Cricket player Alex Hepburn, who was imprisoned for raping a sleeping woman in 2019, lost his court appeal on Tuesday June 30 to have his conviction overturned.
Hepburn, a 24-year-old Australian, was jailed last April for five years for assaulting a “dozing” woman during a contest he had set up on WhatsApp along with his friends.
He was found guilty of rape but cleared of another attack on the woman as the prosecution claimed that he had been “fired up” by the contest to sleep with the majority of women before carrying out the rape on April 1 , 2017 at his home in Portland Street, Worcester.
In early June, Hepburn appealed his conviction in the Court of Appeal.
The London Court of Appeal ruled that communications about sex games should not have been reported at the rape trial and that the sentence should be reduced, but today three senior judges rejected his appeal, saying:”The conviction is not unsafe.”
The whatsapp posts shown to the jury did not prove he was able to have sex without consent, according to the Court of Appeal judges.
Many of the messages referred to Hepburn ‘s game to achieve sexual encounters with a variety of women, the court heard.
This is what his lawyer David Emanuel said “just not supported by anything in the messages”.
Mr Emanuel told the judges: “I accept it would be different if there was talk of sex against will, or trickery to gain a point, or taking a chance, but there’s nothing like that in the messages.
“They are too far removed as to be able to be to do with the facts of the alleged offence.”
Prosecuting counsel, Miranda Moore QC, argued that it was right that the WhatsApp messages were heard at the trial as it wasn’t just banter.
She told the court that “this wasn’t a bit of boyish banter at a point in time” but a “deep-seated and long-running game between a number of professional sportsmen”.
Judge Jim Tindal, while passing sentence to Hepburn at Hereford Crown Court last year, told the cricketer he and a former teammate, Joe Clarke, had agreed to a “pathetic sexist game to collect as many sexual encounters as possible”, following a similar stunt the previous year.
In remarks about the WhatsApp chat group, the judge said: “You probably thought it was laddish behaviour at the time.
“In truth it was foul sexism.”
