Limerick man jailed for six years after rape and Facebook threats

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

A Limerick man who made death threats to a woman he had raped was jailed for six years. He cannot be named to protect the victim’s identity. The proceedings were reported on 27 May 2019.

He pleaded guilty to raping the then 19-year-old woman and admitted intimidation of a witness and attempting to pervert the course of justice. The rape took place in Co Limerick in November 2015; the other offences occurred on subsequent dates that month.

The woman went to the man’s house after he told her he was having a party. She found nobody else there and he raped her.

The court heard that, two weeks after the rape, the victim’s sister began receiving messages from a fake Facebook profile the man had set up. Eleven messages threatened the sisters to drop the charges. He admitted sending them but said he had not intended to harm them and had decided to “chance it”.

In a victim impact statement, the woman said the rape had changed her life and that she feared meeting the man or his family.

Mr Justice Michael White treated the attempted intimidation as an aggravating factor. He noted an assessment stating that the man had a very low IQ and said his early guilty plea was a significant mitigating factor, sparing the victim from giving evidence at trial.

The judge had made it a condition of the man’s bail that he stay away from where the woman lived and have no contact with her by any means.