who had a relationship with a married woman, the wife of a prisoner incarcerated under his control. He felt that while such a relationship was “uncommon” in the prison service it had not highly compromised him in his work.

He agreed with Mr English that the article was “in the main true” and had not identified him in any way nor had it described him as a sexual predator. The Page 1 headline “Jailer’s ‘Sex with Con’s Wife” was true as was “Prison warder suspended in affair probe.”

Judge Linnane also dismissed Moles’s application for the publication of a correction by the newspaper.