Let’s revisit so-called investigative journalist Gemma O’Doherty’s award-winning documentary on missing child Mary Boyle released on July 4, 2016. The YouTube documentary focuses on the disappearance in 1977 of the then six-year-old girl in Co. Donegal. The little girl followed her uncle across the fields from her grandparents’ home before turning back, never to be seen again. Mary Boyle remains Ireland’s longest-running missing child case. No body was ever found. No crime scene to analyse.
As the credits roll at the end of the documentary, O’Doherty gives thanks to former Epstein lawyer Paul Tweed who also helped her win a High Court defamation case in January 2015 including an undisclosed sum for damages against her former employers Independent News and Media. She even got an apology.
Tweed - known for representing a slew of in da club celebrities including Liam Neeson, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Timberlake, Kelsey Grammer, Nicolas Cage, Harrison Ford, Ashton Kutcher and Johnny Depp - was also there by Gemma O’Doherty’s side in December 2014 for an unfair dismissal case at the Employment Appeals Tribunal which she won. Incredibly.
The context to that case has been previously covered on this Substack.
Paul Tweed is in the headlines for his correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein following the financier’s 2008 conviction by a Florida state court for soliciting a prostitute and procuring a child for prostitution. Choosing to defend Epstein’s reputation in the media was a bad move for Tweed. It undermines his own reputation. Especially now that the Internet is poring over his emails to Epstein, released in a massive file dump that has rocked the world. Things will never be the same again. Babylon is burning.
Heads are rolling even in the absence of arrests and proper mainstream coverage of the seriousness of the crime network uncovered. The story is too big to bury. The mainstream media has lost control of the narrative as people take matters into their town hands and research for themselves. It’s a horror show.
Epstein will go down in history as one of the most prolific pedophiles to walk this earth, a Jimmy Savile type predator who got away with murder on an industrial scale. Darker still, Epstein was a symptom of an evil system that continues to work in the shadows to this day waiting for us to move on to the next distraction.
Paul Tweed claims he never met Epstein in person or visited his private island but choosing to represent a man with such a criminal record does not reflect well on the Belfast solicitor, regardless. He categorically rejects the suggestion that he acted in any way inappropriately, according to The Belfast Telegraph.
As for his business relationship with anti-corruption journalist Gemma O’Doherty. Tweed represented her again in August 2016, for another defamation case against Independent News and Media for an article (below) by Maeve Sheehan which questioned the production of her Mary Boyle documentary. The outcome of this case is unclear but the offending article remains online.
Report reads:
A second garda who contributed to a documentary about the disappearance of Mary Boyle has denied claims of political interference in the investigation of the case.
Retired detective sergeant Aidan Murray, who featured in Mary Boyle: The Untold Story, has claimed the programme was “selective” and “misleading” in how it presented his interview.
That’s not all that was misleading in the documentary. There’s quite a bit.
The clip from the Mary Boyle documentary isolated (above) in the main video is worth analysing. It’s very odd. The wording is off. There’s an agenda at play and it becomes more apparent as the broadcast rolls on.
It’s like O’Doherty has put words in the mouths of her interviewees in advance of recording. It feels like garda intimidation is the message viewers are supposed to glean from the documentary. We’re expected to feel sorry for convicted child abuser Brian McMahon who’s been put upon by those meanie cops. O’Doherty fails to address the suspect’s child abuse track record or acknowledge his victims’ testimonies which is peculiar in the extreme. That’s quite the omission for an apparent investigative journalist.
Why was O’Doherty so quick to defend a convicted sex offender painting him as popular and innocent? Surely she should have remained neutral and open to all possibilities in her exploration of Mary Boyle’s disappearance.
Compare and contrast
The Irish Independent article reads from February 10, 2015:
Former Irish army soldier and amusement arcade owner McMahon was jailed for two years in 2013 for a string of sex offences against boys in south Donegal in the 1970s and 80s.
He had pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to 35 charges of indecent assault of the boy between 1966 and June 1974 at two locations in Ballyshannon. He was convicted by a jury of 31 of the charges.
Contrast that to what O’Doherty says in her voiceover:
When he was arrested in relation to the kidnapping of Mary Boyle in October 2014, those seeking justice and any who knew Mr McMahon were deeply disturbed. A popular man in his local community, whom many believed had been done an earlier injustice by the state. They were adamant he had nothing to do with the it.
Who’s this they? The script sounds like it was written with the assistance of a lawyer or a committee of suits. It’s clunky and devious. Why would anyone be ‘deeply disturbed’ by the arrest of a convicted child abuser? What does it matter if he was popular? What about his victims who were only 10 and 13 at the time? We only hear from them if we dig deep online.
Highland Radio reported on July 31, 2013:
In his victim impact statement, the older brother told the court he did not have any recollection of happy childhood moments, due to the physical and sexual abuse during what he described as “the most vulnerable” part of his life.He said at the time he “didn’t have the vocabulary” to describe what was inflicted on him. In an effort to cope throughout his life, he immersed himself in his work and worked hours “far in excess” of the working week. “I have no self-confidence,” he said, adding that he has difficulty trusting and confiding in others.
His younger brother, in his victim impact statement, said he has endured an “emotional, painful path” due to the “violence, intimidation, terror and completely irrational behaviour” of McMahon. He said the incident meant the creation of an environment of “secrecy” and he built up a “shell of protection” in an effort to cope.Mr Justice Carney imposed a sentence of two years on each charge, to run concurrently.
This was the prison sentence Brian McMahon was serving when he was arrested in relation to the disappearance of Mary Boyle. If you watched O’Doherty’s documentary, you’d think McMahon was the victim of an earlier injustice as he described feeling intimated by the cops when they arrested him in prison.
The documentary includes a snippet from Crime Correspondent Paul Reynolds report on RTÉ’s SixOne News on October 21, 2014:
Thirty seven years after six-year-old Mary Boyle went missing gardaí today made their first arrest in this long running investigation.
A 64-year-old man was taken from the Midlands Prison at midday on a Section 42 warrant which allows gardaí detain inmates.
Gemma O’Doherty’s voiceover continues:
When Mary disappeared in 1977 he (Brian McMahon) was a young soldier in Finner Army Camp outside Ballyshannon. Abandoned by his mother as a child, he had grown up in state institutions and in a foster home in Cashelard where he was subjected to severe physical abuse. His foster mother had been deemed unsuitable to look after children. As an adult he received compensation from the State Redress Board.
In 2013 Brian McMahon was convicted of indecent assault after allegations were made against him of offences dating back to when he was a teenager. He says he is innocent of the charges. At the time of his arrest for the Mary Boyle case he was serving a sentence in the Midlands Prison in Portlaoise.
A sentence. What kind of sentence would that be? Again the wording is strange. Firstly Gemma O’Doherty chooses to ignore the fact the indecent assault charges were for two boys aged 13 and 10 at the time. Their victim impact statements are not considered for the documentary. She skips over the fact that Brian McMahon was convicted by a jury of 31 of the charges between 1966-1974. He may say he’s innocent but a jury found otherwise in a court of law. Surely that should have been mentioned. It’s worth noting that McMahon has taken no responsibility for his crimes and makes out he was set up.
The script is framed to illicit sympathy for the convicted sex offender. Indeed it is sad he had such a hard start to life but in omitting relevant information Gemma O’Doherty is failing in her duty as a journalist to provide the full picture. Viewers may have less compassion for the suspect if they knew the damage he had inflicted on minors over an eight year period. Surely that extended beyond his teenage years if he started at 16. We’re left guessing. Not good. It should be crystal clear.
Strange Scripting
It’s also relevant to the story that the viewer understands the context to Brian McMahon’s arrest rather than it being framed as some kind of garda stitch-up against an innocent man.
O’Doherty goes on in her voiceover:
Brian McMahon was a soldier at Finner Army Camp outside Ballyshannon at 12 kms from where she disappeared. He believes he was on the camp the day she vanished. He did not know Mary Boyle and had no car but it was put to him that he walked to the Gallagher’s remote farm, managed to abduct the six-year-old from her family and take her away on foot.
We find Gemma O’Doherty once again being manipulative with words. She says Brian McMahon did not know Mary Boyle. Maybe so but he knew her mother from his time living with foster parents in Ballyshannon. She leaves that piece of important information out for some reason. An Irish Independent report from February 10, 2015 states:
McMahon said he knew Mary Boyle's mother when he lived in Ballyshannon and before she got married and moved to Kincasslagh…
He said he was linked to the case after a RTE documentary was aired and a viewer remembered McMahon pointing out the home where Mary, aged six, was last seen alive.
O’Doherty also claims Brian McMahon had no car at the time but doesn’t say if he had access to military vehicles or any vehicle for that matter. In an interview on Ocean FM in May 2016, McMahon told interviewer Niall Delaney that the army records showed he was on annual leave at the time of Mary Boyle’s disappearance but he said he was actually on patrol leave. So he wasn’t on the camp the day the child disappeared then? Where was he? O’Doherty offers a preposterous scenario to viewers in her efforts to defend Brian McMahon and makes out the gardaí were intimidating him for no reason. It’s thoroughly unsatisfactory as a viewer when you find out vital information has been omitted or presented in such a way as to encourage a certain response and entice you off the scent.
The Ocean FM interview is rather insightful with McMahon admitting the damage caused to his personality during his formative years:
Delaney: Bryan, I mentioned earlier, in the early 1980s, you were, you ran this amusement arcade in Sligo, isn’t that right? Called the Jam Pot which many people will remember.
McMahon: That’s true, Niall, that’s true and it was at that point in time, in fact, that I was recovering from alcohol for years of alcohol abuse. I just got as it were, an inner knowing with regard to my dilemma and I just stopped drinking there and then and I went to Alcoholics Anonymous for quite a number of years and I got great support there and met a lot of friends there. But still, and I must say, truthfully, that my personality was very badly distorted, you know, from the formative years of my life, I carried that with me to this day, I can’t change the person who I’ve become my personality, until the day I die, will always be…
Delaney: And was that you think part of the reason why you ended up in court for indecent assault of two young boys?
McMahon: That I’d say, no, I’d imagine, I would imagine that this whole set-up was starting to build up a momentum and I believe that it started after I received that sum from the Redress Board. Because it’s very, very ironic that shortly after I received the money, two gardai arrived on my door and informed me that I was being arrested on suspicion of indecent assault.
It’s very interesting that Brian McMahon takes no responsibility for the abuse of the boys and is backed up by Gemma O’Doherty in her documentary who deliberately leaves out the details of the case, as if they’re irrelevant. The fact remains he was a suspect for a reason and was questioned because there were inconsistencies in his story. That should have been made clear in the documentary.
The office of the Director of Public Prosecutions eventually decided not to bring any charges against Brian McMahon. We’re left wondering why Gemma O’Doherty made the production in the first place. Was it to take the heat off the convicted sex offender and keep the spotlight on Mary Boyle’s uncle Gerry Gallagher (since deceased) who was last to see the child making him the obvious suspect? He maintained his innocence to the end. Or was it to direct the spotlight towards a local politician and hotelier (also deceased) whose estate has been granted permission to pursue a defamation case against Gemma O’Doherty for her allegations in the documentary? These kind of productions are expensive and time consuming to make and usually have a purpose.
One thing is clear from the broadcast, O’Doherty was being creative with the facts, something that has become her trademark when she’s pushing certain agendas. It’s highly suspicious that she ignored the victims in the child abuse case and attempted to make her audience feel sorry for Brian McMahon. This is troubling and deserves to be highlighted and marked.
Add to that her thanks to Epstein’s former media defamation lawyer Paul Tweed in the credits and the viewer is left with more questions than answers. Tweed was also willing to defend the reputation of a registered sex offender without seeing any moral issue with his stance. Maybe it’s just a coincidence but it’s worth clocking.
The Mary Boyle mystery remains open. Gemma O’Doherty’s documentary has shown us how the journalist frames certain narratives to suit her agenda. By the end of it we’re expected to blame the uncle and the local politician/hotelier for the cover-up. But what if it’s not them? The job of the journalist is to explore all avenues in a fair manner leaving room for updated information and new leads. There were too many details left out of Mary Boyle: The Untold Story for the viewer to form a proper opinion. The script was too manipulative.
It’s little surprise that Gemma O’Doherty is trying to convince her audience that Epstein Island is a movie set in one of her latest posts.
If that’s the case, does that mean Paul Tweed is a crisis actor? That would be handy alright. Move along, move along.
Related articles:
Was Former Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan set up to prime the way for a foreign takeover of An Garda Síochána?
Deliberate Bad Publicity: Gemma O’Doherty is the real psyop
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