Lovett to stand trial on rape charge

Sacked St Kilda AFL player Andrew Lovett claimed he could get any girl he wanted and
didn't need to rape anyone, but has been ordered to stand trial.
Lovett will argue he was having consensual sex with a woman he is accused of raping
twice at the home of then team-mates Jason Gram and Sam Fisher in the early hours of
Christmas Eve last year.
St Kilda's football manager Greg Hutchison told the Melbourne Magistrates Court on
Wednesday he met with Lovett a few hours after the alleged rape.
He said Lovett told him the sex was consensual, but that she may have thought he was
Gram.
"He also said: 'I can get whatever chicks I want, I don't have to rape anyone, you
know me Hutchy, I wouldn't do that," Mr Hutchison said in a statement tendered in
court.
Lovett, 27, was committed to stand trial on Wednesday accused of twice raping the
woman at the Port Melbourne apartment where she had gone to bed because she was
drunk.
She has claimed to witnesses that Lovett raped her while she was asleep.
The woman told Gram, whom she had kissed earlier in the night, that she thought it
was him, but it was "the dark guy."
She says she kept saying "No".
In his police record of interview, Lovett says the sex was consensual and included
her being on top of him.
"You know, everything was okay," he told police.
"There wasn't any problems ... it wasn't her going, no, stop, don't do this, or
screaming ...
"There wasn't any of that. So, yeah, at the time, it felt like it was right. It was
consensual. We were both enjoying it."
When he later arrived at the apartment, team-mate Adam Schneider asked Lovett what
had happened.
"Lovett said: 'Nothing happened. I don't know why she is crying'," Schneider, one of
four players to give evidence on Wednesday, told the court.
Deputy Chief Magistrate Jelena Popovic found on Wednesday there was enough evidence
for her to order Lovett stand trial.
His trial is expected to be held in July next year.
On the afternoon before the alleged rape, St Kilda players had arrived back in
Melbourne from a week-long training camp on the Gold Coast and went to the Royal
Saxon Hotel in Richmond.
In his statement to the court, captain Nick Riewoldt recalls it was a "pretty quiet
night".
"We had earlier had a stern talk about expectations of our behaviour in public so
nobody was going crazy," he said.
During the night Gram met the alleged victim and they talked and flirted.
When the pub closed around midnight many players headed for another nightclub, but
Lovett, Gram and the alleged victim and her friend headed back to Gram's apartment.
Gram and the alleged victim's friend put her to bed for her to sober up.
The woman was later found by her friend wearing no underwear, curled up in the
"foetal position, crying and in a hysterical state" in the entrance of the
apartment.
"She said: 'I was asleep and he pumped the s*** out of me'," the friend told the court.
Lovett was released on bail with conditions including he not leave Australia and
have no contact with witnesses other than for football-related purposes.