A man who repeatedly r@ped his unconscious wife with household objects has been jailed for 11 years in Ireland.
The Dublin man, 49, was found guilty by a jury last month for 11 counts of sexually assaulting his wife between January 2005 and September 2014.
Mr Justice Paul Burns sentenced him to 12 years, but suspended the final year on several conditions, including the man’s participation in a course on sexuality and consent, the Irish Examiner reports.
The horrified woman discovered her husband of over 20 years had been repeatedly raping her while she was asleep after finding the ‘hideous images’ on his computer.
The abuse occurred in the family home on unknown dates between January 2005 and September 2014.
The man continues to maintain his innocence, but the judge said his repeated rapes constitute an ‘egregious breach of the normal trust between a married couple’.
The verdicts were handed down earlier last month following a retrial, after the jury in the first trial returned not-guilty verdicts to four counts and was unable to agree on the remaining counts.
In her victim impact statement, which was read out by one of the investigating Gardaí in the case, the 50-year-old woman said she didn’t know her husband was ‘into porn’, let alone using her for his ‘sick fantasies’.
She said in the wake of the marriage breakdown, she suffered from anxiety, depression, sleeplessness and panic attacks. She said she struggled with financial issues and had to ask her family for money. ‘It was unbearable,’ she said.
Since the shocking discovery, she said that she has deleted every memory of the man from her family home. ‘But I can’t delete the pain, humiliation, and degradation he put me through,’ she said.
In her statement, she also spoke of her shock since discovering the ‘perverse, indecent, hideous images’, saying it was ‘like a bomb went off’ in her head.
Her statement was read out at the man’s Central Criminal Court sentence hearing on December 18. She added how many unanswered questions she has been left with.
‘Why had he done this to me? How long had it been going on? How did I not know? Was he always this way?’ she said.
The woman added that she felt she was married to a stranger, who had inflicted ‘the most heinous and violent abuse’ on her.
The woman also thanked her family and Gardaí for their help and support. She said she would now begin the process of healing.
Her husband was found guilty by a jury of 11 counts of sexually assault by ‘penetrating her vagina with various objects’.
It was the State’s case that the wife was unconscious and unable to give her consent when her husband carried out the rapes.
A detective told Eilis Brennan SC, prosecuting, that the abuse came to light when the woman discovered images her husband had taken of her on his computer in March 2019.
She asked him to leave the family home and made a complaint to The Garda Síochána. The couple were married for over 20 years and have children together.