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The French international will return to action in the Top 14 on Saturday October 5 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 meeting.” Asked about the prospect of a comeback for Hugo Auradou, 21, on the occasion of the 5th day of Top 14, the manager of the Pau Section Sébastien Piqueronies could not have been clearer, Friday October 4, in pre-match press conference. “There is no surprise, you have seen him training with us, the day has come to put him on a rugby field and that will be tomorrow”supported the manager, evoking “the fruit of a logic of support”, et “one more step, the logic of things since July”. Before explaining his particular case: “Nothing prohibits him from playing rugby, he is presumed innocent. Today it is up to those who defend it and the management of the club to assume consistency as they have done from the start.
With Oscar Jegou, also 21 years old, Auradou is charged in Argentina with aggravated rape, because in a meeting, for alleged events 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
In their version, the players have claimed from the start 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”. They returned to France on September 4.
The son of ex-France XV player David Auradou reappeared at the Pau training center five days later before resuming collective sessions 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, noted “a series of inconsistencies and contradictions […] which overall paint an unlikely story”. The complainant, for her part, presented Thursday, before a legislative committee, her sense of rights “scorned” by the courts, after having requested in vain, through his lawyers, the recusal of the two prosecutors in charge of the investigation, invoking their “lack of objectivity” assumed. At the beginning of September, she said to herself “abandoned by the justice of Mendoza. They treat me like a criminal when I am the victim”.
“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 commission Jose Luis Ramon, who will therefore formulate, in his personal capacity as president, a request for access to the file of the instruction for information purposes, because “There is something that smells bad” in this matter. He deplored a “political pressure” to close the case, a “extreme speed” decisions of the prosecution, recalling that the rugby players’ lawyer is none other than the brother of the Minister of Justice of the Argentine government.
