I hope that long after Paul Moody has served his sentence, everyone in the country will recognize who he is and what he has done

News anchors, recalling examples of Moody’s horror tactics, turned my knuckles white and my stomach shrank. How he left his sick victim on the beach from which she had to crawl home. Steal your expensive cancer drug. She sat next to her hospital bed and spat vicious and violent thoughts into her ear. The hatred he felt for her and the tenacity with which he made her suffer and ruined her life.

Those of us lucky enough not to know Moody introduced him to us as an undeniably monstrous character. But within the lines of this horrifying tale, we learned a little about the other Moody, the fake version of himself that this vile offender must have worked so hard to bring to the world.

We learned of the Garda colleague who was manipulated into putting her victim through to Moody after calling the Garda station to raise the alarm about him. We heard how he, an insider who may have acted in ill-gotten gain, was able to manipulate the system not only against the victim but also against those close to him.

There’s no doubt that those who were close to or worked with Moody probably spent a very hard few days reconciling the person they thought they knew with the man we’re all hearing about in the news have read. But we also know from his brave sacrifice that there were people in Moody’s life who stood by him even after they found out what he was doing, even after they had all the evidence they could have needed to see how he really is.

Abusers are often master manipulators, sometimes, but not always, using big, bombastic personalities as brilliant disguises. How many times has a woman been killed in Ireland only to cause her own town or village to lose her memory by wondering aloud at the good character of the “pillar of the community” who killed her?

I wonder what exactly called Paul Moody to serve in the Gardaí. Do we think it was a desire to protect the public? Or do we think it might have been a desire to protect oneself? Moody chose a profession that surrounded him with respectability. His uniform was a costume. When Moody was disguised as Garda, he was disguised as someone the rest of us should respect.

So often what counts for these types of offenders is not the damage they cause to others, but the damage done to their reputation if they are caught. For that reason, I wonder how much justice we can expect from Paul Moody’s verdict.

Coercive control isn’t a crime, it’s a crusade. It requires a kind of surrender on the part of the perpetrator to the most brutal, sustained harassment that eventually suffocates the victim in hellish isolation. While we mean well, I often think it’s a mistake to measure the harm of coercive control based solely on victims’ declarations of its effects. I think that the effort that men – and it is mostly men – make to deny women their freedom and their lives through enforced control should always be viewed as an aberration that totally undermines the values ​​we hold as a society contradicts.

So, given the effort coercive measures require, do we think the current maximum sentence of five years is an appropriate sentence for this type of crime? I would very much believe that there must be perpetrators who would spend less time in prison than they would have spent orchestrating their evil crusade of torment and torture, even if they received the maximum sentence.

So I had a hard time believing that the three years and three months that were handed down to Moody really corresponded to his crimes. I don’t have enough confidence to feel that such a short sentence could ever change or reform someone who is capable of doing what they have done.

But what would feel a little fairer to me would be if Paul Moody was notorious. Just three years after the criminalization of coercive control, I firmly believe his crimes should remain one of the most notorious examples of why this law must exist. I hope that everyone in the country will recognize Paul Moody for who he is – and for what he did – long, long, long after he has served his sentence. Let’s make sure Paul Moody finally gets the reputation he truly deserves.