“I was shocked, gobsmacked, my mouth was on the floor.” Jade Rasmussen could not believe it when her long-time boyfriend was jailed last month for a serious physical assault on her.
Having read about Cathal Crotty, then a 22-year-old soldier, with an address at Parkroe Heights, Ardnacrusha, Limerick, getting a three-year suspended sentence for a brutal random assault on Natasha O’Brien in Limerick city in May 2022, Ms Rasmussen said she never thought Aidan Walsh would get a prison sentence.
Ms Rasmussen was a 23-year-old student at Dublin’s Trinity College when she was assaulted on September 9th, 2020, at a holiday home in Co Clare by Walsh, now aged 28, with an address at Castle View, Carrickmines, Dublin 18.
Dublin Circuit Criminal Court previously heard that, during an assault that ran into the early hours of the morning, Walsh kicked Ms Rasmussen in the legs, punched her in the back, put his hands around her neck and pushed her against a countertop.
Ms Rasmussen said Walsh had told her he was returning to Dublin without her. Under the impression he had left the house, she attempted to take her own life but he returned and intervened, before dragging her down a wooden flight of stairs, causing her “indescribable pain”.
“I will never be able to forget that he wanted to let me fall off the edge of the banister so that I could break every bone in my body,” she said in her victim impact statement, which she read to the court.
“The idea that I was that worthless to someone still rings heavily in my ears.”
Walsh put her and her dog in his van and dropped them off at a “random” fuel station in Portlaoise after a drive that was “one of the most terrifying experiences of my life”, she said. “His unadulterated rage made me question whether I would get out of the van alive.”
She and the dog were picked up at the garage by her sister and two friends after Walsh contacted one of them.
In the days after the assault, Walsh sent Ms Rasmussen a text message saying: “It took all my willpower not to kill you”, a reference to the night of the assault, she said in her statement.
“I think a lot about how I could have died that night, along with the expression ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’,” said Ms Rasmussen. “I vehemently disagree. In my case, what didn’t kill me has broken me into pieces, and I still cannot find a way to put myself back together.”
After the assault, between September and December 2020, she was experiencing “indescribable fear” on a daily basis.
She said Walsh’s inability to accept she did not want to see him led him to seek her out on several occasions, including an evening where he searched for her for four hours “according to himself” and called her more than 40 times before he “ambushed” her as she cycled home from a friend’s house.
She said she felt unable to report the assault until after an incident at Trinity College in December 2020 involving Walsh.
In her statement, she said she suffered “extreme psychological distress” caused by the assault, resulting in a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and requiring “extensive” treatment, including inpatient stays at mental health facilities. She was placed on medication for depression and panic attacks.
Ms Rasmussen described the life changes she experienced as “brutal and endless”.
One of the biggest changes was her inability to complete her M Phil degree at Trinity College, she said. “I was too traumatised to complete the course and graduated with only a H Dip.”
She went from being a top two graduate for her undergraduate degree “to being barely able to hold down multiple jobs in the service industry”.
Her depression and lack of confidence in herself meant she could not get out of bed some days, causing much distress to her family, she said.
Due to her “multiple suicide attempts”, her family were too scared to leave her by herself. She had had to give away her beloved dog “as I did not have the emotional capacity to look after him”.
Her parents had broken up when she was very young and she moved to Copenhagen to live with her father for a time after the assault to access different mental healthcare. That “only furthered my feelings of depression, isolation and hopelessness” and she returned to Ireland.
Speaking to The Irish Times in the wake of the sentence, Ms Rasmussen said she was in her teens when she first met Walsh at the “Wes” teenage disco in south Dublin.
She was “besotted” from the start and they were boyfriend and girlfriend from when she was about 15. They never lived together but, apart from some breaks, were in a relationship for eight years until the 2020 assault, she said.
She said she had been feeling increasingly controlled by Walsh and had told him, when they went to Clare in September 2020, she wanted to end their relationship and was interested in someone else.
Walsh knew she had become friends with a male student and was furious, she said.
Among the aggravating factors that Dublin Circuit Criminal Court Judge Dara Hayes took into account on October 7th last when imposing a 30-month sentence, with 15 months suspended, was that the assault on Ms Rasmussen occurred in the context of an intimate partner situation and its severe impact on Ms Rasmussen.
He took into consideration Walsh’s further admission of a threat to kill the male friend of Ms Rasmussen’s, made via phone on the night of the assault, and its impact on that man.
The Director of Public Prosecutions, represented by barrister Edward Doocey, entered a nolle prosequi on charges of coercive control and a threat to kill Ms Rasmussen.
In mitigation, the judge took into account Walsh’s plea of guilty to the assault on Ms Rasmussen, his expression of remorse, that he had no previous convictions, his admission of the threat to her friend and his full co-operation with the probation services.
The judged suspended 15 months of the sentence on conditions including that Walsh engage with an offenders focus programme, have no future contact with Ms Rasmussen, pay €7,000 to the prosecuting garda for her and disclose intimate relationships to the probation service.
Walsh has married since and is in a loving relationship, the judge heard.
The final sentencing hearing had been deferred to October to await a probation report and came almost a year after Ms Rasmussen had read her victim impact statement.
She sees herself as “a survivor, not a victim”, Ms Rasmussen stressed. Her motivation for speaking out is because she wants young women who find themselves in controlling relationships to know they will be taken seriously if they seek help.
Before this, she read newspaper headlines about changes in domestic violence laws but had thought, in terms of her own situation, “we’re not tied to each other enough, he’s only my boyfriend, it’s not enough”.
“It actually is enough. You don’t have to be married and have kids to go through this. I want young girls – I was so young at the time, just 23 – to know they’re not excluded from being taken seriously. I don’t want girls to think they don’t have enough to report. There is a misconception the guards don’t do anything with women’s complaints of domestic violence; they do, the guards put their heart and soul into it.”
She is particularly grateful to Sgt Eugene McCarthy and gardaí at Donnybrook Garda station for their “outstanding” work on her case and their support of her. Without that, and the “fantastic” support of Women’s Aid, she would have felt unable to continue with reporting the assault and with the court process, she said.
“I was treated with kindness, respect. I felt like I was broken, that I had nothing in me. I had no reason to believe in myself, that I should feel empowered or strong or brave or proud of what I did, they’re the ones who told me that I am brave. The judge had very kind words for me too.”
“I’m hoping that at least one girl who is on the fence about reporting her violent boyfriend, maybe they’ve broken up but he’s stalking her and she’s scared, will read about my case. I just want some good to come out of this.”
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