Appearing via video link with cuts on her forehead and her skin pallid, Eleanor Donaldson learned her fate in front of the two victims who just want to know why she never stopped her DUP leader husband Jeffrey from sexually assaulting them

They sat in the front row of the public gallery, side by side, two women who had been abused by former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson when they had been little girls.

It was Friday the 13th, the final hurdle of the trial that saw him jailed, and now they awaited the sentencing of his co-accused, his wife Eleanor Donaldson.

The women had started their journeys to justice alone but in Newry Crown Court they held hands at the start of the hearing, linked forever by the horrors they had each suffered, by the trauma of the case and now the prospect of a new life with sentences secured.

With the police positioned behind them, Victim A and her husband sat either side of Victim B and as the court proceedings moved to formal sentencing, the screen behind Judge Paul Ramsey flickered into life, prompting them all to turn to face it.

Eleanor Donaldson was not in Newry Crown Court. Instead, her pallid face appeared in courtroom 1 via video link. Wearing a black polo neck top, her hair was severely cropped, cut at an angle across the fringe, revealing two deep cuts on her forehead, each an inch long, partially healed and fully visible.

She appeared slumped slightly to the right, leaning against the shoulder of her solicitor, her eyes closed, her facial expressions giving away rolling emotions.

It was the first time she had been seen at court since February 21, 2025, when she appeared with the same solicitor at her side, walking briskly into the building, smiling slightly at the media cameras.

After that her health reportedly failed and after several medical reports, Judge Paul Ramsey ruled that she would face a trial of the facts, excusing her from appearing alongside her husband in the dock.

She was not seen again in or near the court for almost 21 months and the change in her appearance was marked.

Last month, Judge Paul Ramsey had insisted that she make an appearance on Friday, either in person or on screen to hear him sentence her.

Almost five months on from the jury finding her husband guilty of all 18 charges and finding that she acted in the five counts she faced, it could have been feasible to forget exactly what the jury had found she did.

Chief prosecutor Rosemary Walsh KC took the court back through the five counts, briefly and precisely, the way she had taken the jury through four weeks of evidence in the summer.

Counts one, two and three concerned Victim B, who had been raped and twice indecently assaulted. The prosecution case, and the jury’s finding, was that that day, Eleanor had directed or guided the child into a position where her husband would have access to her to abuse her. Eleanor knew, Ms Walsh said, what was going to happen.

Eleanor Donaldson at court in September 2024. Photo: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

Count four was centred around Eleanor’s actions – or lack of action – after witnessing her husband abusing a child. She saw what was happening but stepped away, pulling the door to. The closing of the door, the jury found, let the abuse carry on.

Count 19 rested on two moments when a child approached Eleanor for help and support. The first time, she told her Jeffrey had kissed her in a manner the prosecution described as deeply inappropriate and sexual. Eleanor laughed, as if it were a joke.

The second time, the same little girl told Eleanor she had woken to see Jeffrey standing over her with a torch trained on her intimate parts. Eleanor did nothing to help her. That, the jury found, exposed the child to additional risk of sexual harm, and she failed to stop it.

In June, Judge Ramsey had directed the jury that it must be sure Eleanor had ‘aided and abetted or assisted or encouraged the commissioning of offences by a positive act, whether by words or deeds’. The jury was sure.

Ms Walsh told the court that pain ‘permeated’ the victim impact statements of both women. Then she turned the court’s attention to what they had said about Eleanor.

Victim B described the harm she had carried as a child and into her adult life. Then she addressed Eleanor directly, with the question she had waited decades to ask: ‘What did I do wrong that you didn’t make it stop?’

Victim A said becoming a mother herself had forced her to look again at her own childhood, and at the adults around her. Holding her own children, she could not fathom how anyone could fail to protect a child.

Eleanor arriving for court in April 2024. Photo: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

Two people who should have kept her safe had failed her, she said, and no amount of healing will ever change that.

She still cannot understand why loyalty to Jeffrey was put before her, and before Victim B. Neither little girl, it seemed, had been valued enough to protect.

The court could not answer those questions. The judge was bound by the narrow options the law allowed. But they hung in Courtroom 1 long after Ms Walsh sat down, and they were still hanging there when Eleanor appeared on screen, eyes closed, head bowed.

Yesterday the court heard oral evidence from Dr Christine Kennedy, a forensic psychiatrist, and Professor George Fox, who had each assessed Eleanor. They stated that she should be subject to a Supervision and Treatment Order (STO).

Judge Ramsey also had reports from a social worker and from probation. Her barrister, Ian Turkington KC, told the court the medical evidence was ‘clear’. The prosecution accepted it pointed one way.

Judge Ramsey called the order an ‘inevitable conclusion’. So that is what she got.

As he spoke to her, Eleanor kept her head almost bowed and did not open her eyes. Not once. Not as the judge explained what would happen to her. Not as the two women she had failed sat in front of her, waiting.

When Judge Ramsey asked her to acknowledge the order he had made, her mouth worked but without sound. Judge Ramsey told her: ‘Just nod if you understand me.’ She gave a slight nod and a single word broke out and flatlined. ‘Yes.’

After two and a half years, a trial of the facts sat out at home, five findings by a jury, two victim impact statements and a husband jailed for 15 years, one word, one syllable – and a dry cry.

Eleanor had once been a trusted and feted member of society, she carried the title of Lady and worked part-time as a one-to-one classroom assistant for children with additional needs in a primary school. Now she has been placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for five years.

She will not go to prison but is subject to an STO and will spend the next three years supervised by a social worker from the Craigavon Community Mental Health Team. She must allow that social worker into her home. She must attend medical appointments and accept the treatment she is given. She must tell the authorities if she moves house.

Jeffrey Donaldson leaving Newry Crown Court during his trial, at which he was found guilty of rape. Photo: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

Jeffrey, 63, is 19km away in Maghaberry, serving 15 years for 18 counts of child sex abuse committed between 1985 and 2008, including the rape of a girl of primary school age when he was 25 or 26.

On March 29, 2024, released from custody, separated from his wife and with both facing charges of non-recent sexual offences against two children, Jeffrey began deleting his social media accounts.

Within 24 hours, the world knew he was at the centre of the abuse claims and speculation on her identity was rife.

A fortnight later, around April 10, 2024, a visitor called at the house in Dromore to check on Eleanor’s welfare.

She told them: ‘I hope we don’t go to jail because we’ve only just recently bought that new car.’

Her husband went to jail. She did not. But it is a long road from a woman worried about a shiny new car to the figure slumped on a screen behind Judge Ramsey, unable or unwilling to look at the two women she had failed, sitting before her in the gallery.

They had never had the luxury of closing their eyes to the actions they had been subjected to by Jeffrey, or the inaction of Eleanor.

The prison van taking Jeffrey Donaldson out of Newry Crown Court in June. Photo: Alamy

The couple’s house in the Dromore countryside in Co Down, where they lived for 22 years, is now for sale. Life will never be the same for either of them. Cares about a new car, plans for a new life in the Middle East, hopes of full acquittals have all fallen on hard ground.

What is left are two women who have to pick up the pieces of their lives while the world discusses how hard-fought justice is never the end for sex abuse victims, but a new and fragile start.

There is a temptation, in cases like this, to measure that justice in years. Fifteen for him with the guarantee of 50 per cent remission because the crimes were committed before 2009. Not a day behind bars for her. Three years under supervision, five on the register.

The women in the front row of the public gallery had, it appears, never measured justice in that way. It is clear from their victim impact statements that what they wanted from Jeffrey was a realisation and acknowledgment of his wrongdoing, a mea culpa and a heartfelt apology and explanation.

They have had to accept they will not get what they had desperately hoped for.

What they wanted from Eleanor was an explanation as to why she did not act to protect children she discovered were in danger, in pain and fear.

They did not get that either. The woman who could have answered it sat with her eyes shut and closed the chapter with a single word on her lips.

As the proceedings started to draw to a close, Victim A’s husband leaned forward in his seat, searching it seemed, looking for more. It did not come.

Almost imperceptibly he shook his head, appearing lost in his own thoughts.

In a moment, he reached back into the world he had supported since 2019, when his then girlfriend had revealed her truth to him, that she had been a sex abuse victim of the MP Jeffrey Donaldson. He reached back and looked at both women, his wife and Victim B.

His face open, his hand outstretched, he quietly led them out of the public gallery and towards the judge’s chambers.

From there they could make an exit, an exit into their changed world, into reality and routine. An arduous chapter had closed. They must move on.

Yet there are still a couple of postscripts that must be dealt with. Eleanor has applied to appeal the jury’s findings and Jeffrey has also applied for leave to appeal his convictions.

The appeal court is still working through the decisions, which are likely to be delivered in January 2027.

What will take longer is a review of the very law that kept Eleanor out of the dock.

On October 20, Justice Minister Naomi Long and Health Minister Robbie Butler appointed John Gillen to examine the law on unfitness to plead and trials of the facts. He is the senior judge whose landmark 2019 review of how sexual offences are handled in Northern Ireland’s courts produced 250 recommendations.

It came after UUP leader Jon Burrows wrote to both ministers in July, warning of ‘real and legitimate public concern’ about how the system works.

This case, he said, had brought that concern to a head.

It is not rare. Mr Burrows said 60 trials of the facts were held in Northern Ireland between 2020 and 2025.

Gillen’s review goes straight to the heart of the Donaldson case. Should a defendant who later becomes fit to plead face a conventional criminal trial after all? Should sex offender notification and other safeguarding measures apply when a jury finds someone did acts that would otherwise be serious sexual offences?

He will give particular attention to the views and experiences of victims – people like the two women who sat through four weeks of evidence knowing the woman they accused would never stand in the dock. Mrs Long said it was ‘absolutely vital that justice is served and that it is seen to be served’.

An interim report is due by February 2027, the final report in the spring. It will come too late for the two women in Courtroom 1. It may not come too late for the next victims.