Ex-DUP chief in Northern Ireland given 15-year prison term for sexually abusing girls

NEWRY, Northern Ireland — The former leader of Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party, Jeffrey Donaldson, received a 15-year prison sentence Thursday for sexually abusing two schoolgirls and continuing for decades into their adulthood.

Donaldson, 63, kept his hands clasped together but offered no visible reaction as Judge Paul Ramsey said the former Democratic Unionist Party leader must serve an 11-year sentence for raping one girl and a further 4-year term for sexually abusing another.

Donaldson has been behind bars since June, when a jury found him guilty of 18 counts of sexually abusing the two women — identified in court only as Victim A and Victim B — when they were children. The listed offenses ran from 1985 to 2008.

Ramsey, addressing a packed Newry Crown Court, read from the two victims’ statements, which described abuse that began when they were 7 or 8 years old. One of the victims described recurring nightmares: “I wonder what it is like not to be afraid at night.”

The judge noted how Donaldson, who is appealing the conviction, had “doubled down on his denials” over what he called the veteran politician’s “catastrophic descent into disgrace.”

Donaldson’s former party, which denounced him immediately after his 2024 arrest and scrubbed him from the DUP website, said in a statement Thursday that Donaldson “deserves every day of the lengthy prison sentence he has to serve” for what it described as “vile and disgusting crimes.”

“Our first thoughts are again with the innocent victims who, having suffered such evil, were retraumatized through giving evidence at the trial. They deserve our compassion, support and respect,” the DUP statement said.

Donaldson was an MP representing Lagan Valley from 1997 to 2024, first for the moderate Ulster Unionist Party and then — after belatedly breaking with the party over its support for the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 — as a member of the hard-line DUP.

Donaldson became DUP leader in 2021, when he oversaw the collapse of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government in a bitter dispute over the region’s peculiar post-Brexit trade rules. Just weeks before his arrest, he again played a key role in reviving the coalition, the cornerstone of the Good Friday peace deal he had once rejected.

In March 2024, Donaldson was arrested in his secluded County Down home and charged alongside his wife, Eleanor. She was subsequently deemed by the Newry judge not mentally fit to stand trial on charges of aiding and abetting his crimes.

The U.K. government in July removed Donaldson from membership in the Privy Council, a body of parliamentary advisers to King Charles III. The king also stripped him of his knighthood.

Donaldson has been placed in an isolated hospital wing at Northern Ireland’s Maghaberry Prison, alongside other convicted sex offenders, to protect him from potential assaults from other prisoners. He reportedly is spending much of his days behind bars doing puzzles and reading the Bible.