Latest news with #AmandaBrunker
Irish Times
11-07-2025
- Irish Times
Rapist who harassed three women journalists is to spend longer in prison
A convicted rapist handed an 11-year sentence last month for harassing three journalists has been told he will spend an extra 10 months in prison. Mark McAnaw (53), previously of Letterkenny, Co Donegal, was before Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Friday for breaching the conditions of a suspended sentence. He pleaded guilty last month to harassing three journalists – Nicola Tallant, Amanda Brunker and Deirdre Reynolds – in August 2023. At that time McAnaw was under the suspended portion of a sentence for an aggravated burglary committed in 2018. READ MORE In June 2023 McAnaw received a sentence of eight years and four months, backdated to when he went into custody in 2018, for the aggravated burglary. The final 16 months of the sentence was suspended for 16 years on strict conditions. He was released from custody on that sentence in July 2023, several weeks before the harassment of the three journalists took place. On Friday he was before Dublin Circuit Criminal Court for a hearing in relation to the activation of the suspended portion of the sentence for aggravated burglary. Judge Martin Nolan was told the application to reactivate the suspended portion of the sentence had been triggered by McAnaw breaching the conditions of the suspension. These were his convictions for the harassment of the three journalists and a separate District Court conviction for a breach of the Sex Offenders' Act. Rebecca Smith, defending McAnaw, said her client was homeless following his release from custody and had struggled to access medication he had been on. McAnaw also found it difficult to abide by the conditions imposed, she said. The judge said he could activate none, all or part of the suspended portion of the 2023 sentence, which would run consecutive to the 11-year sentence imposed on McAnaw last month. He said McAnaw had committed 'rather serious offences' following his release from custody in 2023, which had already been dealt with by another judge. Judge Nolan reactivated 10 months of the 16 months suspended portion of the 2023 sentence and directed it to run consecutively to the 11-year sentence McAnaw is serving. Last month Judge Pauline Codd handed McAnaw an 11-year sentence for the harassment of Ms Tallant, Ms Brunker and Ms Reynolds. The court heard McAnaw repeatedly sent the three women emails and messages of a violent and sexually threatening nature, which escalated to him threatening to put a 'bullet' in one of them. He also referred to himself as an 'IRA Top Boy'. He also turned up at the offices of the Sunday World on Talbot Street, Dublin, and when refused entry he went to a cafe across the road. When gardaí approached him there, McAnaw was writing an email to Ms Tallant. McAnaw is detained at the Central Mental Hospital (CMH), but does not accept his diagnosis of schizophrenia and has declined to take medication, the court was told. His previous convictions include rape, kidnapping and assaults causing actual bodily harm. McAnaw refused to enter a bond before the court last month, which would have suspended the final 12 months of the 11-year sentence imposed.
Sunday World
10-06-2025
- Sunday World
Deirdre Reynolds: I believe my stalker had a 'rape or kill' list of women in Irish media
SPEAKING UP | Under cross examination, I was asked if being threatened with rape or murder was not just 'part and parcel' of my high-profile job. Typically penned in green, by an author appropriately mad as a box of frogs, over the course of almost two decades writing for national tabloid newspapers, it's fair to say I've had one or two – though none to rival the well-known travel writer who once received human faeces gift-wrapped in one of their articles, in a large brown envelope with address crazily scrawled in, what else, but green ink. Among fellow hacks, we laugh about this so-called 'fan mail', which now more typically comes in the form of emails or Facebook or Instagram DMs. August 14, 2023, was the day I stopped laughing. Mark McAnaw first addressed me as a 'proper little sort' whom he wanted to 'see in various styles of sexy underwear while wearing heels' and 'give a really, really, really good seeing to'. Amanda Brunker and Deirdre Reynolds Just days later, when I hadn't agreed to 'a f*cking basic thing like a normal phone call', so that he could 'get this on the go on a regular basis', the 53 year-old British man was promising to come to Dublin 'armed to the teeth' on a specific date to 'put a bullet in [my] f*cking nut'. On Thursday, the 'IRA Top Boy' and 'most powerful god there ever was', as he also referred to himself in the string of frightening mails that followed, was reduced to anything but, as he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for harassing me, Nicola Tallant and Amanda Brunker. Sitting in the back of Court 10 at the Criminal Courts of Justice, I couldn't help but eject a couple of quiet tears of relief, partly for myself, but also for every other woman out there who's ever faked a phone call to their sister while walking back to their car after dark or kept a tiny body spray in their handbag for more than just freshening up while out and about. As he stood up to whisper with his defence team, spruced up for the day that was in it in a freshly-ironed white shirt and navy bomber jacket, mostly though, I was thinking of the young foreign student, who was just 19 at the time he raped her at a house in Donegal in 2010, and how she had resisted so strongly that the radiator had been pulled from her bedroom wall; while selfishly glad he'll never get the chance to do the same to me as he'd schemed. Amid all the legalese, I didn't even realise that the schizophrenic, whose 30-plus year history of the most stomach-turning violence against women also includes kidnap, had just volunteered to spend an extra year locked up rather than seek medical help, among other bond conditions. Nicola Tallant When Judge Pauline Codd praised us for remaining 'calmly courageous' throughout the near two-year case, which began with me casually giving a statement to a detective in an office at work, I didn't have the heart to tell her how my knees had damn near buckled the first time I had to walk right past him to take the stand. Or how it had been pounding so furiously coming up to other court dates that it took an ECG, cardiac MRI, and several hundred euro to confirm that the tightly-wound knot in my chest was just the panic of breaking one of the golden rules of journalism, by becoming the story. 'I'm glad he's not on the streets', says victim as convicted rapist who threatened 3 female journalists is jailed' – announced just one of the many headlines about the case on Friday. Victim? Surely, they didn't mean me? But, surreally, they did, and as the 'Fair play, missus' messages from everyone from colleagues to cousins to old school friends started trickling in, I also didn't reply how if I'd known from the beginning that I'd wind up like the proverbial deer in headlights on RTÉ's Six-One News or Morning Ireland, I might simply have dragged McAnaw's messages into the trash folder, where they belonged, said nothing, and hoped for the best. Mark McAnaw was jailed for 11 years News in 90 Seconds - Tuesday June 10 The 'danger to [the] public', as Judge Codd called him on Thursday, didn't really give me that option, however, when he told me he had '30 girls on [his] list' – among them 'all the 2FM girls' – whom he would 'keep emailing' if I didn't 'start replying to [his] messages'. 'What happens to you lot now is firmly in your court,' he chillingly warned me. It was my strong belief then, and remains so now, that McAnaw, just like Englishman Gavin Plumb, who was jailed for plotting to kidnap and murder Holly Willoughby last year, has a fantasy 'rape or kill' list of women in Irish media. In speaking up, I can only cross my fingers that I haven't jumped straight to the top of it should he ever be free to torment us again. Under cross examination, I was asked if being threatened with rape or murder was not just 'part and parcel' of my high-profile job. Read more One last time with feeling: it's not. Nor should it be. Now imagine how the woman who mailed me in recent days to say how she'd been asked by a female Garda if she found her stalker 'attractive', or the countless rape survivors who've been quizzed about their underwear choices or alcohol consumption in a system more usually weighted in favour of perpetrators than victims must feel. Deemed 'untreatable' by a forensic psychiatrist, as well as being at 'highest risk' for re-offending, McAnaw has been ordered to stay at least 10 miles away from me for the rest of his life. As my heart rate slowly returns to normal, moreover, let's hope he never gets anywhere near any woman or girl ever again.
