A court found Jeffrey Donaldson, ex-leader of Northern Ireland’s DUP, guilty of historical sex offences including rape.
NEWRY: A court on Monday found Jeffrey Donaldson, the former leader of Northern Ireland’s main pro-UK party, guilty of 18 historical sex offences, including rape.
A jury took 10 hours to reach a verdict after Donaldson, 63, pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and after four weeks of evidence at a court in Newry, south of Belfast.
The trial focused on allegations from two women who said he sexually abused them as children over a period spanning more than two decades.
Donaldson was found guilty of one count of rape, four counts of gross indecency with or towards a child and 13 counts of indecent assault.
The judge remanded Donaldson in custody and said a “lengthy sentence of imprisonment” was inevitable, with sentencing due on September 25.
Donaldson led the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) from December 2019 until his resignation in March 2024, when he was charged by police.
A heavyweight in Northern Irish unionist politics for decades, he was suspended from the party after the allegations emerged.
The charges related to incidents between 1985 and 2008.
The prosecution argued that the complainants’ accounts, while describing events dating back many years, were credible and consistent in their core details.
It said the women had kept their experiences private for long periods before eventually deciding to report them, and urged jurors to consider the evidence in the context of historical abuse allegations.
Neither woman can be identified publicly because of strict anonymity laws for victims of sex offences.
During the defence case, Donaldson entered the witness box and rejected every allegation.
He told jurors that no abuse had taken place and challenged key elements of the complainants’ evidence, maintaining that the accusations were false.
His defence lawyer highlighted an absence of forensic material, medical findings or independent eyewitness evidence.
Donaldson’s wife, Eleanor, was also found guilty to five charges of aiding and abetting her husband’s offending.
Those charges related to two complainants and happened between 1985 and 2006.
Eleanor, 60, faced a so-called “trial of the facts”, not a criminal trial, after a judge ruled her unfit to stand trial on mental health grounds.
Donaldson was first elected to the UK parliament in London in 1997 and was the longest-serving Northern Ireland MP.
The allegations came just weeks after Northern Ireland’s power-sharing assembly was restored after a two-year boycott by the DUP over post-Brexit trading rules.
