A woman who was regularly raped and sexually assaulted in her sleep by her then boyfriend has criticised the suspended sentence handed down to him yesterday.
Niamh Ní Dhomhnaill said when she heard the sentence given to Magnus Meyer Hustveit it did not sink in.
She said: "I expected that he would spend at least some nominal, some tokenistic, time in prison. That would be representative of what he had taken away from me. I would say I have lost three years of my life."
"I feel a lot older than 28 some days. It is a little bit galling that someone can commit those kind of crimes and for whatever reason the crimes themselves don't speak for themselves."
"I don't know can you ever get your head around it."
Woman speaks to Morning Ireland after boyfriend who regularly raped her while she slept receives suspended sentence https://t.co/LMLiHKyHaf
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) July 14, 2015
Magnus Meyer Hustveit, who is 25, pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to one count of rape and one count of sexual assault between 2011 and 2012.
He received a suspended sentence of seven years' imprisonment.
The full extent of the offences only emerged after the Norwegian wrote to his former partner and told her he had been using her "body for my gratification" for nearly a year.
Ms Ní Dhomhnaill said it is very difficult to have any confidence or hope in the criminal justice system in Ireland after the sentence.
She said the onus should not be on victims to speak out and challenge sentences.
She also said the abuse had completely changed her life and she suffered from anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
She said: "It certainly has taken three years away from my life. I don't want to give my abuser any more power by using words like destroyed but undeniably, as I said in the victim impact statement, I'm a completely changed person. Life can't be the same."
