Irishman Denis Coulson, one of the former Rugby players of the French club Grenoble (east) tried for ten days behind closed doors for a gang rape in March 2017 in the southwest of France, apologized to the victim Wednesday, according to his lawyer.
“He asked her for forgiveness (…) and he asked his teammates for forgiveness because he feels a responsibility to the extent that it was he who led this young girl into the room,” said Corinne Dreyfus-Schmidt.
“At the same time, Mr. Coulson does not really question himself,” replied the victim’s lawyer, Me Anne Cadiot-Feidt, for whom he apologizes “in relation to himself”, “a little bit like for children.”
The former pillar, now 30 years old, is being prosecuted for gang rape with New Zealander Rory Grice, 34, and Frenchman Loïck Jammes, 30.
They all plead for the consent of the victim with whom they had spent a Top 14 post-match in a bar then in a nightclub, alcohol flowing freely, before ending the night in a hotel near Bordeaux. The young woman came to her senses there the next day, naked on a bed with a crutch in her vagina, surrounded by two naked men and others dressed.
“It is extremely difficult to reconstruct the facts more than seven years later,” continued Mr. Dreyfus-Schmidt. “There are only testimonies that overlap and we try to hold on to the few material elements that we have.”
“He was 22 years old at the time of the events, he was drunk, there was a kind of sexual euphoria in this room and at that moment, he sincerely thought, as she was capable of action, that she was OK,” added the lawyer.
The hearing continued on Wednesday with the questioning of Loïck Jammes.
His defense requested, in vain, a new medico-legal expertise after a forensic pathologist mandated to replace the doctor who carried out the original analyzes, unavailable for health reasons, had “invalidated” the work of his colleague at the bar, according to Mr. Denis Dreyfus.
“On a medico-legal level, we cannot prove anything. It is likely, in a case which is strewn with multiple question marks, to provide an additional one,” said Loïck Jammes’ lawyer to the press.
The Irishman Chris Farrell (31 years old) and the New Zealander Dylan Hayes (40 years old) appear on trial for having witnessed all or part of the alleged rape without intervening.
