A successful Dublin businessman who rugby tackled a woman to the ground and sexually assaulted her as she walked home at night, has been jailed for six months.
Aviation broker Anthony Lyons, aged 53, of Griffith Avenue has also been ordered to pay €75,000 compensation to his 27-year-old victim who he attacked on October 3, 2010.
Mr Lyons’s victim was walking along a North Dublin Street in the early hours when she was grabbed by the businessman, pushed towards a wooded area and sexually assaulted until a passer-by heard her screams and her attacker fled.
The 53 year old has never denied that he was the perpetrator, but at his trial he argued that his new cholesterol medication was to blame and that he had been overcome by an irresistible urge.
The jury rejected the unusual defence.
Today, Judge Desmond Hogan said the manner in which the attack was committed puts it at the higher end of the scale as it involved violence of a seriously frightening nature.
But Mr Lyons is considered at low risk of reoffending, and as a man of means the judge ordered him to pay the injured party €75,000 compensation.
However, there were shocked gasps when he suspended all but six months of a six-year prison sentence and outside the court the victim’s grandmother said: “Money talks”.
Original story courtesy of BreakingNews.ie http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/businessman-gets-six-months-in-jail-for-sexual-assault-561171.html