A Cork man who lied to a 16-year-old girl to extort money from her over fake drug debts before raping her at a hotel has been jailed for 9 years.
Craig O’Connell (26) of Hollyville, Hollyhill, Cork pleaded guilty to one count of rape of the girl and one count of demanding money by menace with respect to her then boyfriend, who was 18 years old at the time.
The Central Criminal Court heard how the accused, who was 24 at the time, caused the teen couple to break up after he lied that the girl had made advances towards him, before he sent footage of himself sexually abusing her to the boy to prove that they were an item.
The court heard that the accused became friends with the young man in October 2023, before the 18-year-old introduced him to his girlfriend, with whom his relationship at the time involved “kissing”.
O’Connell lied to the pair, telling them he was the son of a drug lord and a key player in well-known drug gangs operating in Cork and Limerick.
After the teen couple broke up, O’Connell told the girl that the young man had a drug debt to him, which she then used money from her part-time job to pay off.
The teenager testified that after the breakup, she felt that O’Connell was the only one who would listen to her, and so the pair became closer.
The court heard that the accused manipulated the girl into believing that she owed him €12,ooo by lying that Gardaí had seized this amount of drugs from him. He said this was her fault as she was the only one who knew about the drugs.
He said that other members of his gang knew where she lived and were on the way to her home to attack it and her family. He then told her she had three options to pay the debt, one of which was to have sex with him, another to pay the money in full, or to have persons unknown come to her home and “butcher her family”.
As the child was unable to pay the money and was in fear for the safety of her family, she agreed to have sex with the accused. To facilitate this, he booked a hotel room where he filmed himself orally raping the child, which he told her had to be done to prove that she had paid the debt. These actions resulted in charges of rape of a child, oral rape of a child, and production of child pornography.
After this assault, O’Connell told the girl that she still owed him €2,000, which led her to hand over her pink Samsung tablet, which was worth €600.
O’Connell also sent a fake news story to the girl’s by this time ex-boyfriend, calling him a “rat” and telling him that the three men who were supposedly arrested had had over €45,000 worth of drugs. This resulted in the young man working as a “runner” for the accused, who was in fear and trying to pay back the debt.
At the time, the young man was working at a hotel and said that O’Connell “tormented him” and that he was physically struck by him.
At the same time, O’Connell told the girl that she was “known” to be the young man’s girlfriend, that the young man was “fucked”, and that she was now responsible for the higher debt.
O’Connell then lied that he had taken the debt onto himself after borrowing money from a “traveller family” and posed as the girl’s protector from those who wished to harm her over the supposed debt.
In an effort to pay it off, the girl also gave the accused her mother’s engagement and wedding rings, as well as other jewellery. In all, he was given goods to the value of over €10,000 as well as being given access to her parents’ bank card details, which he used to buy alcohol and takeaways.
In January 2024, the girl’s father walked in on her trying to conceal something after he noticed that a new bank card had gone missing. After he discovered the card in her possession, she broke down and told him what had happened to her.
When the matter was reported to the Gardaí, the girl was interviewed by a specialist to whom she told that O’Connell’s actions had “ruined her life”, “had been the scariest thing that ever happened to her” and had caused her to want to take her own life as she had no hope that things would get better.
When Gardaí went to a pawn shop to which the accused had brought the family’s jewellery, they discovered that he had also pawned the phone he had used to contact the girl. When this was examined, a video of his sexual abuse of the child was discovered.
He also sent her a message on Snapchat telling “you’re dead, raped, tortured”.
When the accused was arrested on the 14th of March 2024, he said that the girl had initiated sex with him and that she “tore the body off me”. In respect of the video, he said that the victim “had made a porn” and claimed that she was 18 at the time.
The girl described being “raped, abused, and threatened” by the accused, saying she can “no longer be out in public” and feel safe.
She said she has panic attacks and that “no amount of therapy and endless conversations” would ever fix this.
“This will always haunt me in the back of my mind when I’m alone,” she said.
The young man described his ordeal as having “changed his personality”. He said he had depression at the time, which has since got worse and that he still fears O’Connell or his associates might harm him, as he really believed that he was a “high-level gangster”.
Mr Justice David Keane said that the court wanted to wish both victims well in their “continuing recovery from their ordeals” from the “obvious psychological harm he inflicted on them”.
The court said that the abuse of the girl was aggravated by the fact that the accused had presented himself as her friend and protector instead of her abuser. The court also noted the manipulation of telling both of the young people that each had cheated on the other to break them up.
The court noted that the chief mitigation in the case was the accused’s guilty plea, and noted that he had seemed to shy away from taking responsibility for his actions with his reluctance to engage in victim-led probation counselling and that letters of apology had been “very generically framed”.
The accused, the court noted, had given an account of his personal circumstances which could not be verified by anyone other than himself as he would not give permission for his records to be examined, and he had previously referred to himself as a “compulsive liar”.
The court set a headline sentence of 14 years for the count of rape in respect of the girl, with the other counts of oral rape, production of child pornography and the thefts and demanding money by menace taken into consideration as accepted by the DPP.
An actual sentence of 11 years was set before the last two years of this were suspended for two years.
In respect of the young man, the accused was sentenced to 6 years for demanding money by menaces contrary to Section 17 of the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act 1994,
The sentence was backdated by six weeks to allow for time spent in custody.