Limerick man jailed six years for 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 was jailed for six years after raping a woman and threatening her through Facebook. The proceedings were reported on 27 May 2019.

He pleaded guilty to one count of rape, intimidation of a witness and attempting to pervert the course of justice. The rape took place in County Limerick in November 2015, when the woman was 19. The other offences occurred on subsequent dates that month.

The woman knew the man’s family and went to his house after he told her he was having a party. When she arrived, nobody else was there and he raped her. The man, who was 26 when the report was published, cannot be named to protect her identity.

The court heard that, two weeks after the rape, the woman’s sister began receiving messages from a fake Facebook profile set up by the man and purporting to belong to a friend of his. Eleven messages threatened the sisters in an effort to make them drop the charges. He admitted sending them but said he had not intended to harm the sisters and would “chance it”.

Mr Justice Michael White described the intimidation as an aggravating factor. He noted a mental health assessment stating that the man had a very low IQ and said his early guilty plea was a significant mitigating factor that spared the woman 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, including by Facebook, telephone, email or any other means.