A Sunday World journalist has said that receiving a death threat from a convicted rapist “caused me a lot of anxiety”.
Yesterday, 53 year old Mark McAnaw was sentenced to 11 years behind bars after a sustained campaign of harassment against three Sunday World journalists Nicola Tallant, Amanda Brunker and Deirdre Reynolds
In 2023, McAnaw sent the trio a number of sexually menacing and violent emails, at one point telling Ms Reynolds he would ‘put her full of bullets’.
On Newstalk Breakfast, Ms Reynolds said that ahead of the sentencing she had feared in a “worst case scenario” he would walk free.
“So then, when he got essentially the maximum sentence that he could get in all three complaints, I really was shocked,” she said.
“I’m happy, obviously, with the outcome.”
Ms Reynolds continued that in her role as a journalist she gets a significant amount of emails “good and bad, obviously”, but McAnaw’s “crossed the line” from trolling to threats.
“Especially, in tabloid journalism, we kind of laugh it off maybe,” she said.
“There’s a lot of things we shouldn’t laugh off maybe but we kind of normalise things that aren’t really normal.
“It’s only since yesterday that it’s really hit me because I’ve been getting messages from people saying, ‘Well, done’ or ‘That was a terrible ordeal’.
“And I’m going, ‘Actually, when I think about it, it really was.’”
Criminal history
Ms Reynolds added that when she first reported McAnaw’s threats she was unaware that he had a long history of violence against women.
“It ranged from rape to kidnap; he attacked one woman in her own house with a knife - and this was both in the UK and Ireland,” she said.
“When he turned up at our office, it became apparent that he wasn’t a spoofer and he was capable of carrying out these threats.
“The most serious one being… that he would put me full of bullets.”
She concluded that the past two years have been difficult for her.
“It has caused me a lot of anxiety,” she said.
“I suppose maybe more than I wanted to acknowledge over the last couple of years.”
McAnaw has been detained in Dublin’s Central Mental Hospital.
Main image: Deirdre Reynolds. Image: Supplied.
