Jail for serial flasher business student who 'traumatised' woman

Tom Tuite

A business student has been given a four-month jail sentence for a string of random lewd acts in front of three women in south Co Dublin.

Indian national Rishabh Mahajan (31) exposed himself to two women in UCD, Dublin District Court heard.

Mahajan also touched himself while staring in a third victim’s bedroom window when he was at an apartment viewing across the street from her.

He had already been convicted and jailed in June following committing a string of indecent exposure offences and a sexual assault in Dublin.

He was due to be released in September and remain on six months supervised probation, but on Thursday, July 30th, Judge Treasa Kelly imposed a separate four-month term, prolonging his time in jail by another three months.

Now he has six criminal convictions for indecently exposing himself and one for sexual assault.

Reports indicated sexual compulsion in his offending, which he claimed not to remember.

The sex offender was in Ireland just for a month when his offending began and is now fighting a deportation order.

There was a victim impact statement from the young woman he watched through the window. Judge Kelly noted that the complainant was left traumatised and afraid to be home alone, and her parents cancelled her holiday to give her support.

He pleaded guilty to three counts of offensive conduct of a sexual nature.

Garda sergeant Farrah Fox told Dublin District Court the first victim had been studying in a room in UCD on December 15, 2024, when the accused came in and sat down.

He stared at her and began masturbating in the room. The woman turned and looked away, and the accused left the room a few minutes later.

On December 26, another victim was in her bedroom in south Dublin when she saw the accused standing in a garden opposite the house, “staring in the window and touching himself in an inappropriate manner”.

The victim called the gardaí.

On March 5, 2025, another woman was walking to her car in UCD when she saw the accused, who appeared to be leaning against her car.

“He had his pants down to his knees and masturbated while looking at her,” Garda Sergeant Fox said. The woman shouted at him, and he pulled up his pants and left the area.

Security later found him at another part of the campus, and he was arrested.

The offences all happened during the afternoon.

The court heard the accused came to Ireland in September 2024 to study for a master's degree in business analytics at UCD, his barrister Paddy Flynn said.

He had been "quite popular at home in India” and never had “these kind of problems” before.

“It seems for whatever reason, when he came to Ireland he denigrated himself to this level,” Flynn said. Mahajan, who had lived in Smithfield, Dublin 7, “spiralled into squalid criminality” quite quickly due to “imbibing in student life in the wrong direction”.

He was smoking cannabis, drinking, and the times of the offences showed “it got to the point that he was also intoxicating himself during the day”.

The accused had a degree that could have given him a good career, but he was removed from UCD because of his crimes.

He had not been able to return to his family and had missed his sister’s wedding.

Mahajan was concerned about returning to India because publicity from his crimes had “travelled” and he would be rejected by society there as he had been in Ireland.

The accused still owed half of a student loan of more than €30,000, and there was now a deportation order in place, which he was fighting.

“He’s ruined his life as a result of his offending,” Mr Flynn said. Mahajan was “very remorseful” for what happened, the barrister said in a plea for leniency.

His other case was dealt with in the Circuit Court in June, when the court heard Mahajan targeted a woman working late inside a glass-walled building on three separate occasions between October 23 and November 4, 2024.

During these incidents, all captured on CCTV, Mahajan exposed himself and masturbated while staring directly through the glass at the victim. On one occasion, he laughed when she told him to leave, and during his final visit, he wiped his hands across the glass wall before fleeing.

His actions were described by the sentencing judge as "brazen" when he was sentenced to 16 months, the final 12 months suspended with conditions.