Jeffrey Donaldson: From non-smoking, non-drinking, church-going politician to predatory sex abuser
Jeffrey Donaldson arriving at Newry courthouse on Monday. Picture: Charles McQuillan/Getty
While Joe Biden feted Jeffrey Donaldson at the White House during St Patrick’s Day celebrations in March 2024, a handful of detectives back home in Northern Ireland were quietly completing the countdown to his unmasking.
Weeks earlier, Donaldson had steered the DUP back to power-sharing at Stormont, a political feat that rebooted the Good Friday Agreement and imbued a statesmanlike aura to his triumphant visit to Washington.
The Lagan Valley MP looked like an accountant and spoke in a passionless monotone — an antithesis to his fire-breathing predecessor Ian Paisley — yet he had brokered a deal with Downing Street over Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit status in the UK and convinced his party to accept it.
But days after his return from the US, on a damp, dark morning, the police swooped on his Co Down home and everything Northern Ireland thought it knew about Donaldson imploded.
The Presbyterian family man, who wore a fish badge on his lapel to signify his Christian faith, was charged with 18 sexual offences — one count of rape plus multiple counts of indecent assault and gross indecency against two young victims — and his wife, Eleanor, was charged with aiding and abetting the abuse.
Two years later, the figure who stood convicted in the dock of courtroom one of Newry crown court appeared unchanged — immaculate suit, a bit jowly, no visible emotion — but was now a pariah.
Four weeks of evidence in the often sweltering chamber uncloaked a previously hidden Donaldson, 63, a predator who abused two girls over two decades while ascending the political ranks to prestige and power.
“It is just incomprehensible, that you have known someone for a lifetime and worked with for a lifetime and this happens,” said Reginald Empey, a unionist grandee who used to work closely with Donaldson. “You’re talking stuff which is off the charts here.”
The victims, complainant A and B, told the court that behind the media-savvy sheen — Donaldson projected reasonableness even when adopting hardline positions — lurked a manipulative man who abused them from 1985 to 2008.
Complainant A said she was of primary school age when Donaldson began to be “physical” with her and grope her chest. He used a light to look at her genitals and on another occasion kissed her and put his tongue in her mouth, she said. She recalled having nightmares about “men doing horrible things to children”.
Complainant B said the rape happened while she was of primary school age. “I remember being really still and all I could hear was his breath.” The memory of the assault endures, she told the court. “What happened that night will live with me for ever.”
Complainant B said she was of secondary school age during another incident — he lifted up her top and fondled her breasts — which she said was partly witnessed by his wife before she walked away.
She told police in her interview he “had this terrible breath” and was making a “panting sound”. “He never said anything, just always silence.”
Eleanor Donaldson told police, in an interview played in court, that it was a “massive shock” to see the pair alone in a room but she had no evidence of wrongdoing. “I didn’t go in, I wasn’t in that room, I just stood in the open doorway.”
The trial judge, Paul Ramsey, judged the 60-year-old unfit to stand trial on mental health grounds so she faced a trial of facts, which tests the evidence but cannot result in a criminal conviction.
In the 1990s, Donaldson apologised to Complainant B during a meeting at a Co Antrim Christian centre and in 2020 wrote a letter to Complainant A expressing regret for causing “hurt, pain and distress” and asking forgiveness for a “sinful nature”.
Under cross-examination, Donaldson brazened it out and said those apologies referenced not abuse but unrelated matters and accused his accusers of making up the allegations.
His barrister, Kieran Vaughan, questioned the complainants’ credibility and honesty. “We say the evidence shows that nothing happened.”
The jury of five women and seven men decided otherwise. Which means that from 1985, when Donaldson was first elected to a Northern Ireland assembly, the non-smoking, non-drinking, church-going politician began a dual life of secretly inflicting harm on innocents while giving polished public performances as a defender of conservative unionism.
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