Courts

High Court dismisses woman’s civil claim of rape against school principal

Claims strongly denied by the man, who said that while he gave the woman lifts, the assaults never happened

Mr Justice Tony O’Connor on Friday said it was impossible to reconcile the allegations of the young woman with the evidence of the man. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien

Fri Jan 26 2024 - 20:28

A young woman who claimed she was repeatedly raped by a school principal in his car when he gave her lifts to her school has lost her High Court action for damages.

She sued the man, who was a principal in another school close to the one she was attending, claiming damages over what she said was a series of sexual assaults and rapes in 2009 and 2010, when she was aged about 16.

The claims were strongly denied by the man, who said that while he gave the woman lifts, the assaults never happened. The court heard a complaint was made to gardaí in 2011, but the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) decided not to prosecute.

Mr Justice Tony O’Connor on Friday said it was impossible to reconcile the allegations of the young woman with the evidence of the man.

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The woman had failed to establish her claim in what is a civil court where there is a lower standard of proof than in the criminal court, he said.

The man put his head in his hands and let out a sigh of relief as the judge dismissed the action. Members of the man’s family who had accompanied him to court started to cry.

Neither the woman nor her legal representatives were in court for the judgment.

In her action, the woman claimed the principal groomed her initially during the drive to school by talking about whether she had a boyfriend and saying that she would “look good in a leotard”.

She claimed the assaults started with him touching inside her thigh and escalated into him making her rub his penis as he drove and later into making her perform oral sex on him. It was alleged the first time he raped her was when he pulled into the side of the road after making her put a condom on him.

It was claimed the assaults and rapes increased up to the end of the school year. It was further claimed he warned her he would kill her if she told anyone.

He stopped giving lifts at the end of the 2009/10 term and, following self-harm thoughts, she said she told others what had happened.

The principal, in his evidence, said he never groomed, sexually assaulted or raped the girl.

Her claims that she was regularly 10 to 15 minutes late for school as a result of the assaults were untrue because, he said, he could not be late for work as the principal of a busy school with hundreds of pupils.

The school secretary gave evidence that he was always on time for school opening and this was corroborated by one of the teachers. He said he never took back roads or went down laneways to park or into a farmyard entrance as the woman claimed.

He also said it was impossible, as she had claimed, for him to put back her seat and then climb over to rape her because he weighed 16½ stone, was 6ft 2in tall and it was a saloon car.

The judge said the court could not ignore the apparent unreliability about the history of assaults and rapes when applying the burden of proof test.

That lack of clarity, coupled with the absence of records or another witness to support suggestions that her school grades had slipped or that she was late for the start of school on many days, did not assist her in discharging the burden of proof.

The court was also concerned about the significant delay in setting out the detail of the assaults in writing, which she had given in evidence.

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