The trial previously heard about a meeting at a Christian Centre in Armoy in the 1990s between Complainant B and Sir Jeffrey, at which she claimed he had apologised.<\/p>\n
Sir Jeffrey recalled it having been a short meeting, also attended by Davey and Linda Hoy, who ran the centre.<\/p>\n
He said he “embraced” Complainant B and said he was sorry if she had ever felt “uncomfortable or unhappy” about him.<\/p>\n
He said the meeting had been “a very positive experience” for him.<\/p>\n
Vaughan asked Sir Jeffrey was any allegation of sexual abuse mentioned or put to him.<\/p>\n
“No, not ever,” he replied.<\/p>\n
“The word allegation wasn’t even mentioned at that meeting. There would have been no reason for it to be put to me.”<\/p>\n
Vaughan also asked Sir Jeffrey about an alleged incident involving Complainant A who has claimed he had kissed her and put his tongue in her mouth.<\/p>\n
“Why would I just kiss a child using my tongue?<\/p>\n
“That is just ridiculous… that just did not ever happen,” Sir Jeffrey said.<\/p>\n
Sir Jeffrey described his and Lady Donaldson’s arrest at 06:00 GMT on 28 March 2024 as “a complete shock”.<\/p>\n
He added: “We had no idea this was coming. None.”<\/p>\n
He said one minute he was asleep, the next he was standing in the hall with a police officer.<\/p>\n
The couple were then taken for questioning at Antrim police station.<\/p>\n
“I had never been to a police station in my life as a suspect. It was completely new to me,” he stated.<\/p>\n
“My head was in a spin.”<\/p>\n
Sir Jeffrey also told the court that a brief extra-marital affair in London in 2008 had caused his wife “hurt and pain” and that he would regret it “until my dying day”.<\/p>\n
He said life in politics, as an MP, had been “all consuming” and it had caused “tensions” in his marriage.<\/p>\n
He said Lady Donaldson struggled with her mental health.<\/p>\n
The court also heard about an episode in which she placed a listening device in his car in 2020, after the discovery of texts between him and a constituent.<\/p>\n
He was confronted with a recording, which he described as “flirtatious in nature”.<\/p>\n
Sir Jeffrey denies acts of gross indecency and indecent assault against Complainant A when she was a child, between 1999 and 2008.<\/p>\n
Other alleged offences, dating back to 1985, including a charge of rape, relate to a second woman, Complainant B, when she was also a child, which he also denies.<\/p>\n
His wife, Lady Eleanor Donaldson denies five charges of aiding and abetting his alleged offending.<\/p>\n
Lady Donaldson faces a trial of the facts after she was previously deemed unfit to face a conventional trial on mental health grounds, and is therefore not participating in proceedings.<\/p>\n
The trial continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The trial previously heard about a meeting at a Christian Centre in Armoy in the 1990s between Complainant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":633112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-633111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/633112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}