Jarryd Hayne sex assault trial: Intimate messages before allegation

He was once one the poster boy of the NRL, with his dazzling footwork and electric pace creating some of rugby league’s most exhilarating moments.

Now Jarryd Hayne’s career is a memory and he faces the prospect of a second trial over allegations he sexually assaulted a woman, then 26, at a home on the outskirts of Newcastle on grand final night 2018.

On Monday a jury of eight men and four women were discharged having deliberated for two days over claims he forced oral and digital sex on the woman.

They could not come to a unanimous or majority decision on whether the woman had been sexually assaulted or whether the incident was a consensual hook-up gone horribly wrong.

During the eight-day trial at Newcastle District Court the jury heard details about flirty and explicit messages the pair shared on Instagram and Snapchat, with the woman making the first move by sliding into Mr Hayne’s Instagram direct messages on September 17.

“You are absolutely gorgeous x,” her message read.

Mr Hayne, then 30, was holidaying in Dubai and replied the next day with “price it”.

The confused woman wrote back: “Do you think I’m an escort or something? Because I’m not,” complete with a laughing emoji.

In an apparent attempt to save face, the footballer responded “I was talking to a guy about a Rolex last night, not sure how you go those messages”.

What followed was days of “forward” chatting, with the woman sending a number of risqué photos.

In one message on Instagram she wrote: “I’m not gonna lie I imagined what it would be like to be f***ing you when you started talking”.

“I like your honesty,” Mr Hayne replied.

Their exchanges would move from Instagram to Snapchat, an app which deletes messages after they are read, as the woman said it was “safer”.

Not all of their communications were sexual, with the woman telling the court Mr Hayne also sent videos of his baby daughter.

On the weekend of September 29, 2018, the former Parramatta Eels player sent the woman a video showing him singing in a car headed to Newcastle for the two-day party.

They had never met before but Mr Hayne made at least one attempt to invite her out to a venue he was drinking at with his friends that night.

She declined and instead invited him for “coffee or breakfast” the next day.

“I’m seeing you before you go,” she said. “Friends welcome.”

On Sunday the 30th Mr Hayne and the party goers spent the morning at paintball before venturing out on a pub crawl and returning to ex-Knights player Wes Naiqama’s house for a barbecue.

The NRL grand final was to be played that night but Mr Hayne needed to return to Sydney for a sponsored event and decided to “pop in” to the woman’s house on the way.

She gave him her address about 7.30pm and asked after him when he still hadn’t arrived an hour later: “Where are you fool?”

The cab pulled up outside her place about 9.07pm and Mr Hayne set one of the vodka Cruisers he had brought with him on the letter box before he went inside.

“It was up in the air, best case scenario I would be having sex with her, worst case I would just get introduced and that was it,” Mr Hayne told the court he was thinking upon his arrival.

The woman’s mother was at home doing the ironing and watching the Roosters battle it out with the Storm for the NRL premiership.

In Mr Hayne’s story the mother came to the front door and directed him to her daughter’s bedroom.

But the woman says she answered the drunken footballer’s knock at the door and smuggled him into her room as she was embarrassed to still be living at home.

Both agree the footballer tried to break the ice by asking to do a “singalong” and playing songs off her laptop, with an Ed Sheeran cover of ‘Wonderwall’ first up.

Things turned sour when an impatient taxi driver knocked at the door asking after Mr Hayne, who had told her he was just stopping in to “pick up a bag”.

The woman told the court she was “upset” about Mr Hayne leaving a taxi running outside, and the court heard she said to her mother: “Does he think we’re going to have sex or something? No way.”

Mr Hayne went outside to speak to the driver before returning inside.

In his version of events he went back into the woman’s room and could tell she was unhappy. He tried to get the grand final up on his phone before walking down the hall to the loungeroom.

He gave evidence of his joy at seeing former NSW teammates such as James Tedesco winning the premiership, and the woman’s mother recalled him saying “Go the Roosters! I’m jealous”.

In the woman’s story, however, he came back into the house and walked straight past her bedroom without talking to her before returning after the game finished.

She accused him of pulling off her pants off and forcing sexual acts on her which caused two lacerations to her genitalia and substantial bleeding.

“He pushed my face down and pulled my clothes off and … I’m not sure whether he bit me or cut me or whatever the hell he did but I was saying don’t, no, I don’t want to,” the woman said. “Then I was bleeding everywhere.”

She told the court she said “no” and “stop” before she froze.

Mr Hayne soon pulled away at the sight of blood.

After he washed and she had a shower, the woman found Mr Hayne standing in her bedroom.

He asked her if the $50 on her bed was hers.

She said no and he replied “I better go”.

The woman sent a text message to Mr Hayne 20 minutes after he left saying: “I am 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.

“I’m sitting here crying on my bed because I feel weird.”

He later replied “Go doctor tomorrow”.

The woman said in court she was attracted to Mr Hayne and would have been open to having sex with him in the right circumstances, but was in “fairy land” and dreaming of something more.

On the stand Mr Hayne denied the girl’s allegations she told him “no” and “stop”, claiming the sexual acts were consensual and her injuries an accident caused by his fingers.

He knew “she didn’t want to have sex” but he claimed they started kissing and he decided to “please her and that was it”.

She took her pants off, he claimed, and he inserted his fingers in her vagina before “going down” on her.

However he said he was soon shocked when she began to bleed and he rushed to the bathroom to wash himself.

“I felt the sense of a different liquid hit my lip — it was like a shock, I jumped up,” he told the court.

The court heard the woman did not immediately tell her mother about the incident and told her Mr Hayne had left because he had a bloody nose.

Her allegations were reported to police after her brother in law contacted the NRL Integrity Unit without her knowledge.

But she did send a friend photos of her injuries and bloodstained bed, telling her Mr Hayne had been “rough” and that she was “too scared” to report it.

She told her close friend in a text her vagina looked “mangled” and there was “blood pouring out of it”.

“He would have the money to ruin me … the last thing I need is my life in the public eye,” she wrote.

The court was played a short video she took of the bloody scene in her bedroom, showing splashes of blood on her blankets, pillow and a towel.

She had recently suffered from significant health issues and was worried her wound would become infected, which led her to see a doctor on October 3.

On November 14 and 15 police watched over a Snapchat exchange between the woman and Mr Hayne, which started with the complainant saying: “I thought you would have at least asked if I was OK or not by now.”

“You said you were OK last time we spoke?” he wrote back.

She wrote: “You knew I definitely wasn’t OK from the damage that night … It was pretty messed up … you just left me that way.

“You should have just stopped when I said so.”

Mr Hayne wrote a series of messages back denying the woman’s claims.

“Wtf are you on about??? I stopped strauht (sic) away and made sure you were OK.

“We spoke for a while after to make sure you’re OK b4 I left.

“You’re starting to sound suss.”

He replied to a message in which the woman claimed he had been forceful as “completely untrue! Everything we did you consented to.”

In an intercepted phone call between Mr Hayne and Newcastle captain Mitchell Pearce in November 2018, Mr Hayne told his friend the woman was a “full-blown weirdo” who had “wigged out” after their meeting.

He said he had engaged a lawyer and would get her for defamation “easy”.

In another call he said he was “fuming” at the allegations, but denied in court he was angry because of the potential impact on his career.

He said the woman had become attached to him and was “blowing up” because “I brushed her”.

Crown prosecutor Brian Costello told the jury in his closing address that Mr Hayne believed he had been “promised” sex by the woman and that he never stopped to “simply consider” her consent.

He urged the jury not to show any leniency to Mr Hayne due to his superstar status, telling them “we are all equal before the law”.

Mr Hayne’s barrister Phillip Boulten SC said his client’s “terrible” sexual prowess was to blame for the woman’s injuries, but argued it was not sexual assault.

“He was trying to please her, sexually. But it ended really badly,” Mr Boulten said. “It was bad sex”.

Mr Boulten said it was unlikely the woman would have complained of sexual assault without the presence of blood.

“(She) was very upset about her injuries. And that’s really why we’re all here.”

Outside court Mr Hayne told a waiting media scrum he “told the truth” during the trial, and he was ready to “do it all again”.

Mr Hayne, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of aggravated sexual intercourse without consent recklessly inflicting actual bodily harm.

A new date could be set when his matter is mentioned on December 16.