Girl was coached to give evidence, says man cleared of sex assault
A 62-year-old man on trial for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl claimed yesterday that it never happened and that the girl was coached to give the evidence against him.
The jury of four men and eight women took only 15 minutes to reach a unanimous not guilty verdict.
The accused hugged his counsel, John Devlin, and solicitor, Joseph Cuddigan, on delivery of the verdict.
Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin thanked the jury for their attention to the case where the man had been accused of one count of sexual assault in January 2016.
Mr Devlin, defending, said in his closing address to the jury yesterday at Cork Circuit Criminal Court that the girl had said the defendant put her on his lap and then kissed her stomach but he submitted to them: “He is a fat man, he does not have a long neck. How would he get his head around? Is it actually possible?”
Sinead Behan, prosecuting, said it was alleged by the State that: “She was rubbing his dogs. He was putting coal in a bucket. He sat her down and put her on his lap. It is alleged he kissed her stomach, put his hand down her pants and touched her vagina and then he put his finger in his mouth. She said that he said to her if she left him do that more often he would give her money. She was 12 at the time.”
The accused gave evidence yesterday and said that sometimes when children would visit, he would kiss them on the cheek when they were leaving, and that at Christmas, he would give them selection boxes and they saw him as a granddad. He said he would have kissed the complainant on the cheek when she was leaving.
“I never touched her inappropriately,” he said.
He said there was one incident when she got her belly button pierced as was the craze at the time and she called to his house to say it was bleeding. He said he put Savlon antiseptic cream on it.
He said he had trouble with children throwing stones at his house and kicking balls against it. It was confirmed by gardaí that he had complained about this.
Ms Behan suggested that he could have told her to go home to her mother to deal with her belly button. “Was it your place to deal with it yourself?” she asked. He replied that it was.
Ms Behan said the complainant had been very consistent in her evidence.
The defendant replied: “She is very well coached on what she said.”
He said the only word she knew for her private parts was “fanny”. However, he said that two years earlier she told him she had a kidney infection and that it hurt her vagina when she went to the toilet. He claimed she was coached to say it the way she did, including the use of the word, fanny. He said that might have sounded more credible than the girl using the formal word.
