Jarryd Hayne sentence: judge jails former NRL player for minimum of three years | Lismore City News

Former NRL star Jarryd Hayne has been jailed for a maximum of four years and nine months for raping a woman who he met in the NSW Hunter region on the night of the 2018 grand final.

After five years, three trials, two guilty verdicts and an appeal, Hayne’s dramatic fall from grace is complete once more after the 35-year-old was on Friday ordered to serve at least the next three years behind bars.

Hayne was in April found guilty of two counts of sexual intercourse without consent after a two-week trial in Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court, a jury accepting the victim’s evidence that she had not consented to sexual acts performed by Hayne.

The former Parramatta Eels fullback and NSW representative went to the woman’s house on September 30, 2018, after a buck’s weekend in Newcastle.

A taxi waited outside as he played the woman songs on a laptop and watched the end of the grand final with her mother before performing non-consensual oral and digital sex on the woman for about 30 seconds.

They then cleaned blood off themselves and Hayne continued on his journey to Sydney.

In a victim impact statement read during Hayne’s sentence hearing earlier this week, the woman said she had not been able to move on with her life since the incident almost five years ago, continued to need time off work and had been unable to finish her university studies.

“After going through the first and second trials, I was hoping this would all be over, and I could finally try and move on with my life,” she said in the statement read to the court.

“I have not been able to move on or feel any sense of peace.”

The woman, who cannot be identified, said the incident and its fallout had been mentally and socially damaging.

“I’m stronger and I’m wiser but I’m damaged and I won’t ever be the same person,” she said.

Defence barrister Margaret Cunneen, SC, had argued Hayne would spend his time in jail in protective custody, which she said would be “more onerous”, and urged Judge Graham Turnbull, SC, when sentencing Hayne to consider the “extraordinary loss” of his rugby league career and an “extremely lucrative contract”.

Two days after the guilty verdicts last month, the DPP applied for a detention application to have Hayne refused bail until his sentencing this week.

But despite changes to the bail laws after conviction that meant offenders had to provide “exceptional” or “special circumstances” to avoid being immediately taken behind bars, and a concession that Hayne would spend more time in jail, Judge Turnbull continued Hayne’s bail.

But a week later that decision was reversed by a NSW Supreme Court judge who said it was “remarkable” that Hayne had been allowed to remain on bail despite being convicted by a jury of “committing two extremely grave sexual offences”.

The trial beginning in March was Hayne’s third on charges laid in November 2018.

The jury in the first trial was discharged after being unable to reach a verdict.

The second jury found Hayne guilty, but his conviction was overturned in the Court of Criminal Appeal after Hayne had spent nine months in jail.

Hayne has previously indicated he plans to appeal the guilty verdicts in the latest trial.