Cape Town - A row has erupted in New Zealand after members of the Chiefs Super Rugby team were accused of sexually assaulting a woman hired to strip at a club party.
According to the BBC and New Zealand press reports, police were looking into allegations that Chiefs players groped and licked the woman as she danced.
New Zealand Rugby is also investigating the incident, but police are no longer involved.
The Chiefs lost to fellow New Zealand side the Hurricanes in the semi-finals of the competition. The Hurricanes then went on to beat South African side the Lions in the final in Wellington last Saturday.
The row has drawn even more attention after an executive from the club’s major sponsor suggested the woman was partly to blame.
The team’s management also initially said she was “not beyond reproach”.
Women’s groups called the comments “shameful”.
A second woman has now come forward with similar allegations.
In interviews, the first woman, identified only by her professional name Scarlette, said she was booked to perform a strip routine at the Chiefs’ “Mad Monday” end-of-season party.
She alleged the players were drunk when she arrived.
The stripper said they touched her inappropriately, including “forcefully” between the legs, poured alcohol on her, threw gravel at her and used sexual insults. When pressured, she agreed to let one player perform a sex act on her for NZ$50 (R484), but that four more then did so without her consent. She was not given the money.
A second woman, identified as Laura, said she was assaulted at last year’s Mad Monday party. But team’s chief executive Andrew Flexman initially said Scarlette’s allegations were “one person’s accusation, and her standing in the community and culpability is not beyond reproach”.
Comments by a senior executive of the Gallagher Group, a Hamilton technology firm and the Chiefs’ main sponsor, also triggered a backlash.
Margaret Comer told media outlet Fairfax: “If a woman takes her clothes off and walks around in a group of men, what are we supposed to do if one of them tries to touch her?
“Perhaps the stripper shouldn’t have been hired but I’m reluctant to say that the boys were out of line.”
New Zealand’s National Council of Women condemned the two responses as “shameful'.
All Blacks coach Steve Hansen’s last words on the Mad Monday tradition was: “We should kick them to touch, we don’t need them.”
Weekend Argus