County cricketer jailed for five years for raping woman in ‘sex conquest’ game

A county cricketer who treated a “dozing” woman whom he raped in his teammate’s bedroom like a “piece of meat” has been jailed for five years.

Alex Hepburn, 23, was convicted after an attack he carried out during the first night of a sexual conquest “game” he helped to set up on a Whatsapp group.

Hepburn – who the sentencing judge concluded thought he was “God’s gift to women” – had cooked up the “pathetic, sexist game” with a teammate.

Judge Jim Tindal told Hepburn he had seen his victim “at that moment as a piece of meat, not a woman entitled to respect”.

The Australian-born former Worcestershire all-rounder was said by the prosecution to have been “fired up” by the contest to sleep with the most women before carrying out the rape at his flat on Portland Street, Worcester, on 1 April, 2017. Jailing Hepburn at Hereford Crown Court yesterday, Judge Tindal told the “immature” cricketer he and a former teammate Joe Clarke had agreed a “pathetic sexist game to collect as many sexual encounters as possible”, following a similar stunt the previous year.

In remarks about the Whatsapp chat group, the judge said: “You probably thought it was laddish behaviour at the time. In truth it was foul sexism. It … trivialised rape.”