Jason Corbett’s young children told social workers in the United States after their father’s death that he physically and verbally hurt his second wife Molly Martens Corbett, a court in North Carolina has been told.
Mr Corbett’s daughter Sarah, then aged eight, said Ms Martens Corbett had told her when she was six that “your dad is not that good of a dad”.
The court on Wednesday afternoon viewed video recordings of interviews carried out with the two young children by staff at the Dragonfly children’s advocacy centre in North Carolina just four days after their father was killed.
After they returned to Ireland the children recanted the comments they had made and these details are expected to be read into the court record later in the proceedings.
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On Monday Ms Martens Corbett did not contest a charge of voluntary manslaughter in relation to the killing of Jason Corbett.
Her father Thomas Martens pleaded guilty to a charge of voluntary manslaughter. A sentencing hearing is now underway to determine the sentences they will receive.
In his interview from 2015 the then ten-year-old Jack Corbett said his father had “physically and verbally hurt my mom”.
He said he saw his father punch his mother on one occasion and also push her down when she tried to stop him looking at her phone.
He said on occasions Ms Martens Corbett would shout back at his father and on others would curl herself up in a ball under the covers.
Sarah Corbett said in the recorded interview that her father would get angry, for example, if lights were left on.
She said on one occasion he stepped on Ms Martens Corbet and on another rolled over her foot. She said he also called her “bad names”
She said that one day her father had called Ms Martens Corbett on 47 occasions.
The children said Ms Marten Corbett’s mother had given them code words – “Peacock” and “Galaxy” - to use when calling her if there was an emergency. Jack Corbett said the code words were to be used if things were really bad and “going on and on for an hour or so”.
Separately on Wednesday the court heard that Ms Martens Corbett told police after the death of her husband that she was afraid his family would kill her and take his two children back to Ireland.
In an interview with police she said she had not told her own parents about physical violence in her marriage.
The court was shown a video recording of an interview Ms Martens Corbett gave to police the morning after her husband was killed in August 2015.
She said she did not highlight domestic abuse in her marriage as she was scared about losing access to the two children from her husband’s first marriage who lived with them in their home Winston Salem in North Carolina.
She said the two children were not hers biologically, were not US citizens and that he could take them away.
Ms Martens Corbett said in the interview that she and her husband had been fighting “forever”.
She said she had gone to hospital on a couple of occasions. She said one time she had gone after her husband hit her head on a bed headboard. She said she was seeking an MRI but doctors prescribed her painkillers and said she had a stress headache.
She said she did not tell health authorities what had happened.
Prosecutors later maintained to the court medical records showed no abrasions or tenderness on her head.
Ms Martens Corbett said physical assaults had started “maybe a couple of months” into her relationship with Jason Corbett.
She said she had a condition involving an additional clump of veins in her leg which presses on a nerve.
She said when her husband was angry he had a tendency to stamp on it “accidentally on purpose”.
Ms Martens Corbett said she told her parents about the verbal assaults but not about anything physical.
She said the verbal assaults depended on her husband’s mood.
She said she had brought her children to a doctor’s surgery and she had not said anything specifically but suggested “things were not good at home”.
Ms Martens Corbett said her husband acted perfectly in front of others.
