Disturbing intercepted phone calls reveal NRL superstar Jarryd Hayne vowed to ‘get’ the woman he raped in an angry conversation with Mitchell Pearce.
The former Australian and NSW Blues representative will be sentenced in May after a NSW District Court jury found him guilty of two rape charges on Monday.
The former Dally M player of the year denied assaulting the woman, 26, in the bedroom of her home in Newcastle on the night of the 2018 NRL Grand Final on his way home from a teammate’s buck’s night.
Audio of a phone call intercepted by police between Hayne and NSW Origin teammate Pearce shows the contempt he felt for his accuser.
Jarryd Hayne (right) arrives hand in hand with his wife of two months Amellia Bonnici (left) at Sydney’s Downing Centre Court where a jury found him guilty of sexual assault
Hayne was arrested four days after the intercepted phone call in November 2018, which begins with him telling Pearce about the woman he met in ‘Newy’.
‘Who’s this sheila come out saying something about ya?’ Pearce asked.
‘She’s from Newy, bro,’ Hayne replied. ‘Newy?’ Pearce inquired.
‘Full-blown weirdo, yeah,’ Hayne added. ‘A couple of your boys might know her, bro.’
Pearce asked for her name and after it was supplied replied: ‘I’ll ask the boys.’
Hayne said the woman ‘sent all these nude snaps on Snapchat and that she wanted to ‘link up, link up’ but became ‘filthy because the cab was out the front’ of her house.
‘It’s like, well I’m only going to be here for a short time,’ Mr Hayne said. ‘I watched a bit of the grand final with her old girl.’
Jarryd Hayne (right) threatened to ‘get’ the woman who accused him of rape for defamation in a phone call with former NSW Blues teammate Mitchell Pearce (left) which was intercepted by police
Hayne said he was ‘fooling around’ with the woman when ‘she bled a little bit… it was weird’.
‘She wigged out… [I said] “my fingernail must’ve just clipped you, that’s all, it’s nothing major, like it was just a little bit”.
‘[She] full wigged out. [I told her] “nah nah, sweet sweet”. So we watched a bit of f**kin’ music videos and that, I was like oh OK yep, I better go now, rah rah rah. She’s just like, filthy I left her. I was like “what the f**k”.’
In the 7.03pm phone call to Pearce, Hayne said the woman later contacted him to say he had been aggressive and she told him ‘no, no, no.’
‘You got a lawyer and that?’Mr Pearce asked:
‘Yeah I spoke to my lawyer and that,’ Hayne replied. ‘I’ll get her for defamation easy… I gotta go, bro, my lawyer’s calling me.’
The call ends with Pearce asking Hayne when he’ll be in Newcastle next for a catch- up. ‘Look after yourself, see you bro,’ Pearce ended the call.
In a separate call with another friend, Hayne described the woman as an ‘idiot’ and a ‘young cow carrying on’, and claimed she was ‘blowing up’ and ‘filthy because I brushed her’.
‘You speak to them a bit, they get attached,’ he said. ‘Cause I’ve flicked her, she’s blown up.’
The call intercepted with police begins with Jarryd Hayne telling Mitchell Pearce (pictured) about the woman he’d met in ‘Newy’.
Harrowing footage of the young victim’s blood-stained bed sheets were also publicly released following Monday’s verdict.
Hayne walked from court with a defiant message after the jury sensationally found him guilty of two charges of sexual assault.
‘I’d rather go to jail knowing I spoke the truth rather than be a free man living a lie,’ the footballer said following the verdict on Monday.
Hayne, 33, appeared to have been crying while waiting to be released on bail, with a relative coughing up an additional $50,000 in surety to secure his liberty.
Judge Helen Syme said that jail would be ‘inevitable’ when the one-time rugby league superstar is sentenced in May.
A NSW District Court jury of seven men and five women reached its sensational guilty verdict just after 2pm on Monday, following three full days of deliberations.
The former rugby league superstar now faces up to 14 years behind bars over the two charges of sexual intercourse without consent.
Hayne appeared to have been crying before fronting the media. ‘I’d rather go to jail knowing I spoke the truth,’ he said, in a seeming admission of his fate
Hayne was found not guilty of more serious alternative charges of aggravated sexual intercourse without consent inflicting actual bodily harm, which would have carried an even longer sentence.
The rugby league icon bowed his head when the first guilty verdict was delivered. Hayne and his new wife Amelia Bonnici hugged afterwards. She looked shell-shocked. One of his lawyers patted him on the arm.
Hayne will be under virtual house arrest at home on the NSW Central Coast from now until sentencing. The jury’s decision comes after a previous jury trial in Newcastle last year failed to reach a verdict.
Hayne’s victim, then 26, had claimed he had sexually assaulted her, had been ‘really rough and pushy’, forcefully removed her clothes and left her bleeding from her genitalia.
The famous footballer’s rendezvous with the woman came after he had been celebrating a bucks weekend in Newcastle and paid a cab driver $550 to drive him back to Sydney.
But he asked the driver to let him ‘pick up a bag’ from a nearby suburb, where the woman lived with her mother. The taxi waited out the front.
Hayne first met the woman via Instagram when she messaged him that he was ‘absolutely gorgeous’ about a year earlier.
The jury was told Hayne played an Ed Sheeran cover of Oasis’s Wonderwall in the woman’s room – when the driver rapped on the front door.
The woman became upset that the cab had was running and had said there was ‘no way’ she was going to have sex with Hayne.
Shortly afterwards, she alleged Hayne forcefully removed her clothes, was ‘really pushy and rough’ and left her scared. She said she had suffered cuts to her vagina which left her bleeding.
Jarryd Hayne – pictured with wife Amelia Bonnici on Monday – was found guilty of two counts of sexual intercourse without consent with the unnamed woman in 2018
Hayne left soon after and she sent him a text message saying that ‘I’m hurting so much’.
‘I know I’ve talked about sex and stuff so much but I didn’t want to do that after knowing the taxi was waiting for you,’ she wrote in a follow-up text.
His only reply was ‘Go doctor tomorrow’.
Hayne never denied the couple had been intimate but his defence told the court that he believed she was saying no to sexual intercourse and consented to other acts.
In recorded evidence, he said: ‘She said she didn’t want to have sex. We didn’t have sex.’
Hayne said he knew the woman didn’t want sex but he had still ‘wanted to please her’.
An emotional Hayne walked from the courtroom after relatives quickly arranged for the payment of a $50,000 surety
Earlier on Monday, Judge Syme had urged the jury to put out of their minds community discussion about sexual assault that has appeared in the media recently.
‘You must put out of your mind any media reporting obviously about this case, but there’s been a lot of media reporting about a lot of other things in general,’ she said, in an apparent reference to the consent debate in the media. ‘You must put those things out of your mind.’
Hayne’s jury retired at 12.39pm last Wednesday and as of last Friday the court heard they had made ‘good progress’ toward a verdict. The jury made a decision just prior to lunch on Monday but held out on delivering their verdict until after lunch.
Hayne will be sentenced on May 6 at Newcastle, where his court saga began.