3 days ago
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.
