Jarryd Hayne Jailed for 4 Years 9 Months
Jarryd Hayne has been jailed for a maximum of four years and nine months for sexually assaulting a woman in her Newcastle home, but the former NRL player could be released in two years due to time already served.
Hayne was found guilty after a third trial on two counts of sexual intercourse without consent relating to non-consensual oral sex and the digital penetration of a 26-year-old woman on the night of the NRL grand final in 2018.
The 35-year-old appeared via video link in Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court on Friday, with a shaved beard and in a prison green T-shirt, for his sentence before Judge Graham Turnbull.
The judge said Hayne, knowing the woman was not consenting, “overwhelmed her in an inherently unequal context and an indulgence of physical power to achieve some sexual gratification”.
Turnbull set a maximum term of four years and nine months’ imprisonment, with a non-parole period of three years.
The sentence was backdated to May 2022 to account for time Hayne had already spent in custody and under onerous conditions on remand, meaning he will be eligible for release from May 2025.
“Say no more,” Hayne replied. The video link feed was then cut to the court, but Hayne was heard by those observing proceedings online to say, “F---ing three years, bro, f---.”
The judge noted Hayne “maintains his innocence”, and, as a result, “expresses no contrition or remorse”.
Outside court, the officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Inspector Eugene Stek, said of the victim: “She’s certainly much braver than she believes, she’s certainly much stronger than she seems, and she’s certainly much smarter than she thinks.” The trial heard Hayne and the woman had been talking for almost two weeks on platforms including Instagram and Snapchat, exchanging “flirty” messages and photos, before he arrived at her home in Fletcher at 9.07pm on September 30, 2018. Leaving a $550 taxi waiting outside and a halfdrunk Vodka Cruiser on the mailbox, Hayne told the driver he needed to collect a bag. Inside the woman’s bedroom, Hayne played his “go-to” songs on a laptop, including an Ed Sheeran cover of Oasis’ Wonderwall.
The Crown case was that the possibility of sex evaporated for the woman when she became aware of the waiting taxi, after a beep of its horn or a knock at the door.
The judge said the complainant had been “open to something sexual happening if it happened in the right way”, but her “heart dropped” and she felt Hayne was there for “one thing”, telling her mother, “there’s no way I’m about to have sex with him”.
Crown prosecutor John Sfinas submitted Hayne engendered fear into the victim, who weighed 48 kilograms compared with Hayne’s 104 kilograms, and was motivated by his own sexual gratification.
Hayne, in his evidence, said: “I knew she didn’t want to have sex; I thought I’d just please her and that was it.” But the judge noted, on Hayne’s own account, “he places her hand on his crotch”.
The judge said the jury must have rejected Hayne’s account as true or possibly true, and must have accepted the complainant’s account.
In her evidence, the woman said Hayne grabbed her pants and “pulled them off in one go”, was rough and forceful and performed the acts despite her saying “no” and “stop”, leaving her bleeding.
“The offending only stopped when the bleeding commenced,” Turnbull said. “He did not relent voluntarily.” Hayne left the home at 9.53pm. In response to the woman’s texts that she was “hurting” and “didn’t want to do that”, he said, “go doctor tomorrow”.
The now 30-year-old woman said in a victim impact statement that her life had been “launched into what feels like a never-ending nightmare”, including going through three trials in under five years.
“I have not been able to move on or feel any sense of peace,” she said.
“I am stronger, and I am wiser, but I am damaged, and I won’t ever be the same person.”
She found discussion on social media and reporting “extremely difficult to handle”, and said people speak about the sexual assault “like they were there”.
The judge said: “These remarks on sentence and the imposition of this penalty should not obscure the fact that there was a young woman here who was dealt with criminally by this offender.”
Defence barrister Margaret Cunneen, SC, had argued Hayne was a “very different man” since the “hiatus” in the relationship with his now wife Amellia Bonnici, with whom he shares three children.
She said Hayne, a two-time Dally M Medal winner who played for the Parramatta Eels and Gold Coast Titans, was publicly vilified, experienced an “extraordinary loss” from his “stellar rugby league career”, and still faced the prospect of being stripped of his achievements.
Bonnici previously told the court the family had been living off Hayne’s savings.
Hayne’s lawyers have indicated an intention to appeal against the verdicts.