On Saturday, Laura ably walked readers through the background to the case of a UCD student who has been variously named “Maeve” and “Caitlyn” in a broadly sympathetic hearing of her story, which was initially brought to public attention by Ruth Coppinger.
In recent days, the emphasis in that story has somewhat changed: Coppinger’s original narrative was that UCD had behaved appallingly in the aftermath of the student being raped in February 2023, refusing to let her re-sit exams and putting her through a gruelling court ordeal, which led to hundreds of thousands of euros in costs being awarded against her.
As Laura reported on Saturday, that version of events was not quite true: The student had, in fact, been struggling tremendously with her course well before the alleged events of February 2023, when the rape is alleged to have taken place.
In the preceding term alone, she had failed three exams and missed substantial time due to “personal issues”. When UCD were finally informed in May 2023 of the alleged rape, they acted swiftly to offer her “remedial grades” for modules concerning the term in which the rape had occurred. In her judgment, Mrs. Justice Marguerite Bolger was as clear as any judge can be that she accepted the evidence of UCD that the college had done everything it could for the student, in terms of her academic record.
That perhaps explains why the tenor of mainstream media coverage has shifted: No longer are journalists covering this case focused on whether UCD has questions to answer, but instead the broad thrust of coverage is about how society at large has questions to answer, in respect of how we deal with “image based sexual abuse”.
Some plain facts must be stated here: First, that the student in question did not report her alleged rape to the Gardai. I write that not as condemnation – a person may well have good reasons for not doing so – but as an important factor to consider in terms of the “societal response” and the treatment of her alleged rapist, as well as in the wider context of current media coverage.
However, there are some points to consider here: The alleged rapist is said to have carried out a brutal and violent assault, leaving the student with severe bruising and injury. He is also said to have been a medical student, meaning that he would in future have access to vulnerable people and vulnerable women in particular. That such a person has been apparently allowed to escape responsibility or justice for his actions is unfortunate and potentially dangerous. As is the fact that the University was not alerted to his existence in a timely manner, for any potential internal disciplinary action.
This is curious, given that the alleged victim has now been given the right – anonymously – to tell her story to the Irish media, which has been eager to share and broadcast it whole and uncritically. RTE, the Irish Times, the Independent, and Newstalk have all run some version of this story, anonymised and with the student’s name and voice changed. But the alleged perpetrator still escapes justice, because no criminal complaint has been made. As I say: This is at minimum unfortunate. In the past week I have had many emails – all from women – asking why the “rapist” has been allowed to continue with his studies. The answer, per the public record, is that no person has been identified to the University or the Gardai as the perpetrator.
Indeed, UCD was not informed of the rape allegation at all until May 2023, after the alleged victim had sat her exams for that year, of which she passed two and failed to sit or failed a further six. In the aftermath of failing to sit those exams, she asked for “special grades” – essentially an exemption from having to take the exams again. UCD declined this, but did offer her a plan to do some repeats later in the year. As Mrs. Justice Bolger notes:
The University was dealing with a student who was struggling academically, had missed a number of classes in 2022, had failed several exams and on her own account, was both stressed and distressed. The fitness to practice process was an opportunity for the university to address the clear issues of concern with the plaintiff locally, and to seek to identify appropriate support for her.
What we have here then, are the following circumstances: A student who had failed exams in 2022, Christmas 2023, had a poor attendance record, and who failed to pass 75% of her exams at the end of 2023 and only then brought to UCD’s attention an alleged rape in February 2023 which she said affected her performance. It is surely harder and harder to accuse UCD of wrongdoing here, which is presumably why the clamour against the University has somewhat died down, and the story has moved on to focus on the separate and distinct question of image-based-abuse.
So let’s get to that, because there is some important context, again set out in Mrs. Justice Bolger’s account of the case.
The background facts to the image-based abuse are as follows: By 2024, the Student had been persistently refusing to do the repeat exams UCD had asked her to do in 2023. Of that, Mrs. Justice Bolger states:
The plaintiff’s stated excuses for not availing of the opportunity afforded to her to sit six remediation exams in September 2024 on the 2022/2023 materials, are entirely unconvincing and groundless in fact. It is a great pity that the plaintiff did not focus more of her energy on the remediation exams arranged for her in September 2024, based solely on the 2022/2023 material to which she had access, having repeatedly claimed over many months that she wanted to and was ready, willing and able to sit her remediation exams and having told this court that she had said “multiple times I really really wanted to sit those exams, they were incredibly important”
This context is important, because the young woman did, finally, through her solicitors, agree to sit the exams, all six of them, between the dates of May 3rd to May 17th last year, 2025. This was agreed to by the University on April 9th, 2025.
Two weeks later, on April 21st, is when the “highly offensive” image of her was sent by email – between the dates when she had agreed to do the exams, and the date when the exams were due to be taken. We can reasonably surmise that this is either very cruel timing by somebody who had no reason to know that she had finally agreed to sit those exams, or horrendously and uncommonly bad luck. In any event, the circulation of the images by email put paid to the exam plan. The Student told the court in oral evidence – but not in written submissions – that her very great upset over these images was the reason why she could not sit the exams in May 2025. Of that, Mrs. Justice Bolger writes:
Having regard to the plaintiff’s explanation to this court for not sitting the May exams, the lack of any attempts to avail of the process for identifying medical reasons for not attending an exam and significantly having regard to the contents of the plaintiff’s solicitors’ detailed and carefully drafted letter of 9 May 2025, I do not find the plaintiff’s reasons for not sitting the remediation exams made available to her between 3 and 17 May 2025 to be convincing or acceptable.
The images, of course, were circulated from highly secure and anonymous email accounts and anonymised sim cards. We might reasonably surmise that the only person who could plausibly have taken photographs of the unconscious student after her rape is the same anonymous and un-accused person who was in the room with her at the time of the attack. If so, that person also somehow either got very lucky, or somehow was close enough to the student in question to know just how cruel his timing was, in deciding to persecute her in this highly distressing manner fully two years after her rape. That person, returning to a theme above, is also a monster beyond comprehension: Not only perpetrating a rape, but then being the obvious prime suspect, two years later, in resurrecting the entire trauma in the most cruel and callous way. But again, no such person has been accused, per the public record of this entire case.
There are, to be frank, very many extraordinary and horrific apparent coincidences of timing in this entire tale, in which each step of the trauma aligns perfectly with the scheduled and then re-scheduled and then scheduled yet again exams, which have yet to be taken.
There is also the extraordinary fact that, per the public record, the only people in this entire story to have gone to the Gardai are…. UCD. To investigate from whence the offensive images in question originated. That will be a challenging investigation, but it remains the best hope of identifying the perpetrator of wrongdoing in this case.
Of course, the Irish Media – perhaps given the timing of International Women’s Day and perhaps because of an inherent willingness to give a sympathetic ear to victims – has run this story, in its evolving versions, largely without criticism or critique or any instinct for enquiry. Before UCD applied successfully to have the judgment made public, they were the villains. Now, two weeks on, Ireland’s callousness in relation to image-based abuse seems to be the primary target.
Yet at the centre of this story is a young woman who has been afforded every protection by the media, and every kindness by her university, and who still – three years after failing exams that she sat before she was ever allegedly attacked – has failed to re-sit them. There are many holes in this story, and they are going entirely un-interrogated. Perhaps out of kindness. But perhaps, too, out of a media myopia when it comes to issues of this nature.