There was no hiding behind God when your legal reckoning came, Jeffrey

When Jeffrey Donaldson is a free man he’ll be an old man.

There’s no doubt he’ll still believe he’s a Christian man, hiding behind a faith which he believed allowed him to abuse two schoolgirls, raping one of them, and then call them liars in court.

The scriptures have been a theatrical prop for the former DUP leader, his Christian fish pin a grotesque costume, providing decades of cover and deflecting suspicion.

Donaldson has claimed from the beginning of his political career at 22 - the same year he started abusing the older of his victims - that he heard the word of God directing his life, and for four decades his performative devotion hid his crimes.

The only genuine Christian principles on display are those of his victims, and the recordings of their reflections on their abuse, released by the PSNI following Donaldson’s sentence hearing last week, should be the only sermon he hears during his years behind bars.

Victim B, raped by Donaldson as a child, asks “who I would be if this hadn’t happened,” reflecting on a life derailed at seven, when she went “from colouring in, to that”.

She voices compassion for “the girls and boys this is happening to right now,” and shares that every day is still a struggle when she wants not to be alive.

The damage Donaldson inflicted upon those brave women is soul-deep, irreparable and has elicited not an iota of humanity from him.

Coverage of the trial and subsequent hearings revealed a man who regarded the legal process as an inconvenience to his divinely anointed political rise, who displayed more concern about the Irish Sea border than the women who were sharing the most painful and intimate moments of their lives in a public arena.

“I wish I knew why they were lying,” he told Newry Crown Court, their testimony apparently causing bafflement rather than any semblance of regret, guilt or shame.

Donaldson, who we now know was a booze-swilling, projectile-vomiting hypocrite brandishing a Bible, had the gall to call his accusers liars.

He maintained that stone-hearted demeanour through police interviews, his trial, his pre-sentence probation interviews and in court this week when Judge Paul Ramsey said Donaldson had uttered “not one word of regret, apology or shame”.

Shame was clearly in short supply for Donaldson. His wife – the former Lady Donaldson, now just plain Eleanor – who stood back and did nothing in the full knowledge that her rising star husband was abusing little girls, is not spared in the victims’ statements.

After being found unfit to stand trial and instead being damned in a trial of the facts, she may not have a conviction, but she deserves all the condemnation.

“The effects of the Donaldsons’ actions have bled into every part of my life,” says Victim A. Eleanor witnessed Jeffrey’s sexual advances and was told explicitly about his abuse by a frightened young girl who must have desperately hoped she’d stop her husband’s vile behaviour.

Victim A, abused from the age of seven to 14, shared this week that when she disclosed the horrors inflicted on her, the reaction was to “make light of it”. The eight charges relating to her of gross indecency and indecent assault included Donaldson shining a torch on her genitals.

The impact of Eleanor’s disregard for a child’s torment, her disregard for law breaking, never mind any pretence of Christianity, was to make Victim A feel she “wasn’t worth protecting”. Clearly the only thing worth protecting was image, a facade of fervent faith and keeping the secrets of her depraved husband.

Victim A says having a baby made her reflect on why she wasn’t kept safe, and helped make her decision to speak up against one of the most powerful politicians in Northern Ireland.

Within days of his arrest Donaldson’s political opponents started to make political capital from her experience, even claiming the British government had known of his paedophile activity and had blackmailed him in order to get the DUP to return to Stormont.

Her suffering had been weaponised on the basis of speculation and point-scoring.

The courageous complainant says the lifelong anonymity to which she is entitled gave her some peace and hope of a normal life, even as keyboard idiots fell over themselves to name her.

Some were motivated by cruelty, some by stupidity, particularly anyone who claims not to know that victims of sexual assault can’t be identified. If you can share a post online you can check the law online.

The law surrounding Donaldson’s sentencing means that his hefty 15-year tariff will keep him locked up for just over seven years. The husband and wife have both applied to appeal their verdicts.

Whatever the outcome of that process, those who harm children must by now be very aware that scared children grow up and become adults with a voice, and there is no hiding behind God when your legal reckoning comes.