L.C. v D.C.
| Jurisdiction | Ireland |
| Judge | Ms. Justice O'Hanlon |
| Judgment Date | 25 July 2018 |
| Neutral Citation | [2018] IEHC 449 |
| Docket Number | [2008 No. 8738 P.] |
| Court | High Court |
| Date | 25 July 2018 |
[2018] IEHC 449
THE HIGH COURT
O'Hanlon J.
[2008 No. 8738 P.]
Damages – Personal injuries – Sexual assault – Plaintiff seeking damages – Whether the plaintiff suffered severe personal injuries loss and damage as alleged
Facts: The plaintiff applied to the High Court seeking damages for personal injuries, loss, and damage suffered by reason of a number of sexual and physical assaults, batteries, and trespasses upon her person by the defendant.
Held by O'Hanlon J that, on the balance of probabilities, the plaintiff suffered an incident of sexual assault in the form of oral rape in 2002 and had a recovered memory triggered by flashes of an earlier incident in 1994, which involved digital penetration and rape by the defendant who was found to lack credibility and as a result of those two incidents, perpetrated by the defendant, the plaintiff suffered severe personal injuries loss and damage as alleged. The plaintiff explained her difficulty in disclosing the earlier abuse even though she disclosed as a separate incident against a separate individual which occurred in 1996 on the basis that she was closer to the defendant than she was to the other relative and that made it even harder; the court accepted her evidence on that point also.
O'Hanlon J held that she would award €200,000 to the plaintiff as against the defendant.
Relief granted.
The plaintiff seeks damages for personal injuries, loss, and damage suffered by reason of a number of sexual and physical assaults, batteries, and trespasses upon her person by the defendant.
The PIAB authorisation issued on 13th March, 2008. A defence was delivered on 21st April, 2009, and on 16th January, 2012, relief was refused by order of the High Court where the defendant had sought to consolidate the within proceedings and proceedings under High Court Record No. 2009/6398P. In February, 2017, the plaintiff was served with a personal injuries counterclaim, and it was only on 15th June, 2017, that the defendant made application to amend the defence to include a counterclaim. The Court refused this on the basis that the pleadings had been closed years before.
The plaintiff's date of birth is 21st April, 1988. She traced the various stages of her education. The court notes that she qualified as a teacher, teaching Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Biology. Part of her case is that if she had not suffered the alleged abuse, her first choice was to have become either a doctor or a physiotherapist, but that she achieved 470 points where she had hoped to do better. She described herself as a perfectionist and she presented her evidence in very clear, concise terms: giving cogent evidence in a very intelligent manner. This witness gave evidence of beginning university and taking Bio-Medical Science as her course, then transferring to a Mathematics and Applied Mathematics degree and then taking her postgraduate diploma and master's degree.
This witness described the first incident of alleged abuse as occurring when she was six years of age, staying at a sleepover in the defendant's house at that time, in the area of T, Dublin. She described the sleeping bag as having been pulled over her, but not closed and when she woke it had been pulled back across her and she said she had a nightdress on and underwear and her underwear was at her calves and that the defendant had moved, who was on top of her, he had moved down. She said her legs were open and that he and kneeling between her legs and that he had forced his hands inside her vagina and that she did not say anything but she just remembered feeling pain and crying. Her evidence was that he then moved his legs further up on her more up to the tops of her legs leaning his legs over either side of hers and she could feel him moving back and taking out his penis which he forced inside her and she could just remember sharp pain shooting up inside her and said ‘Ouch’ and nothing else. She did not remember then and thinks that she may have passed out. The next morning, she woke up in the room and her cousin, B, was there in the sleeping bag beside her and that she didn't remember anything else from that point until the following morning. This witness gave a detailed account of the television room she and her cousin had slept in and could describe in detail the nightdress worn by her cousin on the night in question and further that the defendant brought herself and her cousin to hospital the following morning on the basis that her cousin had been very ill during the night.
She confirmed that she did not talk to anyone in the aftermath of the incident and that she was terrified.
The second alleged incident of abuse is alleged to have taken place in April, 2002, when she was thirteen years of age. She described herself, her sister and her younger brother going down to stay in the defendant's house in Co. K where the defendant had moved to live by that stage. She said that they arrived on a Friday and remained there until Sunday evening. She gave details of watching television and hanging around the house on the Friday evening and described on the Saturday how they went for a walk around the village, the graveyard, the church, the place where the defendant's second wife worked and they went to look at a motor vehicle, a blue Impreza for sale in a garage. Thereafter, they went to assist with the building of a pond in the back garden of the house in which they were staying.
On the Sunday, the three children and the defendant went to the local shop and got sweets and on the way back, this witness said there was a little dog who followed them back to the house and herself and her sister brought him back to the shop and that they returned and had dinner at about 2 o'clock, and that she had bad pains in the stomach and decided to go up and lie down so she just said to the defendant's wife that she was going to have a lie down upstairs. She stayed in her clothes and got into bed and lay on the bed and pulled the covers over her legs and turned over on her side and closed her eyes. She described that the top of the stairs in that house her room was the first to the right and that there was a double bed and that her sister and younger brother were in two single beds in the next room and that the room after that was used as an office and that then there was a bathroom and on the other side of the hall where the defendant and his wife had a bedroom.
This witness then described how the defendant came into that room, closed the door behind him, walked to the end of the bed, took off his trousers and crawled up the bed towards her. She described him as leaning his shins on her upper arms, pressing her down so that she couldn't move and that she was just pinned there and that he had his boxers on but his trousers were off. She could see his erect penis in his underwear. He was kneeling down his weight on top of her. He pulled his underwear down and took his penis out and forced it into her mouth. She said she couldn't breathe and he was forcing it into her throat and she could not catch her breath. She thinks she fainted or passed out and woke and he was gone from the room and his clothes were gone. She said she was really hot and clammy as if she was going to be sick and around her mouth was sticky. She didn't know what it was, but now she knows it was semen. The plaintiff's waited till she could hear voices. When she heard the voices of her sister and brother, S and C, she went to the bathroom and tried to cool herself down and washed her face and hands and just splashed water on herself and then went down to join S and C in the sitting room and sat with them.
Regarding the first incident when she was six years of age, the plaintiff told the court that it was a very terrifying experience, as one has no comprehension of what is going on. She described it as having happened and then that she did not remember it. She said she was anxious, very worried, suffering with pains in her tummy, not wanting to go to school in the morning or wanting to be close to her Mam and Dad, being quiet, shy and nervous and that prior to that she described herself as having been a quite a happy child, very, very happy, but that she became more anxious and more nervous.
In relation to the way in which the incident at thirteen affected her, she said it did so very differently; she never forgot it. She described it as being in her head all the time. She felt she had done something wrong, that she was damaged and that she was very, very anxious in relation to boys. She suffered from problems from palpitations and with problems of her hair falling out for a time and her having to get treatment for alopecia.
This witnesses said she was inhibited, not wishing to change her clothing in front of others. She was too afraid in terms of boyfriends: she didn't go there, she didn't trust, and felt that she should have done something to stop what had happened. She had concerns because she had shooting pains up inside her and worried that damage had been done.
She described having a relationship with her present husband for eleven years.
Being checked/examined during labour with the birth of her child was traumatic for her and she said that she was getting flashes of all that during all that time and was concerned about what was going to happen. This witness complained that the matter had been delayed and dragged out in the courts for ten years. In her third year in university she had palpitations, kidney inflections, stress and anxiety, mood swings and inability to sleep caused her to really, really struggle. She took a year out of college in October, 2008, returning to college the following September.
This witness described telling her parents in...
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