A man has been jailed for nine years for rape, after coercing a teenage girl into having sex with him by convincing her that he was a drugs lord and that she owed him \u20ac12,000.<\/p>\n
Craig O’Connell, aged 26, from Hollyville, Hollyhill in Cork, pleaded guilty to raping the then 16-year-old girl at a hotel in January 2024.<\/p>\n
He also admitted demanding money with menaces from the girl\u2019s former boyfriend who was 18 at the time.<\/p>\n
Other sexual offences as well as theft offences and charges relating to videoing the rape were taken into account in the sentencing.<\/p>\n
In her victim impact statement, the girl said she would never function the way she used to and what had happened would always haunt her in the back of her mind.<\/p>\n
Her former boyfriend said every day was a struggle and he wished he had never met O’Connell.<\/p>\n
Mr Justice David Keane said O’Connell had deliberately formed a friendship with the girl which he then exploited.<\/p>\n
He said the rape was deliberately planned as part of a sustained deception intended to terrify and coerce, involving humiliation and cynical planning.<\/p>\n
Outlining the facts of the case, the judge said O’Connell came to the city where the young people lived as a bail condition related to other criminal offences.<\/p>\n
He befriended the 18-year-old man who was in a “teenage relationship” with the girl.<\/p>\n
O’Connell undermined the relationship, causing them to break up and became more friendly with the girl.<\/p>\n
He told her the man had incurred a drug debt and she used \u20ac500 from her part-time job to pay that off.<\/p>\n
O’Connell told her he had high level connections to organised crime and the court heard she had seen him in a hotel with a large amount of cocaine and cash.<\/p>\n
In September 2023, O’Connell falsely told the girl he had been caught with \u20ac12,000 of drugs by garda\u00ed and that she must have informed on him.<\/p>\n
He began to threaten her that people were on their way to harm her and her family.<\/p>\n
He told her that if she did not want people to come to her home and “butcher her family” she could have sex with him to pay off the debt.<\/p>\n
Mr Justice Keane said the girl had non-consensual sex with O’Connell in a hotel on 5 January 2024.<\/p>\n
O’Connell recorded it saying he needed proof.<\/p>\n
Afterwards he told her she still had \u20ac2,000 to pay.<\/p>\n
She gave him her tablet and later posted him watches and jewellery belonging to her parents, including an engagement ring and wedding band valued at more than \u20ac10,000.<\/p>\n
She sent him photographs of her bank card and of her parents’ bank cards and he used these for online purchases.<\/p>\n
The girl’s father ordered new bank cards after noticing fraudulent transactions on his accounts.<\/p>\n
O’Connell’s actions were revealed after the father found his daughter with one of the new bank cards.<\/p>\n
She broke down and told him what had happened.<\/p>\n
The judge said messages recovered by garda\u00ed showed the girl’s vulnerability and included a screenshot of a snapchat message from O’Connell saying “you\u2019re dead, rape, torture”.<\/p>\n
When he was arrested he initially told garda\u00ed she had initiated sex with him.<\/p>\n
O’Connell also accused the girl’s boyfriend of being a “rat”.<\/p>\n
The court heard O’Connell sent the 18-year-old man a fake news story of three men being arrested while travelling to the city.<\/p>\n
O’Connell said he owed a debt of \u20ac45,000 and that was now the man’s debt.<\/p>\n
The man said O’Connell tormented him and made him sell drugs for him, to pay off this money.<\/p>\n
He said he was under constant threat and contemplated suicide.<\/p>\n
The court heard none of the money stolen by O\u2019Connell was recovered.<\/p>\n
However, the engagement ring and wedding band belonging to the girl’s parents had been found.<\/p>\n
The girl said in her victim impact statement that she could no longer feel safe and secure in her skin while in public.<\/p>\n
But she said she had survived being raped, tortured, threatened and taken advantage of in every single way.<\/p>\n
However, she said she had had suicidal thoughts and would never function the way she used to.<\/p>\n
At the sentencing hearing, the girl had asked if her statement could be read privately by the judge.<\/p>\n
However, Judge Keane said it had to be opened in public.<\/p>\n
He said the judiciary was “supposed to be kept in line by the antiseptic value of sunlight”.<\/p>\n
And he said members of the press were “entitled to have access to all material laid before the court”.<\/p>\n
The statement was read to the court by prosecuting barrister Mahon Corkery.<\/p>\n
The 18-year-old man said he had issues with depression before meeting O’Connell.<\/p>\n
He said he genuinely thought O’Connell was a high-level gangster and still thought he or someone connected with him was coming to harm him.<\/p>\n
He said it affected him daily.<\/p>\n
And he said he wished he had never met O’Connell.<\/p>\n
Judge Keane said he wished both victims well and hoped they would continue to recover from the ordeals they each suffered at O’Connell’s hands.<\/p>\n
The judge said O’Connell had created a relationship of trust with the girl and abused it with elaborate and brazen lies.<\/p>\n
He also pretended to be the girl\u2019s protector rather than the calculating predator he really was.<\/p>\n
He said the rape was not a single opportunistic offence but deliberately planned as part of a sustained campaign of deceit intended to terrify and thus coerce.<\/p>\n
He said O’Connell had written letters of apology to the victims but these were difficult to reconcile with a probation report which mentioned his minimising of the offences and inability to engage with victim-led discussion.<\/p>\n
The judge said there was no evidence before him that O’Connell had ever acknowledged the full extent of his offending behaviour.<\/p>\n
He claimed to have addressed addictions to alcohol and drugs but the judge said there was no independent evidence before him to support this assertion.<\/p>\n
He said all the evidence before him was that he was a “practised liar”.<\/p>\n
O’Connell has 62 previous convictions, including 14 for deception.<\/p>\n
The judge sentenced O’Connell to 11 years for the rape with the final two years suspended on a number of conditions.<\/p>\n
Charges of oral rape, production of child pornography, coercion of a child into the creation of child pornography as well as charges of demanding money with menaces and theft were taken into account.<\/p>\n
O’Connell was sentenced to six years in jail to run concurrently for demanding money with menaces from the man.<\/p>\n
Judge Keane said it was an “unusual case with a number of unusual features”.<\/p>\n
Additional reporting CCC Nuacht<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man has been jailed for nine years for rape, after coercing a teenage girl into having sex…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":425519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-425518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/425519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}