Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the former leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and MP for Lagan Valley from 1997 to 2024, was found guilty at Newry Crown Court on 22 June 2026 of raping and sexually assaulting two girls. A jury convicted him on all 18 counts he faced, one of rape, 13 of indecent assault and four of gross indecency, committed against two women when they were children on dates between 1985 and 2008.
Judge Paul Ramsey remanded Donaldson, 63, in custody and refused bail, telling him a prison sentence was inevitable and would be a long one. He ordered that Donaldson be placed on the sex offenders register. The jury of seven men and five women returned unanimous verdicts at 2.15pm, after just over 10 hours of deliberation across three days at the end of a four-week trial. Donaldson, of Dromore, Co Down, wore a blue suit and a Christian fish brooch and showed no reaction in the dock as the foreman read out each guilty verdict. He was taken to prison, reported to be Maghaberry, and is due to be sentenced on 25 September, with a review hearing on 11 September.
Donaldson had first been charged with 11 offences when he was arrested in 2024. After the Public Prosecution Service reviewed the evidence file, the number rose to 18. He denied 10 charges relating to the older complainant, known in court as Complainant B, a count of rape and nine of indecent assault dating from 1985 to 1991. He denied eight charges relating to Complainant A, four of indecent assault and four of gross indecency dating from 1999 to 2008.
The evidence at Newry
The two complainants, identified only as Complainant A and Complainant B to protect their anonymity, gave evidence by video link. Complainant A, the first witness, told the jury the rape and assaults began when she was of primary school age. She told the jury of an incident in which Donaldson used a bright light, possibly a torch, to examine her genitals, and said he had touched her breasts skin on skin when she was a child. Another incident, in which she said he put his tongue in her mouth, had been laughed off as a joke by both Donaldsons.
Complainant A told the court she had reported one incident to Eleanor Donaldson at the time. She said: "I knew by the look on her face she knew I was telling the truth."
The jury heard about a letter Donaldson wrote to her in June 2020, in which he expressed regret for "all the hurt, pain and distress" he had caused. She told the court she had understood it as an attempt to apologise for the crimes. Donaldson said the letter concerned a marital dispute and not rape and sexual assault. His barrister, Kieran Vaughan KC, told the jury that Donaldson had been put out of the family home in 2020 after his wife suspected an affair, and that Eleanor had placed a covert listening device in his car.
Complainant B told the court that Donaldson raped her when she was a primary-school-age child and that the memory would stay with her forever. Under cross-examination, Vaughan KC put it to her that none of the incidents had happened, and questioned inconsistencies in the ages she had given over the years. She said counselling had helped her recall earlier incidents and that she was telling the truth.
The jury heard that Complainant B had spent time at a Christian rehabilitation centre in Armoy in the 1990s after developing problems with drugs as a teenager, and that Donaldson had arranged for her to go there. Claire Selfridge, whose parents David and Linda Hoy founded the centre, gave evidence by video link from South Africa that Complainant B had confided in her about the rape and sexual assault she endured. David Hoy told the court he arranged a meeting between Donaldson and Complainant B at his home in 1997, and that Donaldson opened it by saying he knew what it concerned.
A Presbyterian minister, who with his wife had provided pastoral support to Complainant A and her husband, told the jury that Donaldson sent him WhatsApp messages in July 2023, in which he said he wanted to repent before the two women as he had before God. Donaldson said the messages were not connected to any allegation of criminality. In a separate police interview played to the court, Pastor Stephen Matthews said Complainant B had disclosed the crimes to him at the Armoy centre years earlier but asked him not to go to police, telling him it would destroy their political reputation.
Matthews said she had not named her attacker but that it became obvious who she meant. Asked by an officer who he believed it was, he said: "There was only one person, that was Sir Jeffrey Donaldson."
Donaldson gave evidence over two days and denied every allegation. Video of his March 2024 police interviews was played to the jury, in which he answered no when first invited to comment and rejected the specific accounts put to him. He said he had apologised to Complainant B at the Armoy meeting, but only for making her feel uncomfortable rather than for any rape or sexual assault.
Charges against Eleanor Donaldson
Donaldson's wife Eleanor, 60, of the same address, faced four counts of aiding and abetting and one of cruelty to children. She was ruled unfit to stand trial after consultant psychiatrists reported to the court, with one, Dr Christine Kennedy, testifying that she was severely depressed and suicidal and could not instruct her legal team. Her case proceeded as a trial of the facts, a process in which a jury decides whether a defendant committed the acts alleged but cannot return a criminal conviction. The jury found she had committed the acts in all five matters. She did not attend. Her barrister, Ian Turkington KC, told the court the prosecution had not proved its case and questioned the reliability of decades-old memories. The prosecution case was that she knew of the rape and sexual assaults and did nothing.
In his charge to the jury, Judge Ramsey said the case came down to whether they found the two women's accounts reliable. He told them to decide on the evidence and not on innuendo, speculation or rumour, and not to let sympathy or views on religion or politics sway them. He summarised the evidence over about two hours. The judge thanked the jury for their attention over the four weeks and exempted them from jury service for life.
Public standing and the delay in reporting
The two women went to police in 2024, decades after the attacks began, and the trial heard that Donaldson's public position bore on their silence. Complainant A told the jury she had waited until 2024 because she knew the case would become an extremely public affair involving the media, and called it a huge decision. Matthews told the court that Complainant B had asked him years earlier not to report what she had disclosed, saying it would damage Donaldson's standing.
The crime ran from 1985 to 2008, the years in which Donaldson rose from a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly to MP for Lagan Valley, then to a knighthood and the leadership of the DUP. He built a public identity as a senior unionist, an Orangeman and a professed Christian.
Resignation and the fall from office
The PSNI arrested and charged Donaldson on 28 March 2024. He resigned as DUP leader the next day, saying he would strenuously contest the charges, and Gavin Robinson was appointed interim leader before being confirmed in the role. The DUP and the Orange Order both suspended his membership pending the outcome. He did not contest the July 2024 general election, ending a Westminster career that had run since 1997.
His arrest came weeks after a significant political moment. On 30 January 2024 Donaldson had announced a deal with the UK government, branded Safeguarding the Union, to end the DUP's boycott of power-sharing and return to Stormont. The Northern Ireland Executive had collapsed in February 2022 when the DUP withdrew its First Minister, Paul Givan, in protest at the trading arrangements created by the Northern Ireland Protocol, and the institutions stayed down for two years. After speculation that his legal position might have shaped the timing of the deal, the PSNI said it had first received a complaint in early March 2024, after the institutions were restored.
Donaldson had been MP for Lagan Valley since 1997, first for the Ulster Unionist Party. He left the UUP in 2003 over its support for the Good Friday Agreement and joined the DUP at Peter Robinson's invitation. He was appointed to the Privy Council in 2007 and knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for political service. In 2009 he repaid about £600 after the parliamentary expenses scandal, having claimed for pay-per-view films during stays in London, which he said were not adult films. As DUP chief whip at Westminster he helped negotiate the 2017 confidence-and-supply agreement that propped up Theresa May's government. He became DUP leader on 30 June 2021 after Edwin Poots resigned 21 days into the job. Born in Kilkeel, Co Down, he joined the Orange Order at 16 and later served in the Ulster Defence Regiment, and often said the IRA murder of his police-officer cousin Samuel Donaldson had influenced his decision to enter politics.
Mentors and later allegations
Donaldson built his early career under two senior unionist figures of the 20th century. From 1982 to 1984 he ran the South Down election campaigns of Enoch Powell, the Ulster Unionist MP, and after Powell lost the seat in 1987 he became personal assistant to the UUP leader James Molyneaux. On his website Donaldson wrote that he had worked alongside two of the greatest names in unionism in the 20th century, and on Powell's death in 1998 he called him a statesman. Both Powell and Molyneaux face child rape allegations.
In June 2014 a Church of England safeguarding adviser passed Powell's name to Operation Fernbridge, the Metropolitan Police inquiry into abuse at the Elm Guest House in London, and the referral was made public in March 2015. The information came from a clergyman who had heard it in the 1980s, and it concerned alleged membership of a satanic cult connected to the 1986 fraud trial of Derry Mainwaring Knight. The Church later claimed there was no evidence for the satanic claims and that no allegation of child rape or criminal conduct had been made against Powell. He was never arrested or charged and died in 1998, and his authorised biographer Simon Heffer said the claims were "a monstrous lie". Separately, the Kincora survivor Richard Kerr has alleged that Powell abused him.
Molyneaux, was named in a 1973 British Army press briefing about William McGrath, the Tara leader and housefather at the Kincora Boys' Home, as one of several "people associated with McGrath" who were aware of his activities. The briefing, which the 2017 Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry accepted was genuine, did not allege that Molyneaux abused anyone. McGrath was jailed in 1981 for abusing boys at the home and died in 1992. Village Magazine and Covert History have since published claims that Molyneaux himself abused children, which remain unproven in court. The Hart inquiry found that the child rape at Kincora was carried out by allegedly only three convicted staff and concluded there was no child rape ring and no state cover-up, A finding that many, including former resident Richard Kerr, have disputed, and others allege is part of the cover-up. A separate inquiry has confirmed child rape by prominent establishment figures, including Cyril Smith and Peter Morrison, while finding that a wider network was not proven, to date. Donaldson has not publicly addressed the allegations about either mentor.
Knighthood and forfeiture
The conviction exposes Donaldson's honours to removal, his knighthood can be cancelled by the King, on a recommendation from the Cabinet Office's Honours Forfeiture Committee, where keeping it would bring the honours system into disrepute, and a criminal conviction is the usual trigger. Since 2021 the rules have been explicit that a sexual-offence conviction puts an honour at risk regardless of the sentence, and that a person found to have committed such an act in a trial of the facts can be stripped on the same basis. The former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Fred Goodwin lost his knighthood in 2012 over the bank's collapse. The entertainer Rolf Harris had his CBE annulled in 2015 after he was jailed for indecently assaulting four girls, and the broadcaster Stuart Hall lost his OBE in 2013 following his conviction for child sex offences.
A living knight stripped after a child rape conviction would still be uncommon, because the best-known knighted child rapists were dead before they were exposed. Jimmy Savile, knighted in 1990, died in 2011 before the scale of his offending was established, and Cyril Smith, the Rochdale MP knighted in 1988, died in 2010 before Greater Manchester Police said there was overwhelming evidence he had raped and sexually assaulted boys. Orders of chivalry are living honours that lapse on death and cannot be removed posthumously, so neither knighthood was ever revoked. In 2021 the Forfeiture Committee took the unusual step of saying that both men would have faced proceedings had they been convicted in their lifetimes.
Donaldson is alive and convicted, so the committee can act. The title carries no money and no seat in the House of Lords (that comes only with a peerage) and is largely honorific. His wife Eleanor holds the courtesy style Lady Donaldson as a knight's wife and would lose it if his knighthood goes. Robinson and the Ulster Unionist leader Jon Burrows both said Donaldson should be stripped of his knighthood, and reporting at the time of his charging said a conviction could also cost him his Privy Council membership.
Reaction and sentencing
Robinson, who took over the DUP after Donaldson's resignation, called the crimes "heinous and despicable" and said his first thoughts were with the victims. He said the party had acted decisively in March 2024 and that Donaldson was no longer a member. Burrows said the offences were "among the gravest crimes imaginable". Sinn Féin MP John Finucane said the two women deserved huge credit for their bravery in giving evidence.
SDLP leader Claire Hanna said the case showed that "no one is above the law, regardless of their position, profile or influence".
Donaldson is due to be sentenced at Newry Crown Court on 25 September, with a review hearing on 11 September. He remains in custody until then. Victim impact statements from the two women will be put before the court before any sentence is passed.