Natasha O'Brien says online trolls called her 'professional victim' after attack
In 2022, the Limerick native was viciously attacked by Cathal Crotty, who was then a member of the Irish Defence Forces. He was given a three-year suspended sentence in June 2024.
An appeal was lodged the following month, and the sentence was overturned by the Court of Appeal in January this year, and he was sentenced to two years in jail.
Speaking ahead of her documentary, Natasha, which airs tonight on RTE One, she opened up about the horrendous online hate she received after Crotty was sentenced, with one troll labelling her "a professional victim".
She told The Irish Mirror: "I've been relentlessly trolled in everything I do in every post I post, every video or media interview. Anything and everything, there's just always so much negativity.
"There was a really interesting comment – 'she is a professional victim'. I don't even know what that means but apparently, I'm a professional victim.
"Or I hope she's going to donate all the money she makes from the documentary? What money? This has been out of my time. I've been doing this for the cause."
She also saw posts discussing her LinkedIn credentials with Natasha saying it wasn't even her page.
"That's not even my LinkedIn. We don't even look similar," she said.
Natasha also wants to make it clear that she was paid a "minor fee" for helping make her documentary, which airs tonight at 9.35pm.
"There was a minor fee, and it wouldn't even cover 30 hours of work, and I put in 10 months of this. It's not even a week's wages and I've put months into this.
"It's not about the money and these film projects and their subjects, they do it because it's an important story and message that needs to be heard and seen. It was important for me to do it because I suppose I've been judged in so many ways, and I thought it was time to tell people this is who I am.
"Of course it's a personal journey. I invited the cameras into very vulnerable moments."
Natasha said she hopes when people watch her documentary, they will stop judging victims on how they look.
"I just think that it is 2025 and the time for judging a victim on how they looked is absolutely insane.
"If you actually think that how someone looks is going to give you any indication of what they are going through, you're away with the fairies.
"You haven't a clue if you're seriously going to judge someone's appearance over the bucket load of trauma and all the struggles they've gone through and you're going to look at their appearance and judge them by that.
"I totally couldn't care less about that. It's time we stop judging books by their covers."
Natasha also spoke about the hurt her own family went through as they tried to help her heal from the heinous crime.
She said: "I really lost a part of myself, and my mam was just always so desperate to support me and help me to find myself again but there were lots of pieces of me that were just destroyed. They weren't coming back and when I was filming, I got an insight into what it was like for my mam to have a daughter going through this and how it really affected her and impacted her.
"It wasn't just me suffering, there were others around me suffering too. We forget that."
Speaking about her documentary, she said it was important that the programme explored the leniency of the justice system and not just her own story.
"It was really important to me at the start, that when we got my director on board… I said that I had told my story so many times, I'm sick of telling my story and I'm sure lots of people are sick of hearing my story so I don't want to waste an hour of prime-time television telling the same thing over again.
"I don't want to waste this opportunity to talk about the past. It's not me.
"We wanted to show that while something that happened to us can affect us, it doesn't define us and that was really important when we were filming this documentary."
Natasha added that she finally feels like she is embarking on a "new chapter and journey."
"It has been an emotional rollercoaster but I'm slowly starting to heal now and I'm finally on a new chapter and journey.
"I feel like my own personal fights for justice are now over so now it's trying to go onto bigger things and trying to use this case as a great example of what shouldn't happen again.
"I'm really passionate about trying to continue along to make sure this doesn't happen again for others.
"I wanted to bare my soul. I'm really happy with how it turned out.
"There is massive potential to do more and work on another project exploring restorative justice and going down that route and how do we really achieve a sense of justice for anyone in the system. I'd love to potentially explore that too," she added.
Natasha airs tonight on RTE One at 9.35pm
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