Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the former leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, was found guilty on Monday, June 22, of 18 sexual offences, including rape, in one of the most consequential criminal cases ever to involve a senior Northern Irish politician.
A jury of seven men and five women at Newry Crown Court took just over 10 hours to convict him on all charges: one count of rape, 13 counts of indecent assault and four counts of gross indecency. The offences related to two women who said Donaldson had abused them when they were children, in incidents spanning from 1985 to 2008.
The trial judge remanded Donaldson into immediate custody, telling the court that a “lengthy sentence of imprisonment” was inevitable. He is due to be sentenced on September 25, with a review hearing earlier that month.
The court also addressed the case of Eleanor Donaldson, his wife, who in a separate trial of the facts was found to have committed the acts she was accused of, having faced charges of aiding and abetting.
Donaldson was one of the most prominent figures in unionist politics, having led the DUP and served as a long-standing member of Parliament before his arrest, which abruptly ended his political career and sent shockwaves through Northern Ireland.
Prosecutors had described a pattern of abuse against two vulnerable children carried out over more than two decades. The guilty verdicts, delivered in a packed courtroom, brought an emphatic conclusion to a case that the jury deliberated at length before returning in a matter of minutes to announce.
The conviction of a figure once central to Northern Ireland’s political settlement marks a stark fall from public life and is likely to reverberate through the DUP and unionist politics for years to come.