THIS is Anna Ilnicka’s version of how she was subjected to repeated attack by a garda begins with an introduction, on the street of a west of Ireland town.
She was in a distressed state when the man approached her. She was sitting alone, listening to a busker. She was trying to deal with a devastating experience she had suffered, initially in the clutches of a violent predator, and subsequently at the hands of state agencies, including the health service and the gardaí.
He was dressed in civilian clothes and asked whether she was OK.
She told him to leave her alone. He produced ID that showed he was a member of An Garda Síochána. She could trust him. He would help her.
By then, Anna wasn’t in the mood to trust anybody.
“I was very upset and I walked away from him,” she related in a statement.
“He followed me, saying he was a garda. I found it difficult to accept what he was saying. He said he could help me, and kept asking my name, and asked if I was from Poland.
“He gave me a jacket to put on my shoulders. I then believed he was a garda. I tried explaining to him that I was raped and assaulted earlier that year. And I got very upset. He kept saying he would help me.” The man persisted, offered to drive her home. Ms Ilnicka eventually accepted his bona fides and took up the offer.
“He said it was dangerous being on my own, and I would be safe with him,” she said.
En route to her house, she noticed they were heading in the wrong direction, and told him so. He responded that they had to go to his house so he could write down the details of her case in order to begin helping her.
The man lived in another town, a short drive from where they met. By then, Ms Ilnicka wanted to just go home, but the man insisted on writing down her address and phone number. He asked her whether or not she lived alone and she confirmed that she did.
“He kept saying he would take me home, and he began trying to touch and kiss me. I was crying and very upset and shouting at him to stop. He started shouting at me, and forcefully started taking my clothes off. I felt terrified and numb.”
The man kept shouting at her that he was a garda. Anna just wanted this nightmare to end.
“He was very strong and hurting me, he pulled my clothes off and pulled his trousers down and began to rape me.”
When it was all over, Anna sat on a chair and cried. Eventually, her assailant brought her home. She felt ashamed, and terrified. She had nobody to whom she could turn at the time.
It didn’t all end there. Some weeks later, the man began to phone her. Then he took to sitting outside her house in his car. One evening when she was returning to her home, the man approached her. He was in his uniform, she says.
“He said he would help me with my case and he was sorry for what had happened at his house. He said he had been drinking. He said he was talking to another garda about what happened to me [in the earlier incident] and he would get me justice. I told him I was afraid of him and what he did and to leave me alone.”
She moved house, in an attempt, she says, to get away from him. Yet some weeks after she had found a new place to live, the man showed up again. This time he told her she had to come with him to the Garda station where they would deal with her case. She got into the car, but he drove to a “quiet and lonely” place and attacked her in the car, with the doors locked.
This set off a pattern that was to follow over the next few years. “He was now regularly coming to my house and telling me that gardaí were saying I was crazy mad woman and wanting to put me in prison, or send me back to Poland.
“I was terrified of going to prison and believed he was helping me and I would drink alcohol. He would insist or force me to have oral sex, and also rape me.”
Anna Ilnicka says that over the following years, this man repeatedly terrorised her. She attended psychiatric hospital for related matters at the time, but, she says, her lack of English and fear about the man’s position, meant that the extent of what she was being subjected to was never properly conveyed.
Her claims centre entirely on one individual. She makes no claims, nor has any reason to believe, that any of this man’s colleagues were even aware that he was engaging with her on any basis whatsoever.
In 2011, she told a male Polish friend what she was going though and asked him to stay in her flat a few nights as a means of deterring her assailant. He agreed and Anna told the assailant that her boyfriend was now staying with her.
“Now he laughed at me and continued for a period coming to my house in garda uniform, and contacting me on the phone and sitting outside my house in his car.”
He asked her about another Eastern European woman who lived on the same road, but Ms Ilnicka was not familiar with this woman. Soon after, the man stopped calling. For Ms Ilnicka this element of her nightmare was ended.
The next time she heard from the garda officer was in 2012, over a year later. “He rang me again, on my phone and asked me did I make a complaint to Garda about him. I was terrified he had contacted me again, and I said ‘no I did not’ and left the phone down. I continued to be terrified of him.”
That particular contact would in time take on major significance. By 2012, Ms Ilnicka was still in a fragile mental state as a result of both her experience in the original sexual assault in a West of Ireland town, and her prolonged experience which she claimed to she endured at the hands of this Garda officer.
Last year, the story of her initial assault was revealed by the Irish Examiner. The publication resulted in a number of investigations by both the HSE and An Garda Síochána into how Ms Ilnicka had been treated in the immediate aftermath of the original assault.
It was only then that she felt confident in revealing her allegations about the repeated assaults by the individual garda. She went to GSOC and investigators took a statement.
Some time after presenting that statement, she became aware that GSOC had investigated a previous complaint of sexual assault made against the same officer.
It is not yet known whether this other complainant was the Eastern European woman referenced in Ms Ilnicka’s statement, whom she alleges was the subject of interest from the garda officer at the time he stopped.
GSOC investigated the man in relation to the other complainant and he vehemently denied any impropriety or assault. A file was compiled and sent to the DPP. The DPP decided that the evidence did not warrant a prosecution.
Michael Clifford
Michael Clifford
GSOC is now investigating Ms Ilnicka’s complaint against the same individual.
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