Former Democratic Unionist Party leader Jeffrey Donaldson was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Thursday at Newry Crown Court for sexual offences against two women who were children when he abused them between 1985 and 2008, completing a fall from Westminster influence to a cell at Maghaberry.
Donaldson, 63, was convicted in June on 18 counts including one of rape after a four-week trial in Belfast. Judge Paul Ramsey said the crimes merited a lengthy term. Police and reporters crowded the courthouse 40 miles south of Belfast as victim statements describing decades of hidden trauma were read into the record. Donaldson, who plans to appeal, has been in custody since the jury’s verdict.
What the jury heard
Complainant B told the court Donaldson raped her when she was of primary-school age and later lifted her top and fondled her breasts while she was still at secondary school; the jury heard his wife Eleanor witnessed part of that incident and walked away. Complainant A said Donaldson began inappropriate contact when she was in primary school, including an episode where he used a light to look at her genitals and another where he kissed her with his tongue, laughing off her protests as a joke.
Prosecutor Rosemary Walsh said both victims locked memories away until adulthood before reporting to police in 2024. Walsh described Complainant B’s distress on the stand as “palpable” and said she sometimes wished she could die because of the abuse’s legacy. In a victim impact statement, Complainant A wrote that shame and anger had “stolen” her childhood. The court also heard of a 2020 letter in which Donaldson asked Complainant A for forgiveness for his “sinful nature”; he told the jury any apologies related to other matters.
Political aftershocks in Belfast and London
Until his arrest in March 2024 Donaldson embodied unionist respectability: knighted in 2016, DUP leader from 2021, and a central figure in post-Brexit talks over Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. King Charles stripped his knighthood in July after the conviction. Eleanor Donaldson, 60, was found to have aided and abetted some offending but was deemed unfit to stand trial on mental-health grounds and faced a trial of the facts that does not produce a criminal conviction.
The DUP has condemned Donaldson’s crimes and disowned him as leader, yet the party faces questions from supporters about whether it ignored other complaints, including allegations of drunkenness and harassment. For Westminster, the sentence marks the judicial end of a chapter that once put a DUP chief at the heart of UK government negotiations; for the victims, Ramsey’s term is the public accounting they sought after more than three decades.