A man was sentenced to a year in prison by a judge out of Letterkenny Circuit Court in County Donegal, Ireland, for his five-year-long anonymous campaign of sending sexually explicit and violent text messages, according to the Irish Times.
68-year-old Martin Hughes reportedly sent his niece, Michelle Doherty, threatening messages regularly from 2011 to 2016 that were sexually and physically violent in nature, including one message in which he threatened to slit her throat, per the Irish Times.
Businessman jailed for a year over hate-filled text message campaign against niece https://t.co/TmxZ7ZT4kG
— The Irish Times (@IrishTimes) November 6, 2020
Hughes reportedly sent these explicit messages anonymously through an unregistered phone, which was found by the state police of the Irish Republic in a cardboard box in Hughes’ garage. (RELATED: German Police Raid Homes Of Men With Ties To Vienna Gunman Who Tried To Join ISIS)
Doherty, speaking from a video call from Spain where she’d moved to to escape the text messages, claimed that on occasions she physically vomited after reading the contents of the text messages, according to the Irish Times.
The judge overseeing this court case, Judge John Aylmer, reportedly called it one of the worse cases of harassment he’d witnessed and condemned Hughes for reportedly being remorseless and seeming to suggest that his actions were not unjustified.
Judge Aylmer charged Hughes initially with a sentence of four years, but because of an early guilty plea where Hughes’ defense team pled to a single count of harassment, and Hughes’ age and the fact that he didn’t have any prior convictions on his record, Aylmer reduced the sentence to 12 months in prison.
Doherty, witnessing the judgment being passed over a video call, reportedly wept as the judge passed the sentencing, according to the Irish Times.