Calls to the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre increased significantly during the case against Conor McGregor which attracted widespread media attention.
The centre’s Chief Executive Rachel Morrogh said that calls increased by 17% in the first ten days, and contact by first-time callers rose by 50% in the same period.
Ms Morrogh said that the publicity surrounding the case was having “a really profound effect on the people who use the centre’s services.
“When we looked at the figures for the first ten days of the trial, we could see the calls increased by 17% and the number of first-time callers increased by 50%.
“This case is being directly referenced by many of those callers who are distressed at the contents that they’re reading in the traditional media, but also that they’re accessing information that has been pushed through social media.
“So it’s a really distressing time.”
Many of the callers to the Rape Crisis Centre were concerned about the level of detail being reported, the fact that the identities of the parties were revealed and how they might navigate the court process themselves.
But this case was unlike most other sexual violence cases as it was a civil case and not a criminal one.
Ms Morrogh said that there were so “many unusual features around this case, one is that it has been tried in the civil courts rather than the criminal courts, and that means that neither the victim nor the accused has any right to anonymity.
“So we’re hearing details that we wouldn’t usually hear and, in addition to that, the defendant is an international celebrity, so there’s this huge, phenomenal global interest in the trial and this is driving a lot of conversation online and in traditional media that we’re not used to.”
Nikki Hand told the High Court she was devastated when the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) decided against a prosecution.
The court heard that she had requested a review and that the review had been carried out by the DPP herself, who upheld the original decision saying that there was no reasonable prospect of a conviction in a criminal case.
The standard of proof in a criminal case is higher than in a civil case and jurors must be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt before then can convict.
In a civil case, that standard is lower and is on the balance of probabilities.
The jury in this trial was told that the balance of probabilities means that they had to decide if something was more likely to have been true than not.
