Courts

Woman discovered videos on husband’s computer of him raping her, court hears

Jury hears man inserted various objects inside wife when she was incapacitated

The accused man has pleaded not guilty to 15 charges of sexually assaulting the woman. Photograph: Noel Bennett

Sonya McLean
Wed Oct 19 2022 - 20:30

A woman has told a jury that she discovered videos on her husband’s computer of him “raping me, putting objects inside me” when she said she was “passed out”.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to 15 charges of sexually assaulting the woman by penetrating her vagina with various different objects including a knife and a cheese grater on dates between January 1st, 2005, and September 5th, 2014, at a Dublin address.

The charges also include an allegation of anal rape.

The now 49-year-old woman told Eilis Brennan SC, prosecuting, that she discovered the videos when she went searching for a video he had of taken her when she had been drinking. He had threatened to send this video to her parents and she wanted to delete it.

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The woman described the videos she found. “Videos of one person doing awful things, sexual with objects. It was him [the accused] and he was doing them to me. I looked at about 15 videos.

“There was a carrot… putting cream all over me. In another video you could see a butter dish and there was stuff all over me. I was in different positions.”

She told Ms Brennan the objects she saw in the videos included “a carrot, a courgette, a deodorant bottle, his hand, his penis, a cucumber, normal objects”.

She said in the videos the accused “was raping me and putting objects in me. I was passed out. In some of them you could see a full figure lying on the couch.

“There was no way I would allow these things to happen to me,” the woman told the jury.

The woman said she deleted the videos she found but after getting advice from a friend she tried to move some of the remaining videos on to a memory stick. She later discovered that she actually had not moved those files properly and there was nothing on the memory stick.

The woman identified various objects in a booklet of photographs that were handed to the jury.

She said in the first photograph she could see the accused’s hand. “That is me. He is putting a carrot inside me,” the woman told the jury.

As she went through the photographs, she identified a bracelet she had been given as a gift for her 40th birthday, various different cushions, a grey blanket, her engagement ring, a dress, a pair of green shoes, a cheese grater and a red spatula.

A number of these items had been handed over to gardaí and were exhibits in the trial. The woman identified these objects in court as being those in the photographs.

When asked by Ms Brennan if she was aware of any of the sexual activity captured in the images, the woman replied “No”.

“The first time I came across this activity was when I found them [the videos].”

When asked if she had ever consented to this activity, the woman replied: “I definitely did not consent to any of that sexual activity, not in a million years.”

She said she discovered the videos one Monday in March 2019 and she asked her husband to move out the following day.

Vincent Heneghan SC, defending, told the woman in cross-examination that his client will say that “all this activity that took place between you was consensual”.

“I would disagree with that and back that up with my reaction,” the woman replied.

She said their marriage was difficult and she was trying to fix it. They started marriage counselling in January 2019 but she said she found the videos, two months later.

“Within a couple of days I asked him to get out and take his computer with him,” the woman told Mr Heneghan.

The trial continues before the jury of six men and six women and Mr Justice Paul Burns.

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