A Co Monaghan shop assistant has told a Central Criminal Court jury her boss raped her up to five times a week from the age of 15 to 21.
She said he threatened to kill her if she told anybody and she believed him when he said no one would believe her.
Mr Gerard Clarke SC, prosecuting, said that 10 years after the woman stopped working for the man she bought a tape-recorder and recorded their conversation to use as proof of her allegations.
The 53-year-old man has pleaded not guilty to 27 charges of raping the woman on various dates from 1979 to 1985.
The woman told the jury she had been working in the shop for a few weeks when he first raped her - after he asked her to come to a store, saying he wanted to show her something. She said he grabbed her and raped her. Replying to Mr Clarke (with Mr Frank Martin), she said this continued four to five times a week until she left in 1985.
After he first raped her she went home crying to her mother and asked to be allowed leave the job but her mother said no.
She didn't tell her mother what happened because the man said nobody would believe her.
She had felt unwell shortly after he first raped her. She knew nothing then about the facts of life or sex. Some rapes happened in the defendant's family bathroom, on mornings after she had stayed over to babysit. The woman told Mr Justice Budd and the jury she would cry, struggle and protest only to be told repeatedly by the defendant to shut up. "It got to my head that nobody would believe me," she said.
The defendant's wife called her "a little bitch" as she was leaving the job, when they castigated her for telling everyone she had quit due to not getting holidays. When she went to the store to get her bag, she told the man she was going to tell people what he had done to her. She said he put his hand over her throat and said nobody would believe her - he was a businessman and she would end up in jail for telling lies.
She said he again threatened to kill her if she said anything. He had said this many times over the years. She was depressed over the rapes in the years afterwards because she thought nobody would ever believe her and 10 years later she decided she couldn't carry the burden any more. To prove her allegation she bought a taperecorder.
The hearing continues with legal argument in the absence of the jury.