Terminally ill victim of coercive garda to warn women of dangers of online dating

The woman, who is in her early forties, suffered years of coercive abuse with disgraced Garda Paul Moody,42, from Celbridge, Co Kildare

A terminally ill woman whose life was made hell by an abusive Garda is to go public and tell of her coercive ordeal in a new TV documentary.

She will warn women everywhere about the dangers of online dating and to run a mile if your new man displays any sign of being a bullying control freak.

The woman, who is in her early forties, suffered years of coercive abuse with disgraced Garda Paul Moody,42, from Celbridge, Co Kildare.

In July last year he received a three year and three month prison sentence after pleading guilty to coercive control – an offense which only became law in Ireland in 2019.

CREEPER PEEPER | 

Face of ‘Peeping Tom’ garda who spied on women’s dressing room at Galway station

Cop is sentenced for spying on two female colleagues

Mon 9 Oct 2023 at 11:00

These are the first pictures of the ‘Peeping Tom’ garda who climbed on to a railing outside Clifden Garda Station so he could spy on female colleagues as they changed in the women’s dressing room.

Our exclusive images show suspended Garda Michael Mannion (41) hurriedly exiting Galway District Court on Monday after he was given an earful from Judge Marie Keane, who labelled his behaviour “persistent, bordering on the obsessive, deviant, deeply degrading and humiliating”.

Although Mannion was only charged with two counts of harassment, the court heard how during a trawl of 2,800 hours of CCTV harvested from cameras at Clifden Garda Station, investigators discovered Mannion had spied on his two female colleagues as they changed on six separate occasions.

The court also heard how a month before Mannion was stopped for good, after he was caught peeping in on Garda Aileen Hughes, he had been discovered spying on Sergeant Patricia Grady.

Sgt Grady didn’t report this at the time after Mannion swore ‘black and blue’ to her it was the first time he’d ever done it and begged her to think about the effect exposing him would have on his wife and two small children.

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He is one of the first in the country to be jailed for the crime. The woman has spent the past year writing a book about their torturous and ill-fatal romance.

But she has also spent weeks with a film crew abroad telling her story which is due to be screened on RTE probably next year.

It is understood she will make a series of damning new allegations against the bully boy Garda which were never revealed before.

A source said; “This woman is determined that no woman in Ireland should ever go through what she suffered. She is terminally ill but is fighting the disease with great courage and bravery.

“She is making it her mission to warn women about the dangers of controlling men and how to escape a coercive individual before it destroys your life.

”Paul Moody did everything in his power to control, humiliate and abuse her throughout their whole relationship and in the end she finally got the courage to report him to the authorities.

“She believes there are thousands of women out there who are in the terrible position she was in , and she wants to encourage them to take the first decisive steps to escape their ordeals.

“Her story is horrifying but compelling. It is a story that will make any normal human being angry and upset. But of course the individual in this case Paul Moody did everything in his power as a member of the police force to cover his tracks.

“She never wants to see or hear from him again.”

The woman met Moody online in 2017 and they were together for a number of years. The trial heard how he harassed, threatened, abused and controlled her over a four years period.

During that time he sent her 30,000 text messages, many of them vile and abusive .In one 14 hour period in July, 2018 he sent her 652 messages – one every 90 seconds.

In one text during a holiday abroad he made a reference to raping her while in another he said he went to see her in hospital because he wants to watch her bleed to death.

With remission for good behaviour Paul Moody is due to be freed from prison in less than a year. He has been ordered to stay away from her.