Father to be sentenced over 'truth or dare' sexual exploitation

A Donegal man will be sentenced this week for over 30 charges, including sexual assault, child cruelty and sexual exploitation of his two teenage daughters.

The man, who cannot be named in order to protect the identity of his daughters, faced a total of 34 charges at Letterkenny Circuit Court.

The offences relate to various dates between June 2011 and September 2015 and most arose out of playing a ‘truth or dare’ game.

There were 25 charges in relation to the elder sister: two of sexual assault; eight of child cruelty; and 14 of sexual exploitation. Nine of the charges were in connection to the younger sister: two of child cruelty and seven of sexual exploitation.

At a prior sitting of Letterkenny Circuit Court earlier this year, the accused man, who is now in his 50s, drank from a bottle of Coca Cola as he pleaded not guilty to each of the charges.

After a three-day trial, a jury of six men and six women took just under two hours to come to a verdict. The man sat emotionless, with his arms folded, as the jury foreman delivered a verdict of guilty on all charges.

At Letterkenny Circuit Court last week, he took to the witness box and said he accepted the verdict of the jury and acknowledged that everything said during the trial was true.

“I would like to take the opportunity to apologise for any harm or discomfort I caused,” he said.

One of his daughters left the courtroom while her father addressed the court.

The older sister told how she was just 13 when the depraved sequence of events started.

She was watching The Hills Have Eyes, a horror movie, with her father one Tuesday night. When the girl became scared, her father cuddled her and initiated a truth or dare game.

The man dared his daughter to slap her bum three times. “She thought he was being a creep, she said no and went to bed,” Counsel for the State, Ms Patricia McLaughlin BL, told the court. “There was an underlying sexual tone to the truth or dare games. He always wore a dressing gown, which was quite often open.”

The pattern became regular on Tuesday nights when the girls’ mother went out to meet with another relative.

Two weeks after the first incident, the girl told how she drank Peach Schnapps. “I was still anxious, but it was a lot easier,” she said. “The more I drank, the more my tolerance went up.”

Now 24, she told how she was offered a variety of alcohol, including beer, vodka, Captain Morgan, cider and Peach Schnapps.

She was, she said, ‘tipsy’ at times and on some instances ‘quite drunk’. Her father took steps to conceal her alcohol consumption, leaving the window open and leaving chewing gum on her pillow.

A pattern developed where her father would suggest what she could give him as a dare. Often, he would suggest that she throw iced water over him while he was naked.

The woman wept as she recalled the warped dares given to her by her father, who said he would give her money if she came up with ‘good dares’. She said her father’s attitude to her ‘changed for the better’ after she played the games, which involved varying degrees of undress.

On one occasion, she had to twerk with her pyjamas pulled down. On another occasion, the man dared his daughter to hit him on the testicles with an ornamental reed, while they played a card game which was described as ‘effectively strip snap’.

The woman told how they went onto the Omegle website and communicated with ‘randomers’. They were in contact with a young couple, who were naked at the time, and the father forced his daughter watch them engage in a sexual act.

On another night, when she was 14, he asked her to pull down her pyjamas and underwear and insert a biro into her vagina. 

The last time such an incident occurred, the man ejaculated into her hand.  For the last two incidents, the accused was charged with sexual assault.

“I didn’t tell anyone because I was warned that, if I told anyone I’d be disowned,” the woman said.

The younger of the sisters said the topic of playing truth or dare came up ‘out of the blue’ while she was making tea one night.

Her father began to ask her questions regarding her sexual activity; questions which, she said made her feel ‘like my skin was crawling’. “I felt sick,” she said. “I felt ashamed.”

She told how her father also offered her money to come up with good dares and she declined the offer of alcohol.

The man dared his daughter to allow him to soak her in freezing water with a hose. “He thought it was absolutely hilarious,” she said.

He dared her one time to put ice cubes between her breasts and another he dared her to stand in a freezing shower. On that occasion, the man spotted his wife coming back towards the house in her car and told his daughter: “Just put that towel around you and pretend you went for a wash.”

She ‘point-blank refused’ to run around their house naked and, two weeks after the last incident, she ‘just blurted out’ what had happened to her mother.

The family were moved out of the house immediately and the man was subsequently arrested in January, 2016. He made no admissions when questioned.

Detective Garda Alison Moore gave evidence of the beginning of a Garda investigation when the girls’ mother presented to a Garda station and alleged that her daughters were being abused by their father.

During the trial, the girls’ mother took to the stand and said: “I was dumbfounded that a father would do this with his daughter.”

The man will be sentenced by Judge John Aylmer on Wednesday, November 2.