A GP has been jailed for two years after he was convicted of indecently assaulting a teenage patient while on a house call to her family home over 25 years ago.
Dr Kevin Mulcahy (57) of Cregane, Lombardstown, Mallow, Co Cork had denied a single charge of indecently assaulting then 15 year old girl on December 23rd 1989.
But a jury of ten men and two women at Cork Circuit Criminal Court took just 39 minutes to find him guilty of the sole charge of indecently assaulting the woman who is now in her 40s.
The woman had told how Mulcahy was visiting her house to treat her mother who was seriously ill. The woman herself had a cold and Mulcahy examined her in her bedroom.
He asked her did she know how sick her mother was and when she became upset, he started to comfort her and put his arms around her to give her a hug.
The court heard that Mulcahy asked the girl if she knew how to examine her breasts for lumps and when she took off her top, he showed her how to examine her breasts.
The sexual assault charge did not relate to this incident but to Mulcahy touching around her vagina through her clothing and the young woman said she was shocked.
Mulcahy denied the incident ever took place and said that he had no longer been able to practice as a GP after the woman made a complaint against him in 2010.
In her victim impact statement, the woman said she had been hugely affected by the assault by Mulcahy which happened when she was very upset because of her mother’s illness.
“It was a time of great vulnerability, fear and sadness in our family and Dr Kevin Mulcahy took complete advantage of me at such a vulnerable time in my life,” she said.
She told how she would have had no sexual experiences at the time and was trying to make sense of it all and she could not come forward as sexual abuse was not spoken of at the time.
“Even if I wanted to tell anyone, I wouldn’t have known how — I would have had the language and I was terrified that I wouldn’t be believed ... I felt a huge sense of shame.”
Later when she told professionals who encouraged her to make a complaint, she was still very reluctant to do so because of Mulcahy’s standing in the local community.
“At that stage, Dr Kevin Mulcahy’s practice was well established, his wife’s family were living in the local area and I knew his family were very involved in the medical profession.
“I felt that in making a complaint, I would have been taking on a profession rather than an individual and I feared that he may have had a lot of support locally,” said the woman.
Defence counsel, Blaise O’Carroll SC, said his client had been unable to work as a GP ever since the woman made the complaint and he had no means of making a living.
He was also a carer for his elderly parents and his father suffered from emphysema, said Mr O’Carroll as he pleaded for leniency for his client who is a father of four adult children.
Judge Sean O Donnabhain said that although the actual sexual assault was through clothing, it was nonetheless a serious matter as it involved a gross breach of trust by him.
He was a professional man in his 30s charged with looking after a teenage girl as a patient and he had abused that trust by sexually assaulting her at a time of great vulnerability.
He said Mulcahy and his wife, Bernadette had both given evidence to the effect ‘Pity me — look how terrible life is for me” and he was not aware of Mulcahy showing any remorse.
He accepted that Mulcahy would never work again in the medical field and that his conviction will have repercussions for his family and that he was now socially isolated.
However Mulcahy had put his victim through the trauma of a trial and the discount associated with a guilty plea was not available to him, he said as he sentenced him two years in jail.
The trial was the second time that Mulcahy had been tried on the charge with a jury failing to reach a verdict when he was first tried on the charge back in November 2013.
Almost a year later in October 2014 in a separate unrelated case, Mulcahy was acquitted of a charge of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in his surgery in Kanturk between 1989-1990.
