How disgraced footy star Jarryd Hayne’s legal team will use his rape victim’s text messages against her as he fights to have conviction overturned

Former NRL star Jarryd Hayne hopes to overturn a conviction for raping a woman on the night of the 2018 grand final as a second appeal begins in the NSW Supreme Court.

Hayne’s lawyers argued Wednesday that text and social media messages deleted from the victim’s phone amounted to a deliberate concealment of facts.

They asked the Court of Criminal Appeal to acquit Hayne on those grounds, rather than ordering the 36-year-old to face a fourth trial over the matter.

Hayne, who watched the appeal hearing via video link from prison, was found guilty of two counts of sexual intercourse without consent over an incident at a woman’s home near Newcastle on September 30, 2018.

Previous trials heard that the woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, changed her mind about having sex with Hayne after realizing he had a taxi waiting outside the house.

Hayne’s lawyer, Tim Game SC, told the appeal court that the defense had failed to question the woman during the most recent trial about facts that could have been crucial to the case.

The victim’s messages to another woman he had met on social media did not mention any sexual assault and so he took steps to hide them, he said.

Game argued that failing to produce the messages amounted to “systematically curating material evidence that did not help his case.”

“The things she forgets are the things that don’t help her,” she said.

‘In our case, this is a large-scale concealment of evidence.

“Of course, we say that hiding is the same as lying or deceiving.”

Crown prosecutors argued the victim did not have a close relationship with the woman he was messaging and had never met her in person.

They also pointed out that the woman appeared as a witness in the third trial and the jury was in a position to evaluate her evidence as it saw fit.

The victim’s failure to tell the woman she had been sexually assaulted “paled into insignificance” compared to the complaints she made to others, the court heard.

She told a friend, “I’m too scared to report it,” and asked her mother not to tell anyone because she didn’t want to be in the public eye.

He also discussed the incident at length with his GP and said he did not want to go to the police.

But Game said the defense had been forced to plead its case with “one or two hands tied behind its back.”

Hayne’s defense team also argued that the woman should be questioned about why she allegedly told police: “if those messages get out, I’m screwed and he’ll leave.”

Judge Graham Turnbull, who oversaw Hayne’s third trial, refused to let the woman be questioned about the statement, saying it had “almost infinitesimal weight”.

Game argued that the statement was evidence that the woman appreciated the significance of the text messages and did not want them to come to light.

During the trial, the court was told that Hayne arrived at the house at 9:07 pm and left 46 minutes later, but that the sexual activity did not occur until 9:26 pm in the last 27 minutes of the visit. .

Game told the court that everything the plaintiff claimed happened couldn’t have happened in 27 minutes.

“We’ll say 27 minutes can’t explain it,” Game said in court Wednesday.

Hayne was charged in November 2018 after rape allegations reached the NRL’s integrity unit.

He has been behind bars since April 2023 after a jury ruled he sexually assaulted the woman with his hands and mouth.

The guilty verdict came after a hung jury in his first trial in 2020 and an earlier appeal that overturned the 2021 guilty verdict from his second trial.