Jeffrey Donaldson watches from the dock as two alleged victims address sex abuse trial

Between them, the two alleged victims in the trial of Jeffrey and Eleanor Donaldson on child sex abuse charges have spent five days in the witness box. Connecting to Newry crown court via video link from an adjoining room, they have watched as their police interviews have been played to the jury, taken questions from the prosecution barrister and then faced lengthy cross-examination by defence barristers lasting, in the case of one of the complainants, for a full two days. In one of the most emotionally-charged moments of the trial so far, Complainant B broke down when asked why she had not gone to the police many years ago, saying she blamed herself for what happened to the second alleged victim. “I should have [gone to the police] ... I should have,” she said, but she was “so afraid ... so embarrassed. “I should have,” she said. “If I’d done that, it wouldn’t have happened [to her]. It’s my fault.” She told the court what happened was “seared into her brain for the rest of her life” and her “biggest mistake” was not telling anyone at the time. “I will regret that every day.” The former DUP leader and ex-MP Jeffrey Donaldson (63) with an address in Dromore, Co Down , is accused of 18 offences: one count of rape; four of gross indecency with or towards a child; and 13 counts of indecent assault on a female, on dates between 1985 and 2008. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges. His wife Eleanor Donaldson (60) of the same address, is charged with five counts of aiding and abetting in connection with the charges faced by her husband – charges she denies. Eleanor Donaldson is not present in court as she has been ruled unfit to stand trial on the basis of medical evidence, and the jury of seven men and five women will instead decide on the basis of the evidence presented whether she committed the acts alleged. The trial began at Newry crown court last week and is expected to last about four weeks. At roughly the halfway point, the prosecution is still setting out its case. The majority of the evidence has been from the two alleged victims, who cannot be identified and are known as Complainant A and Complainant B. Throughout Jeffrey Donaldson has been watching from the dock, flanked by two custody officers. He reacts rarely, only once or twice, with a shake of the head. For most of the evidence he has stared straight ahead, an impassive look on his face, or has his head down, making notes. Ten charges against Jeffrey Donaldson – that of rape and nine counts of indecent assault, on dates between 1985 and 1991 – relate to Complainant B, who is the older of the two alleged victims, and claimed he abused her between the ages of about seven or eight and 12 to 13. In her police interview, she claimed Jeffrey Donaldson raped her while she was in primary school, telling police she remembered him “putting his hands inside my pants”, then “pulling my legs apart with his two feet”. She pretended to be asleep “hoping it would stop” but he then raped her, she claimed. Jeffrey Donaldson was always silent during the alleged abuse, she said; she remembered his breathing: “It wasn’t just in and out, it was laboured and panting.” Eleanor Donaldson, she claimed, had facilitated the rape, and had interrupted another incident in which, the complainant alleged, Jeffrey Donaldson had followed her into a room and “lifted up my top and started playing with my breasts and stuff”. She “turned around and walked out”, and closed the door behind her, the complainant said, and years later “tried to contact me to apologise for not doing anything”. The jury also heard of other alleged apologies, including a meeting arranged between the complainant and Jeffrey Donaldson at the Christian Family Centre in Armoy, Co Antrim, at which she said “he apologised for what he’d done to me in the past”. This interpretation was rejected by Jeffrey Donaldson’s barrister, Kieran Vaughan, who claimed the complainant told his client “he hadn’t made you comfortable with the relationship at the time” and he had replied: “If that’s the way I made you feel, I apologise.” David Hoy, who cofounded the centre with his wife Linda, and who arranged the meeting, told the court that when Jeffrey Donaldson met Complainant B, he told her: “I know what this is about. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” Complainant A, the younger of the two victims, said she had received a letter from Jeffrey Donaldson in which he described himself as a “sinner” and said he regretted “all the hurt, pain and distress I have caused”. She said it “felt like an apology ... he was trying to apologise for perhaps the abuse that had occurred, but he didn’t want to say that formally in writing”. The defence barrister suggested to the complainant that the letter “had nothing to do with you” and was instead linked to a suspected extramarital affair. The court heard the Donaldsons had split up for a period in 2020 and Eleanor Donaldson had a listening device planted in her husband’s car to gather evidence about the suspected affair. “The proper context of this letter is a marital dispute that led to him being kicked out of the house,” the barrister said. This was rejected by the complainant, who said Jeffrey Donaldson was “a very clever man ... given the success of his career, he would never have written what he had done [about the abuse] in a letter”. In the police interview played to the court, Complainant A said she was “sexually abused” by Jeffrey Donaldson from “quite a young age”. Eight of the charges against Donaldson – four of gross indecency and four of indecent assault – relate to Complainant A and are alleged to have taken place on dates between 1999 and 2008. During one alleged incident the complainant remembered “vividly”, she said she was sitting on Jeffrey Donaldson’s knee and he put his “hand up underneath my top” and was “rubbing me” and this happened “quite a lot”. In another alleged incident, when she was about 13 or 14, the complainant said she woke in the night to find him “over the top of me” holding a bright light with her nightie pulled up and “lying with my legs kind of open”. “I knew he was looking at my private parts,” she said. Vaughan, representing Jeffrey Donaldson, questioned Complainant A’s recollection of events and said the incident involving the light had not happened as she had described. He claimed other events she alleged had not happened: “Either you made it up – fabricated the tongue in the mouth or rubbing of the chest – or you dreamt it, and over the years you have just come to believe that it’s true,” he said. Of the allegations by Complainant B, he told the jury the defence case is that “Jeffrey Donaldson did not touch you inappropriately” and the alleged rape did not happen. He suggested she was “conjuring up” her claims. Ian Turkington, representing Eleanor Donaldson, said that “at no stage” did his client facilitate the alleged rape of Complainant B – it was “a figment of your imagination”, he said – and she had not witnessed Jeffrey Donaldson touching her breasts. The defence barrister said Eleanor Donaldson had entered the room but she “never saw anything inappropriate”. Eleanor Donaldson had asked her husband about the incident “many times” and they had an argument about it as she had not seen anything specific but there was “something she didn’t like going on”. This was rejected by the complainant. “I saw her look at me that night. She saw what he was doing to me,” she said. The trial continues.