Disgraced former garda Paul Moody is under criminal investigation for historical sexual abuse, Independent.ie can reveal.
oody, who was in prison last week for a coercive control campaign against his ex-partner, is currently under investigation by specialist officers from a division unit of the Garda Protective Services Unit on serious charges of sexual offences.
The investigation is progressing well, a source said. Obviously it’s been going on for “some time”. Garda headquarters declined to comment.
Last Tuesday, Moody, 42, was sentenced to three years and three months in prison for his four-year campaign of harassment, assault and coercive control against his cancer-stricken ex-partner. The abuse came to light when he voluntarily turned in his cell phone to Gardaí after making a false accusation against one of her relatives.
Sources say Moody had a string of ex-girlfriends he met online and tried to check on.
A woman who was in a relationship with him said: Independent.ie this weekend of her experiences with the “controlling” narcissist.
She met him online, where so many modern romances begin. “He was really charming and funny. He just radiated confidence. He’s easily the most confident person I’ve ever met,” she said of Moody.
“We just got along really well from the start,” she says on condition of anonymity. “He was very easy to be nice. He told me he was a garda from the start. He said he was on stress leave and ‘milked it’ – those were his words.”
Within a short time of dating, the woman began to recognize some red flags. The morning after a night out together, Moody accused her of being aggressive towards him and others.
“I knew I wasn’t, that I wasn’t that kind of person. But he told me in such a way that he made me feel like he was doing me a favour. I apologized. I couldn’t remember every aspect of the night because I had too much to drink. But how he described me behaving just didn’t sound like me. He told me I was a mess and not to date. He mentioned gaslighting a lot. He said he had been in an abusive relationship before and that he would not tolerate that behavior again. All I could do was apologize. Looking back now, I can see that he was trying to get into my mind.”
Their relationship, in which the couple spent a lot of time together at first, began to cool down after a few months. The woman began to withdraw, finding some of Moody’s behavior “tiring” to deal with. “It just felt like he was constantly criticizing me. I started to feel like a punished kid. Everything I said, he took me wrong and tried to use it against me. He was really into mindfulness and doing breathing work. going to men’s retreats. He told me he was trying to help me become a better person because he thought I was a mess.”
Moody, of Celbridge, Co Kildare, who was originally charged with 35 crimes, told the woman all about the ex-partner he terrorized for four years. But in his version of events, he was the victim and his former partner the aggressor. “He made me believe that she was the one who did to him what he actually did to her. He said she was aggressive and abusive. When I heard the court evidence, I literally couldn’t believe it. He had just described everything in reverse.”
Moody loved the good life, the woman says, and was a big drinker and gambler. He loved socializing.
“He had a shoebox of expensive watches and all his clothes were designer. He had the social life of dreams, always out with his friends and in the best restaurants. He was constantly talking about his friends and they were always on the phone with each other. His phone was always hopping. And everywhere we went, people knew and liked him. He pretended to be a sweet, caring man. “I’m just a giant teddy bear,” he would say.”
When their relationship started to fall apart, the woman gently tried to abandon him. “I just started saying no when he asked me to take me out or go to his house. He was a big drinker and that was not for me. But he made it very clear that he wouldn’t be tied down to female company. He had a very high opinion of himself. He said something along the lines of, “You could have had it all, but you threw it all away.” He said he never argued with ex-girlfriends, so we kept in touch after we stopped dating.”
The woman, who does not want details of her relationship with Moody to be made public over concerns he might contact her after his release from prison, had no idea he was facing criminal charges and she watched the news in shock Tuesday night. .
“I just couldn’t believe it was him. I certainly had a happy escape. If I wasn’t the strong person I am, I think he could have gotten into my head. I just can’t believe I was such a bad character judge. I had absolutely no idea he was this person.”
Moody had “many” girlfriends, according to a senior investigator involved in the case. “He had a different woman almost every night, women he would meet on Tinder. He was very popular with the ladies. He had more wives than Caligula,’ the researcher said, referring to the Roman emperor.
Several of these women helped detectives from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation (NBCI) build the case against Moody.
While no one has filed any criminal charges, that door remains open for them. But crucially, these ex-girlfriends confirmed a pattern of behavior that characterized Moody as a manipulative monster.
But in the end, it was arrogance that sealed his fate, when he turned in his own cell phone to Gardaí and falsely claimed that a relative of his former partner had asked him to commit a criminal offense by “smacking” a ticket for a road traffic violation.
Officers with the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation were quick to dismiss his false accusations against the relative, who is believed to be a taxi driver, but in doing so they uncovered the litany of abuse against his terminally ill ex-partner.
When his phone was searched and damning evidence of his own criminal behavior was discovered, NBCI detectives approached his victim and she filed a complaint against Moody.
“That was the beginning of the end for him. We found many other women in his phone that he also tried forcibly to control. These women played an important role in the Garda case. We are eternally grateful to them,” said one source.
“Paul Moody has two children with different women. That is a classic move by someone who wants to control someone under duress. Get them pregnant so you can try to catch them.
“Everything about Moody’s life is false. He was very good at making fun of everyone, especially women. The designer watches? Fake. His house? There are steps to repossess it.
‘He never did a decent working day in his life as a garda. In recent months, he reinvented himself as a renovation specialist, refurbishing rich people’s homes. He liked to think that he moved in the best social circles, with so-called famous friends.”
Among Moody’s friends are some who work in the media. He attended a James Blunt concert at Iveagh Gardens with a radio station on July 10. A video seen by this newspaper shows Moody giving two fingers to the camera as he sings and enjoys a drink.
He seemed to have no care in the world, but in three weeks he would be in prison for three years and three months.
“I think he fooled a lot of his friends. But not all of them. Some of them knew what was on the trail and stayed with him,” the source said. “But he convinced some that these allegations were false, that it was not serious and would be thrown out of court. I wonder how many of these so-called friends of his will visit him in prison?”
One person who won’t make a trip to visit prison inmate 116829 is Mark O’Keeffe, the Dublin socialite and businessman who owns the Brown Sugar chain of hair salons and who was Moody’s best man at his wedding.
Last year, Mr. O’Keeffe paid bail for Moody. In 2013 they played together in a Irish Times lifestyle article, discussing the genesis of their friendship.
Mr O’Keeffe could not be reached for comment last week, but in June last year the businessman shared a bail of €8,000 for Moody, half of which was filed in court.
A source close to Mr O’Keeffe spoke to this newspaper about their friendship. “To say that Mark is shocked and shocked is an understatement,” she said. “He was told by Paul Moody that the charge was a big misunderstanding, that it would all end up in the wash.
“When they played in that together” Irish Times article, they were good friends. But that was almost 10 years ago and a lot has changed since then. They drifted apart. They live different lives. But when Mark got a call from Paul Moody’s lawyer asking if he could bail, he did. He believed he was innocent. He was told he would plead innocent, which he originally did.”
Moody was a garda for two decades, mostly at Dublin’s Donnybrook and Irishtown stations, with the exception of a stint with the now-defunct Organized Crime Unit. According to sources, he was not popular among colleagues.
With a 25 percent waiver to which all inmates are entitled, regardless of their conduct in prison, Moody will be released in two and a half years.
He had been given a maximum of five years for compulsory checks; given his plea of guilty and lack of previous convictions, his sentence was less than the maximum.
Moody is currently in protective isolation at Mountjoy. He is expected to be transferred to Midlands Prison.
This weekend, Moody’s ex-girlfriend has yet to come to terms with court revelations about a man she once had an intimate relationship with.
“If I had low self-esteem, or had been sick like his former partner, I think he could have victimized me too,” she says. “I’m not damaged by him, but I’m also not completely unscathed after getting to know him.”