The brave survivor of horrific abuse she suffered at the hands of a former garda Paul Moody has said she cannot understand how some people continued to support him.
The woman, who does not want to publicly identified and wants only to be known as 'Nicola', told RTE that a number of men - who were not members of the gardai - supported Moody during the criminal process. And even supported him after he was charged and had admitted what he had done.
Paul Moody was jailed for three years and three months for the coercive control of his partner who has cancer. The 43-year-old woman told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Monday how her former partner told her the only reason he had visited her while in hospital was to “watch you bleed to death”.
Moody, 42, was caught because he made a complaint to the gardai about one of Nicola's family members and handed in his phone as part of the investigation. Detectives realised the crimes he was committing while examining the phone.
And speaking to RTE on Tuesday, Nicola described how that brought about his downfall. She said: "While trying to destroy my life, he actually destroyed his own. He tried to lie and come after a member of my family with false evidence.”
She also described the gardaí who investigated Paul Moody as "amazing".
"If I could pick such a team, that’s who I would have picked," she said, "They gave me back my faith in An Garda Síochána".
"He handed his own phone in and they came to me and said ‘Nicola’, we know what he’s doing to you. While trying to destroy my life, he actually destroyed his own," she said.
"No one deserves to get away with treating anyone like this," she said, "No other human being should treat another human being this way. It’s cruel and beyond evil."
Nicola previously tried to report Moody to a senior officer in Irishtown Garda Station where he worked, but Moody succeeded in having a colleague divert her call to him.
Nicola also said she does not know how or why the decision was made to allow Moody to only plead guilty to one of the twenty charges, that of coercive control.
And she said she still didn’t think that Moody would "do time", go to jail, "because he was a Guard."
"Because he was a Garda he knew the law. He used it and twisted it in every way he could. He was so clever," she said.
The broadcaster stated that Nicola criticised the fact that when other state agencies became aware of the abuse they failed to act. She also said she gets no pleasure in sending Moody to jail.
"I don’t get any satisfaction from seeing anyone go to prison," she said, "if anything it makes me sad to be put in this position."
However, she said she had no choice because of the abuse.
"I never dreamed I would be involved in anything like this but I had no option," she said. "I find this process very hard, very difficult. If anything, it makes me sad and hurt to have to do this."
Nicola also said she wanted to encourage other victims of this crime to come forward - as she called for privacy, adding that she is due to receive further cancer treatment in the coming weeks.
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