On the first day of his trial at Newry Crown Court, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson walked in calm and relaxed, smartly dressed in a blue suit and green tie, like he had just stepped out of the House of Commons. When the judge asked if he was ready, the former Democratic Unionist Party leader replied confidently: “Yes.”
Four weeks later, that confidence was gone. The 29-year Westminster veteran, once one of the UK’s most high-profile politicians, sat alone as the jury delivered its verdicts: guilty on all 18 child sex abuse charges, including one count of rape. His wife, Lady Eleanor Donaldson, charged alongside him, was not in court; she had been found unfit to face a conventional trial on mental health grounds. The jury found she had done the acts on five charges, including four of aiding and abetting.
“Former DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has been found guilty of 18 child sex offences, including rape.”
The trial’s first witnesses were the two women who had accused Donaldson, referred to as Complainant A and Complainant B to protect their anonymity. They gave evidence by video link, their faces appearing on a large TV above the judge. As they spoke, Donaldson stared at them with what seemed like pity or sadness, often scribbling notes in an A4 hardback notebook, sometimes shaking his head at parts of their testimony.
He occasionally joined in rare moments of levity – when the judge joked that the jurors did not need to spend much time in the gym because they were in and out of their seats so often, Donaldson laughed along with the courtroom. But the pressure showed. On the first day of Complainant A’s evidence, he chewed his lower lip as he waited for her to appear.
No other witnesses gave evidence in his defence. He was on his own. Outside court, the man who had been a regular fixture at school fetes, church services and public meetings in his Lagan Valley constituency had become a stranger to public life. One constituent, not a natural political supporter, summed up the fall: “I never voted for him, but you always just thought he was a decent, family man.”
Now, the 63-year-old faces a future behind bars, his decades-long dominance of Unionist politics shattered by the verdicts that left him isolated in a courtroom that once felt his stage.