Former Ireland U-20 player Denis Coulson has been found guilty of the rape of a woman in 2017.
He was sentenced to 14 years in jail in a Bordeaux courtroom on Friday evening.
Former Ireland and Munster star Chris Farrell was sentenced to four years, with two years suspended for his ‘failure to prevent a crime’ .
The court heard that Farrell will not be sent to prison but will have to wear an electronic tag for the two years and stay in France for the duration.
Irish rugby player Chris Farrell (Photo by ROMAIN PERROCHEAU/AFP via Getty Images)
French player Loick Jammes, 30 was sentenced to 14 years while New Zealander Rory Grice, 34, to 12 years in jail.
Dylan Hayes, 30, from New Zealand was also given a two-year suspended sentence for failure to prevent a crime.
The trial, held in Bordeaux, France, was originally scheduled for June but was delayed after Coulson was badly injured in a traffic accident.
Over the course of the trial, the court heard that in the early hours of March 12, 2017, the woman, identified only as V, left a hotel in tears on the outskirts of Bordeaux, where the Grenoble team (FCG) spent the night after losing a Top 14 game against local team Bordeaux-Begles.
Irish rugby player Denis Coulson (Photo by ROMAIN PERROCHEAU / AFP) (Photo by ROMAIN PERROCHEAU/AFP via Getty Images)
The then 20-year-old filed a police complaint, 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 with a crutch inserted in her vagina.
She said she saw two naked men in the room and others who were fully dressed.
Loick Jammes. Pic: Romain Perrocheau/AFP via Getty Images
Coulson, Jammes and Grice stated that they had sexual relations with V but claimed the encounter was consensual and the student had been proactive in bringing it about. Farrell, the owner of the crutch, was present, as was Hayes.
A toxicology report stated that her blood alcohol level was between 2.2g and 3g, 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.
The woman’s lawyer Anne Cadiot-Feidt rejected the players’ version, saying of her client, V: ‘Nobody can be expected to be perfect all the time.’
Rory Grice. Pic: Romain Perrocheau/AFP via Getty Images
While the decision to drink as much as she did had been her client’s, this did not authorise anybody ‘to do what they like with her body’, she said.
The players, she said, had a duty to ‘protect’ the woman.
The three main defendants left Grenoble in 2017 after the accusations emerged, to pursue their careers in other clubs.
Farrell was sidelined by Munster in 2022 and left the province completely in March 2023.
At the time Munster said Farrell would not be involved with the club while ‘legal proceedings concerning his alleged involvement as a witness to an alleged crime in 2017, are ongoing’.
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