French international Hugo Auradou will return to the Rugby fields on Saturday in the Top 14 with Pau in Perpignan, almost three months to the day after the alleged rape case, for which he is still being prosecuted in Argentina with Oscar Jegou.
“He will start the match,” said Pau Section manager Sébastien Piqueronies on Friday at a pre-match press conference.
“There is no surprise, you saw him training with us, the day has come to put him on a rugby field and that will be tomorrow,” he added, referring to “the fruit of a logic of support”, “one more step, the logic of things since July”.
“Nothing prohibits him from playing rugby, he is presumed innocent. Today it is appropriate for those who defend him and for the management of the club to assume consistency as they have done from the beginning,” added added the Pau manager.
Hugo Auradou and Oscar Jegou, both 21 years old, are charged in Argentina with aggravated rape, because in a meeting, for alleged acts that occurred on the night of July 6 to 7 in a hotel room in Mendoza, where they had just won a match against Argentina for their first selection with the XV of France.
– Request for dismissal –
The players have maintained from the beginning that the sexual relations with the 39-year-old complainant, met in a nightclub, were consensual. First detained then placed under house arrest, they were released in mid-August, then authorized to leave Argentina pending the end of the investigation, the prosecution believing “that the initial accusation has lost its force. strength”. They returned to France on September 4.
Hugo Auradou, son of former international David Auradou, returned to the Pau training center five days later and resumed collective training in mid-September.
Oscar Jegou resumed last week with La Rochelle, where he plays in the third row position, but no date has yet been publicly mentioned for his return to competition.
The Mendoza courts must in the coming days set a hearing date for the examination of the request for dismissal filed at the end of August by the players’ lawyers.
Last week, the prosecution validated a final act, a psychiatric and psychological expert report from the complainant, which seems to weaken her position.
– “Political pressure” denounced –
The two practitioners, co-authors of this report to which AFP had access, noted “a series of inconsistencies and contradictions (…) which overall paint an unlikely story”.
The complainant, for her part, exposed Thursday, before a legislative commission, her feeling of rights “violated” by the justice system, after having requested in vain, through her lawyers, the recusal of the two prosecutors in charge of the investigation.
In an interview with AFP at the beginning of September, she said she was “abandoned by the justice system in Mendoza”. They treat me like a criminal when I am the victim,” she added.
“There was no agreement” in committee to make a formal request for explanations to the prosecutor in charge of the investigation, regretted the president of this legislative committee Jose Luis Ramon, who will therefore formulate, in a personal capacity president, a request for access to the investigation file for information purposes, because “there is something that smells bad” in this case.
He deplored “political pressure” to close the case, an “extreme speed” of the prosecutor’s decisions, and recalled that the rugby players’ lawyer is the brother of the Minister of Justice of the Argentine government.
