It was Paula Doyle’s best friend who suggested that her husband walk Doyle home. This was a Friday night in September 2019, and Doyle, then 46, a mother of five, had been at their house for a family party. Doyle had helped clear up at the end. It was 1am and she was the last to leave.
Doyle lived close by – three streets and a small stretch of park separated their Dublin houses – and in the past, she would have thought nothing of walking it alone. However, for more than three years, she had been receiving messages from an unknown number. They had started relatively harmlessly (“I’ve seen you around … I’d love to get to know you”) but escalated to graphic images and videos. Doyle and her partner had taken them to the Garda Síochána (the Irish police force), who advised her to block the number, but that didn’t stop them coming in (sometimes more than 50 a day); it only stopped her from having to view them. This was why Doyle allowed her friend’s husband, Aidan Kestell, to walk her home that night. “I thought I’d be safer with him, not knowing who was out there,” she says.
Instead, Kestell raped her, leaving Doyle, in her words, “lifeless, in the bushes, like a piece of rubbish, changed completely”. It was only the subsequent investigation that led the gardaí to look a little closer at those messages. It turned out that they were from Kestell, too.
Today, he is serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence for rape and Doyle has become a campaigning figure, working with Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) to draw attention to the terrible impacts of sexual violence and how they are compounded by the justice system – the unacceptable delays and torturous trial-day adjournments, the use of counselling notes as evidence in court. (Doyle knows that Kestell read hers. “It felt like another violation,” she says. “He’d already taken my body, now he’d taken my soul.”)
Despite her public profile, she is very clear that she is only at the start of her recovery. “I’m getting better but I’m not the person I used to be,” she says. “I still don’t want to go out and socialise. I haven’t recovered from my fear of the dark. I don’t like being left alone. It’s baby-steps and I’m trying to be patient with myself.” For Doyle, who has attempted to take her life twice since the rape, getting this far is more than she thought possible.
Before all this, her life was full and busy – with five children, aged from five to 20 at the time of the assault, how could it not be? “Our door was always open – we had a bustling home and I loved that,” she says. “I was quite involved in the community. I ran a youth club. I was on the parents’ association at school, and the board of management. Every weekend, there’d be football or Gaelic matches.” Her best friend was a part of all this. “Our children were similar ages, at the same school. They made communion and confirmation together. I was first in the hospital when her youngest was born,” she says. “She was as close as a sister would be. I loved her to bits.” Mindful of the family’s privacy, Doyle has avoided disclosing information about her friend’s marriage. Kestell was someone she rarely spoke to – though she certainly never imagined that he posed her any threat.
That night, when the two of them left the house, CCTV shows Doyle walking ahead, and when they reached the park gate, she chose to go on alone. “From there, it’s three minutes – I could look across the green and see my home,” she says. Her next memory is waking in that park, in a hedgerow, unable to move, someone’s weight on top of her, and the instant knowledge that “something bad” was happening.
“There are no words for the shock of realising what it was and who it was,” she says. “I couldn’t compute how this person I’d left at the gate was here, doing this to me. I just couldn’t put it together.” When Kestell finally left – smirking, kissing her cheek first – Doyle remained there. “I felt torn, I felt broken, but then I heard footsteps and thought he was coming back to finish me off. The footsteps died away, but after that, I knew I needed to get myself out of there in case he returned.”
Although she didn’t realise it at the time, Doyle was limping; she had bruises to the back of her head, inflammation to her jaw, bruises on her legs, internal bruising. She got home at 3am, washed, then went to bed, lying across the bottom because she didn’t want to be near her partner. “I was contaminated, I was dirty, I was filthy,” she says. “This person was on me. He was in me. I felt my skin was crawling.”
That weekend, she hid in her bedroom, avoiding everyone as much as she could. “I thought that it would break my family,” she says. “I thought that no one needed to know. I could be a strong, brave woman, put it in a box and bury it.”
By the Monday, however, Doyle knew that just wouldn’t be possible. With her partner at work and children at school, she drove around Dublin for hours. “I was driving erratically, very fast, kind of hoping I’d end up in a crash. Then somehow, for some reason, I ended up outside the house of another close friend.” Doyle knocked on the door, went inside and told her friend everything.
“Straight away, I felt relief,” she says. “I didn’t have to pretend any more.”
After this, she called a Satu (sexual assault trauma unit), then went to the police station. It was there that her partner was called in and Doyle told him, too. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but after that, I was never on my own.”
The police statement took several days, and it was during one of these sessions, in Doyle’s home, that her phone vibrated constantly with incoming messages. One of the gardaí made a joke about how popular she was, so Doyle explained that they were “pest messages” that she had been getting for a long time. “They paused the statement and asked to look at them,” she says, “then they opened them up, and called someone – I don’t know how but the number was traced there and then.” When they turned the phone back to Doyle, it showed a map with a flashing red dot on Kestell’s house. Doyle’s immediate reaction was to run to the bathroom where she was violently sick.
The case took more than four years to come to trial, and during that time, Doyle and her family were advised to keep the matter to themselves. If it was widely known around the neighbourhood, they were told, it could jeopardise the case. Through all this, Kestell was in his home, three streets away. He drove past Doyle’s house. He collected his children from school.
How to live like that? Doyle’s life shrank right down. “Our home was like Fort Knox – everything had to be locked up. We got security cameras fitted and the moment the light changed in the evening, the blinds had to be down, the curtains closed. I couldn’t go out to the hall if the light was off. I couldn’t put the bins out or walk to the car on my own. I didn’t want to leave the house because this person knew where I lived.
“I had to change my number and didn’t want to give my new number out, so you lose people. They get fed up. You haven’t turned up to another birthday, another christening, another wedding. You haven’t wished your neighbours a happy new year.”
Inside the house, says Doyle, the family walked “on eggshells”. She still felt “contaminated” and hated to be touched. “On one of my doctor’s visits, I asked for a blood transfusion because, if I could get all my blood out, would I be clean then? That’s the way my head was working. For anyone going through this who thinks that their feelings are so crazy that they must be going mad, I’d say you’re not on your own. And your feelings are normal.” Her family bought a beanbag so that Doyle could sit on her own in the sitting room. Her children devised air hugs as an alternative to real ones. “I had this tight team around me,” she says. “My partner, Derek, cried with me when I had nightmares. When he was working nights, my children stayed up with me when I wasn’t sleeping. Their resilience, their patience, their love. I’ve told them that I’m buying them all cloaks this Christmas because they’re all superheroes.”
Her counsellor, accessed through DRCC, was another. “I wouldn’t be here today without her,” says Doyle. “I learned about triggers, flashbacks and the impact trauma has on a human. She told me that we were going to build a tool belt to help me through my flashbacks, to find ways to train my brain so that although what I was feeling was dreadful, I wasn’t really back there, it wasn’t happening now.
“So if I’m having a flashback, I’ll look out the window. What do I see? Blue sky? Yes, there wasn’t blue sky when it happened, so I can’t be back there. What day is it? Wednesday? This happened on a Friday, not Wednesday. Smell helps. A distinctive sharp smell that is new to my life that I didn’t have then. I use lemongrass. I diffuse it in the house. My children say that every day smells like pancake day here! Ice packs, too. I keep them in the freezer and if I can get to them in time, the sharpness of the cold brings me back. If I’m out and I’m triggered – it might be the smell of someone’s body odour, or a car like his – I try to do something I couldn’t do then. I couldn’t move my hands as he pinned me down, so I bend my wrists. I couldn’t stand up because of the weight of him, so I’ll walk around.”
Her two dogs – Buttons and Angel – were also a huge comfort. “Because I couldn’t have physical affection from humans, my dogs were so good, so instinctive,” she says. “They knew I wasn’t right. On a better day, they’d fight for who was getting my lap, and on the days I was a little bit worse, they’d know and just sit beside me on the beanbag, one on each side. On the nights I slept on the couch, I’d take them with me. When I had to get out of the house, I could take them to the beach and they were my escape. I’d have to say to anyone with trauma in their life: your dog is your best friend.”
Twice, the trial was put back, and on the second adjournment, in July 2023, Doyle tried to take her own life. “I felt we couldn’t live like this any more. If I’d died in the park that night, would my family be better now? They wouldn’t have their mam, but there are stages of grief, instead of living the way we were, with me shut up in the house, with this cloud hanging over me.”
That suicide attempt, though, was also a turning point. “It was a wake-up call,” she says. “I said to myself that it didn’t work for a reason. By then I’d wasted nearly four years waiting for a trial and I couldn’t let this monster get away with it. I couldn’t let him do it to anyone else.” Doyle began following the stories of other victims. Seeing Ciara Mangan waive her anonymity that same July, standing outside the Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin after the conviction of her rapist, was inspirational. “Look at this young woman, standing there, using her voice, no shame.”
Kestell’s trial finally took place in February 2024 and lasted four days. There was no stalking charge – Ireland’s stalking laws weren’t introduced until 2023 and the messages and videos had been sent between 2018 and 2019. However, they were used by the prosecution as evidence of Kestell’s “obsession”. Doyle gave her evidence by video link. Kestell’s defence was, at one point, that he fell on top of Doyle and the intercourse happened by accident. Another time, he claimed they were having an affair. He was found guilty of rape and in March, he was sentenced to eight years with six months suspended.
Doyle stood outside the court that day, surrounded by her family, to give her statement. “I could have sung it. I had such energy, such adrenaline,” she says. “It was such a euphoric moment. I wanted our neighbours to know; I wanted everyone to see the person for who he was.”
Recovery is one day at a time. Recently, in Ikea with her partner and daughter, the smell of body odour triggered panic and Doyle had to leave. “I’ll probably be living with trauma for the rest of my life,” she says, “but I’ve learned how much inner strength and resilience I have. I’m a tough cookie.
“I’ll never be the same person again. Accepting that the past can’t be undone, and what happened will never not have happened, is a really tough pill to swallow, but you have to keep hope. Yes, this is part of your story – but it’s certainly not how the story will end.”
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In Ireland, contact Rape Crisis Network Ireland on 1 800 778 888. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
