A Cavan man who raped a woman while she slept after she got into the bed beside him fully clothed has been jailed for six years. 40-year-old Paul Clarke of of Muff in Kingscourt had denied a charge of rape but was convicted by a jury following a trial at the Central Criminal Court.
He claimed during the trial that the woman was making up the allegation because she was looking for money having learned that he had received an inheritance.
Mr Clarke was found guilty by a jury of raping the woman after a night out in Meath on February 11, 2007, following a trial last October. The woman, then aged 22, was asleep in her friend's house after a night out with Clarke when she woke up to find him raping her.
She told the court she spent years trying to suppress what had happened to her before she received counselling and went to Gardaí in 2017. Mr Edward Doocey prosecuting, told the court yesterday, that the woman was happy for Clarke to be named in reporting the case so long as it did not lead to her identification as she wanted to retain her anonymity.
Sentencing him, Ms Justice Karen O'Connor noted that the woman believed Clarke was clothed when she decided to get into the bed beside him. The Judge said the woman should have felt safe and secure in her friend's home in a bed that she had slept in many times before but "instead she was violated".
The judge added the woman had shown great dignity during the trial and sentence hearing, and she acknowledged that the woman had previously outlined that she was horrified to realise that a member of Clarke's legal team had been following her on social media.
Ms Justice O'Connor said she had read all the defence material, including 15 character references and a psychologist's report which outlined issues Mr Clarke has with his memory following a serious car accident in 2002. She set a headline sentence of seven and half years which was reduced to six years, having taken into account the mitigating factors in the case.
Meanwhile, at the sentence hearing last December, the woman read from her victim impact statement. She said the day after Clarke was interviewed by gardaí, his defence solicitor started following her on social media. “For a defence solicitor to follow the victim of a crime is unprofessional and unethical,” the woman told Clarke’s sentence hearing.
She told the court she struggled with anxiety and depression for years in the wake of the rape. “It reached a point in 2017 when I wanted to drive my car into a ditch,” she said. When she eventually disclosed what had happened to her in counselling, she said it was a weight off her shoulders.
She said the trial process was difficult and exacerbated her anxiety and depression. “In the first trial, it was put to me by defence counsel that at the age of 22, I was a 'woman of the world,” the woman said. “I was not.”
“I thought I would be safe in my friend's house, sleeping on a sofa bed I always slept on...I was naïve.” The court heard the man denied the allegations to gardaí and suggested the woman was looking for money from him, as he had recently come into an inheritance. The woman said she wanted only three things from the man: an acknowledgement of his actions, an explanation as to why he did it and a sincere apology.
