15,000 sign petition to let rugby stars cleared of rape back into game
A ROW over whether two rugby stars cleared of rape should be welcomed back into their sport intensified yesterday.
A petition calling for Stuart Olding and Paddy Jackson to be allowed to represent club and country again has clocked up 15,000 signatures.
And a former international captain, Willie John McBride, said the pair, who are suspended from playing, had learnt their lesson.
Although they were cleared, Olding and Jackson were exposed at their trial as having made vulgar boasts about ‘spit roasting’ in WhatsApp messages following the alleged incident.
Olding wrote: ‘We are all top sh***ers,’ and later boasted: ‘It was like a merry-go-round at a carnival.’ Women were also referred to as sluts and ‘brasses’ – a slang term for prostitutes.
Campaigners last week demanded that Jackson and Olding be dropped from the Ireland and Ulster rugby teams.
They bought a full-page advert in the Belfast Telegraph, which read: ‘The content of the social media exchanges involving Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding was reprehensible.
‘Such behaviour falls far beneath the standards that your organisations represent. As such we demand that neither of these men represents Ulster or Ireland now or at any point in the future.’ Supporters of the players responded with an advert in the same newspaper yesterday calling for rugby chiefs to reinstate the ‘innocent men’. The message was signed by ‘real fans standing up for the Ulster men’.
McBride, 77, who captained the British and Irish Lions team in the 1970s, told RTE television: ‘They have learned their lesson. All of them have issued their regrets and sadness about the affair and their apologies. It is time they got back to doing what they do best and that is playing rugby.
‘I hope that people will see that these are not bad young men.’
Jackson, 26, and Olding, 25, have both expressed a desire to return to playing action. They have been relieved of their duties pending the outcome of a review into their conduct by sporting authorities.
The pair were cleared last month of raping a 19-year-old at a Belfast house party in 2016. Jackson was also acquitted of sexual assault.
Jurors at the city’s crown court took four hours to make their decision following a nine-week trial.
The acquittal sparked mass protests in and elsewhere.
Naomi Long, leader of the cross community Alliance Party, potentially jeopardised the trial, it emerged yesterday.
The court heard she had been critical on Twitter of Frank O’Donoghue QC’s closing speech in which he said ‘middle-class girls’ had been in the house at the time of the alleged rape.
She posted online: ‘I genuinely have no words for how atrocious this statement is. Middle-class girls? What? Because “working class girls” wouldn’t care/don’t matter/think rape is normal? Appalling at every level.’
The comment, which was retweeted 36 times and received 277 likes, risked prejudicing the administration of justice.
The case has echoes of that of Ched Evans, a footballer jailed for rape and then cleared after a retrial in October 2016. Debate raged as to whether the striker, who had played for Wales, should be allowed back into the game.
He was later signed by Chesterfield and then Sheffield United. Belfast, Dublin