Hayne sentenced to jail for sexual assault

Former NRL star Jarryd Hayne has been jailed for five years and nine months at his sentencing yesterday.

Hayne, 33, was convicted in March of two counts of sexual intercourse without consent after he assaulted a 26-year-old woman in her Newcastle home with his hands and mouth and left her bleeding from the genitals in September, 2018.

He was found guilty of the charges after a second trial in the NSW District Court, with an original trial last year ending in a hung jury.

Hayne will serve a minimum of three years and eight months in prison with that timeframe being set as his non-parole period.

The woman Hayne assaulted walked quietly into court yesterday supported by police and several others. When Hayne arrived, a group of his supporters tried to shield him with umbrellas on the way into the court building, jostling with photographers and camera operators.

In a victim impact statement, read out as a detective sat next to her, the woman said the incident has affected her ‘‘mentally, physically, socially and academically’’ and no-one will ever fully understand the extent of her feelings.

‘‘I felt dirty and violated. He made me feel like an object and was looking straight through me,’’ the woman said.

She said she sometimes gets a ‘‘sickening feeling’’ about that night and experiences flashbacks of Hayne’s face looking right through her, stress which has made her unable to work for six months and to stop her university studies.

‘‘My body remembers and my mind won’t let me forget.’’

The trial heard Hayne had been speaking to the victim on social media for a few weeks, but they met for the first time when Hayne – who was in Newcastle for a buck’s weekend – stopped at her house on the evening of September 30, 2018, on the way back to Sydney.

He arrived at her home at 9.07pm and left his $550 taxi waiting outside, telling the driver he needed to pick up a bag. He left 46 minutes later.

In her evidence, the woman said when she discovered the taxi waiting outside she did not want to have any sexual contact with Hayne, but he did not stop his advances and pulled down her pants despite her protests of ‘‘no’’.

‘‘I think I froze in a way, because I can’t remember a massive struggle; it was just really confusing. But he knew I didn’t want it – I said ‘no’,’’ the woman told the trial.