Bailey admits vicious assault on his partner

IAN BAILEY assaulted his partner so viciously that her eye was swollen to the size of a grapefruit, clumps of hair were pulled from her head and her lip was severed from her gum.

The English journalist, who is suing seven newspapers in a libel action arising from coverage of the Sophie Toscan du Plantier murder, admitted the assault on his partner, but denied he was a violent man.

These descriptions of injuries sustained by Mr Bailey’s partner, Jules Thomas, after she was assaulted in May 1996, were given in cross-examination by senior counsel Paul Gallagher.

Mr Bailey did not dispute them.

“How would you describe the person who did that?” Mr Gallagher asked.

“Not very nice,” Mr Bailey replied before adding, “It is appalling.”

“Why did you say, ‘Not very nice’, do you have to be asked twice or three times to get the truth? Is ‘appalling’ as far as you would go? Would you think it was animal-like?” the senior counsel asked. “No,” Mr Bailey replied.

Mr Gallagher asked the plaintiff what he thought the public would think of a man who left this woman with these injuries after she had taken him in to live with her and her three daughters in Schull, Co Cork. “They would think it was appalling,” Mr Bailey said.

He denied he was a violent person. In relation to the assault on Ms Thomas, after which she got a barring order against him, he said: “If she had not started to go at my face this would not have happened. I am not a violent person. When we both drink, violence occurs. I believe there is a difference.”

In his direct evidence he admitted he was convicted of assaulting Ms Thomas two years ago, “to my eternal regret and shame”.

He said this incident was one of three fights they had in 13 years together. Earlier yesterday he said he was naive in talking to journalists after he had been arrested for the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier as he hoped they would write sympathetically about him.

The plaintiff’s barrister, James Duggan, questioned Mr Bailey about each allegation and implication in the articles at the centre of the defamation case.

Brighid McLaughlin wrote one article for the Sunday Independent in which she said Mr Bailey burned his clothes after the murder because they were soaked with turkey blood. Mr Bailey denied he said or did this.

He also denied he had washed his wellington boots in a stream about a mile from the murder scene, when it was put to him that an unnamed villager described seeing a man fitting Bailey’s description doing so. He described Ms McLaughlin’s article as rubbish and said it had upset him greatly.

“I felt when I read it I was absolutely sick to the pits of my stomach. Even going through it prior to coming to court today I felt betrayed. Naive though it may sound, she told me she was going to write a sympathetic piece,” he said.

Commenting more generally, he said: “It has not done anything to increase my popularity. It has sown the seeds of doubt in a lot of minds.”

Mr Duggan BL said he was curious to know why Mr Bailey did not leave Ireland and leave it all behind him. “It didn’t even occur to me. It was a fight or flight feeling inside me. Wherever one went in the world, it was never going to disappear. There was no question of running away from this,” he said.