A court has found former Northern Ireland DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson guilty of historic sex crimes including rape.
Newry: A court on Monday found Jeffrey Donaldson, the former leader of Northern Ireland’s main pro-Britain party, guilty of 18 historic sex offences, including rape.
The jury took 10 hours to reach a verdict after Donaldson, 63, pleaded not guilty to all charges and four weeks of testimony at a court in Newry, south of Belfast.
The trial centered on allegations from two women who said he sexually abused them as children for 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 that a “long sentence of imprisonment” was inevitable, with sentencing scheduled for 25 September.
Donaldson led the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) from December 2019 until his resignation in March 2024, when he was charged by police.
A stalwart leader in Northern Irish unionist politics for decades, he was suspended from the party after the allegations emerged.
The charges relate to incidents between 1985 and 2008.
The prosecution argued that the complainants’ accounts, describing events dating back several years, were credible and their original accounts were consistent.
It said the women had kept their experiences private for a long time before finally deciding to report them, and urged jurors to consider the evidence in the context of allegations of historical abuse.
Neither woman can be publicly identified due to strict anonymity laws for victims of sex crimes.
During the defense case, Donaldson entered the witness box and denied every allegation.
He told jurors there was no abuse and challenged key elements of the complainants’ evidence, saying the allegations were false.
His defense lawyer highlighted the absence of forensic material, medical findings or independent eyewitness testimony.
Donaldson’s wife, Eleanor, was also found guilty of five charges of aiding and abetting the humiliation of her husband.
Those allegations relate to two complainants and occurred between 1985 and 2006.
Eleanor, 60, faced a so-called “trial of the facts” rather than 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 come just weeks after Northern Ireland’s power-sharing assembly was reinstated after a two-year boycott by the DUP over post-Brexit trade rules.
