JILLY BEATTIE: When I broke the story of a husband and wife charged with sexual abuse charges, the former DUP leader's downfall had begun - but here is the EXACT moment our eyes met... and both Jeffrey Donaldson and I knew it was all over for him

Published: 21:57, 26 June 2026 | Updated: 21:57, 26 June 2026 I knew. He knew I knew. And now the world knows too. There was a fleeting moment in court this week when I shared an unspoken understanding with the now convicted child rapist and predator Jeffrey Donaldson.  It was the instant we both realised he was done. It was over. The time was 12.54pm on Monday, June 22, 2026. It came like an echo from another moment two years earlier when we both realised he was in the eye of a storm.  I had published an article about his arrest and charges on despicable crimes without naming him. He saw the story and my byline. Now a child abuse suspect, he was still holed up in Northern Ireland waiting to catch the first flight to London and his bail address.  As he purged his social media accounts, I knew he knew. The time was 12.15pm on Friday, March 29, 2024. Two moments. Two years apart. The same knowledge passing between us like a current across a courtroom, across a news cycle, across the wreckage of a public life built on a fish pin, an orange sash and an enormous lie. On day 20 of the trial, he gave the first noticeable flicker of emotion as lunchtime rolled into place in Newry Crown Court.  The jury of five women and seven men had been in the jury room for a total of nine hours over three days, prompting speculation that they could not agree. But at 12.54pm, two notes were presented by the judge to the prosecution and defence teams. Donaldson appeared back in the dock as the lawyers and ten members of the media scrambled into their places. As is procedure, the judge read the juror notes ahead of presenting them to Rosemary Walsh KC, barrister for the prosecution, Kieran Vaughan KC, Donaldson’s defence barrister, and Ian Turkington KC, representing Eleanor Donaldson in her trial of the facts. The jury was called back in. They wanted to further explanation of the term ‘aiding and abetting’. There it was. Unspoken and unofficial, but I felt the verdict was in on Donaldson. Eleanor Donaldson, wife of Jeffrey Donaldson, arrives at Newry Courthouse on September 10, 2024. Picture: Getty Images The jury would not need to know how to apply the rules around the aiding and abetting term unless they needed to – and they only needed to apply them if Donaldson was guilty of at least one of the four most serious crimes, rape of a child and indecent assault. Judge Ramsey told the jury: ‘You must be satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that Eleanor Donaldson aided and abetted or assisted or encouraged the commissioning of offences by a positive act, whether by words or deeds.’ I knew then it was over. I felt Donaldson did too. I glanced over to him in the dock and caught his eye. He stared back for a moment, bothering his thumbnail in the side of his mouth, then looked away. The gamble of his life had not paid off. At 2pm, everyone was scrambled back into court and Donaldson was asked to stand. Dressed in a smart blue suit and a Hermes tie, he got to his feet. Hands clasped together, he looked directly at Judge Paul Ramsey. At 2.06pm the court clerk started working through each of the 18 counts, asking the jury foreman: ‘Have you reached a verdict on which you all agree?’ Eighteen times. Each charge referred to by number, each verdict returned the same way, by the same voice, with the same word. It took 10 minutes. Donaldson did not flinch once. At 2.16pm the clerk moved to the five charges against Eleanor Donaldson. Five questions. Did she act? The foreman answered yes to each. Still no visible emotion from Donaldson. Former DUP Leader Jeffrey Donaldson leaves Newry court in a van after his trial reaches its conclusion on June 22, 2026. Picture: Getty Images I had been working towards this moment for years. Investigative journalism is not glamorous, not like in the movies. It is tips that go nowhere, sources who go quiet, walls of silence that seem impenetrable and a peculiar sense of isolation at times of carrying information not yet provable, not yet publishable. As a young reporter I had heard gossip about Donaldson, things that did not match the brand he presented to the public. Nothing of the crimes he has been convicted of, but behaviour at odds with his conservative, evangelical Christian persona, at odds with the ichthys pin he constantly wore on the lapel of his suit – the Christian fish symbol, the club membership. I met Donaldson in 1997 when I was working at the Mirror in London. He had just been made an MP and I sought him out, not out of any real interest in politics but to add him squarely into my contacts book. By day, I found him to be a dull little man. I was not the only person watching him, noting his presence in London, in dark nightclubs and gatherings. RUC Special Branch were known to him too, always stopping to speak when they came across him. One officer recalled: ‘We weren’t surveilling him exactly but I liked him to know that we’d seen him every time we saw him, and that we’d seen who he was with.’ Back in Northern Ireland, there was only a faint clue to Donaldson’s London scene and today it takes close examination. His ears are pierced several times, the holes still evident from the nights he shrugged off his dull man persona and popped dangling, glinting earrings in his lobes. It is nothing in 2026 but in the late 1990s it was something. Over almost three decades, details relayed to me were unverified and unpleasant – but they were not criminal. I still felt one day there would be a scandal about Donaldson. I just did not know what it would be. I mulled over every possibility from brown envelope deals to affairs to moral corruption and everything in between. Claims of child sex abuse were simply not on my radar. In 2020, Donaldson vacated the family home and moved in with his brother. I knew this to be fact from multiple sources. The explanation though, was harder to stand up. I learned that he had been suspected of an extra-marital affair. People’s marital arrangements are not my business, but when an MP plays the Christian card, preaches loyalty and the highest moral standards, then builds a career on the appearance of both, an affair is no longer a private matter. It slips first into hypocrisy and then into investigation territory, it carries a public interest element and becomes a news story. Donaldson was being counselled by a now late friend in Co Down and after delicate enquiries, it emerged the MP had sought support in a bid he said, to change. I continued to invite details in a bid to track a pattern of behaviour. There was no suggestion of sexual abuse but running alongside all of this, I had been working a separate investigation entirely. Reports of historical child sex abuse in rural Co Down and Co Armagh had reached me over years in tight-knit communities. People had been carrying damage for a long time. Some of them were still living alongside it. Donaldson’s name drifted through the silence but without foundation or fact. Then, on the morning of March 28, 2024, Jeffrey Donaldson – former DUP leader, MP for Lagan Valley for 27 years, knight of the realm and privy councillor – was arrested and cautioned at his home in Dromore, Co Down. I started making calls. I called Donaldson throughout the day without answer. At 2.44pm, a post appeared on X asking if anyone had heard a rumour about a politician being arrested on serious allegations. It was quickly deleted but was enough to tell me this was not going to stay contained for much longer. A day of checks, a day of visits to contacts and phone calls, and a series of confirmations. I published – carefully, precisely, with guidance and within the law – an article about a husband and wife from Co Down facing charges of historical sexual offences against two children. Within minutes of my piece going live, Donaldson’s social media accounts began to disappear. That was the moment. He was erasing himself from the public record, one account at a time, and as he did so I felt we were both thinking the same thing: this is real now. Within hours, Northern Ireland knew who it was. The police issued a statement and the DUP added Donaldson’s name. What followed was two years of the most intense journalism of my career. The resignations, the exile in London, the return to Northern Ireland to face the charges, the legal process, the pre-trial hearings. And then, on May 26 this year, the opening of the trial itself in Courtroom 1 of Newry Crown Court, a space that would become, for four weeks, the most significant room in the country. I was there every day. The charges were read aloud for the first time, 18 of them spanning 23 years, naming two women whose identities are protected by law, referred to throughout as Complainant A and Complainant B. Both had been children when it started, both had been carrying what he did to them for most of their lives. I had known this was coming but imagining it and hearing it read aloud in a court of law are two entirely different things. Former DUP Leader Jeffrey Donaldson arrives at Newry courthouse this week. Picture: Getty Images The trial lasted for four excruciating weeks. Hours of listening to claims of vile, deviant sexual behaviour, hours of hearing about pain, hours of denials. I watched Complainant A appear on a screen above the judge. The court service had built protective architecture around both women – video links, separate rooms, the physical distance of a system trying to spare them the ordeal of being in the same room as him. Her voice entered Courtroom 1 clearly. She was precise, controlled and utterly unshakeable. She had carried this since she was a child. She had decided now she was going to carry it into the courtroom and leave it there as an adult. I watched Complainant B describe listening to Donaldson’s breathing as he raped her – laboured, panting – and telling herself: ‘It’s OK, it will be over soon.’ She had told her imaginary friend about it. She had played with a yellow toy truck talking to someone who wasn’t there because there was no one she could tell and she just didn’t have the words. She was too young to understand. I watched Complainant A’s husband – a man who cannot be named to protect his wife’s identity – swallow heartache and tears in the witness box as he described sitting in a car park in Kilkeel on the day after St Stephen’s Day 2019, listening to the woman he loved tell him what Donaldson had subjected her to. I watched David Hoy, elderly and precise in a three-piece suit, recall his diary entry on a January page from 1997 and confirm the date on which Donaldson had walked into a room in Armoy. The politician had spoken first, and said: ‘I know what this is about. I am truly sorry. Please forgive me.’ He explained nothing. He apologised for everything. He closed it down. I watched Donaldson himself take the witness stand. Two days in the box. He was, as he had always been, fluent and practiced but he overstepped, he overspoke, he over-explained and he pre-empted questions from Prosecutor Rosemary Walsh KC. He sounded like a man who could feasibly be seen as a bully, a controller. He said a letter of apology in which he had written of the pit dug by his own selfish and deceptive ways, of taking full responsibility for it all, of the deep wounds caused by his sinful and selfish actions, had nothing to do with sexual abuse. It was, he claimed, about a slip of judgement, a few weeks of flirtatious messages with a female constituent. He said both complainants were lying. Donaldson had always been, fluent and practiced but he overstepped, he overspoke, he over-explained and he pre-empted questions from Prosecutor Rosemary Walsh KC In her final shot at Donaldson, after three hours on her feet and 20,000 words of closing statement, prosecutor Rosemary Walsh KC, turned his own words on him, saying: ‘The only person telling lies, Mr Donaldson, is you – sinful and deceitful lies.’ Just 51 minutes after the final verdict, prison officers had processed Donaldson, placed him in Home Office handcuffs, secured him in a locked cell inside a prison lorry and they drove out through the gates of Newry Crown Court on his way to jail. At 3.44pm, he arrived at Maghaberry Prison, 18km from his home in Dromore, in the centre of the Lagan Valley constituency he had represented for 27 years. The smart suit had been swapped for jeans and a casual shirt, the fish pin removed as a sharp object was not permitted where he was going. He had a Bible, which was searched, X-rayed and handed back. Donaldson does not yet know how long he will serve. Judge Ramsey assured him it will be lengthy, dictated by victim impact statements which are expected in September ahead of sentencing soon after. This story is not over. The world will eventually move on while the two women who told the truth in Courtroom 1 will carry what was done to them for the rest of their lives. There are questions – about what was known, when and by whom – that have not yet been fully answered. Jeffrey Donaldson spent decades being protected by silence and domination, by a mask of religion and faith, by the culture of privilege and public standing. He was protected by the assumption that powerful men are unstoppable. He was wrong. He knows that now. Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.