Warning: This story deals with details of sexual assault and may be upsetting
A French court has jailed three rugby players formerly with French side Grenoble for 12 to 14 years over the 2017 gang rape of a student after a drunken night out.
On Friday local time it sentenced Irishman Denis Coulson, 30, and Frenchman Loick Jammes, 30, to 14 years behind bars, and New Zealander Rory Grice, 34, to 12 years in jail.
None of the three had been in detention until now.
Coulson had stopped playing rugby and was working in construction, while Jammes and Grice have been playing for Provence Rugby and Oyonnax, two French clubs in second division.
Gaessy Gros, one of the lawyers representing the victim, said the ruling “gave a very strong signal to men in this country, to the rugby world, and to women”.
“Ladies, you can dress as you like, drink as much as you like, that freedom does not have a price,” he said.
Coulson’s lawyer Corinne Dreyfus-Schmidt said she was “extremely shocked” by the verdict.
She and attorneys for Jammes and Grice said they would appeal.
The court in the southwestern city of Bordeaux also handed a four-year sentence, including two years suspended, to ex-Ireland international 31-year-old Chris Farrel over failure to prevent the crime.
Farrel, who has also been playing for Oyonnax, was to serve his two years under house arrest with an electronic bracelet.
New Zealander Dylan Hayes, now 30 and unemployed, received a two-year suspended sentence, also for not intervening to stop the rape.
In the small hours of March 12, 2017, the student, identified only as V., was in tears as she left a hotel on the outskirts of Bordeaux, where the Grenoble team spent the night after losing a Top 14 encounter against local side Bordeaux-Begles.
V. filed a complaint with police, saying she had met the players in a bar together with two friends and accompanied them to a nightclub where all of them drank heavily.
The student said she had no recollection of how she got from the club to the hotel where she woke up, naked on a bed and with a crutch inserted in her vagina.
She saw two naked men in the room and others fully dressed.
Coulson, Jammes and Grice stated they had sexual relations with V. but claimed the encounter was consensual and the student had been proactive in bringing it about.
Farrell, owner of the crutch, was present, as was Hayes.
On the basis of statements from the accused and witnesses, as well as a sex tape shot by Coulson, investigators have concluded there were several incidents of fellatio, and a banana, a bottle and crutches were inserted in V.’s vagina.
A toxicology report stated her blood alcohol level was between 2.2 and 3 grams, a level considered in the danger zone for alcohol poisoning.
CCTV footage showed her having difficulty standing up as she arrived at the hotel and being propped up by a player.
Gros argued during the trial V. was “in no state to give her consent as these men who carried her, who were with her, know perfectly well”.
Coulson’s lawyer, Dreyfus-Schmidt this week said her client had apologised to the victim and his teammates too “because he feels responsible as it was him who led the young woman into the room”.
Rape accusations have shaken the world of international rugby recently.
An Argentine court on Wednesday dismissed rape charges against two French international rugby players accused of assaulting a woman after playing a match in the country in July.
Hugo Auradou and Oscar Jegou, both aged 21, were held for weeks in Argentina after the alleged July assault.
A 39-year-old woman, whom they met in a nightclub accused them of a vicious assault in a hotel room.
A judge in Mendoza dismissed the case on the advice of the prosecution, which called for the charges to be dropped over inconsistencies in the woman’s version of events. Her lawyer too is planning to appeal.