Three weeks later, the retired back-rower is in hiding, whereabouts undisclosed, facing what he and his supporters view as a gross injustice.
The most he is prepared to offer about his location is that he’s no longer in Ireland, where he had been coaching at a school for the previous six weeks.
Rocky Elsom shares a photo of himself.
“All I can say is I spoke to the gardai and they said if I’m in Ireland they’ll have to bring me in,” Elsom said. “So I told them I wasn’t in Ireland and I wasn’t going to be in Ireland any time soon.”
Elsom didn’t want to reveal how he departed Ireland when he learnt of his trial and its outcome, but almost certainly the only way out without him being picked up was for him to have crossed the border into Northern Ireland, an hour from Dublin by car.
Manned by soldiers at checkpoints during decades of sectarian conflict, it is now completely open, the journey to post-Brexit UK from Ireland, a European Union member, able to be made without even stopping, let alone having a passport inspected.
However he left Ireland, Elsom’s situation is extraordinary. A towering figure who played 75 Tests for Australia and led the Wallabies ahead of the 2011 World Cup, he is effectively an international fugitive.
He is prepared to answer the charges, adamant they do not stack up and are the result of an unjustified bid to hold him responsible for the club’s financial woes. But aware of traditional delays in the French legal system, he fears being detained at length in France awaiting an appeal. He said it was only in the past week he had been provided the documents detailing the allegations against him.
Highly recognisable, Elsom is laying low while he engages a French lawyer to oppose the finding against him in the criminal court in Narbonne, where a hearing has been scheduled for November 15.
He sent the Herald a photo of himself in a room with closed curtains behind him, saying he was venturing outdoors only occasionally.
“I have to go outside at some point but I am keeping my head down, that’s for sure,” he said. “I’ve just got to try and normalise it to a degree … be able to get enough sunlight or do some exercise. Because this is month one. In a way, the attack on me has been going on for eight years so you wouldn’t put it past them to be going on for months and months.”
Elsom is aghast that he wasn’t notified before being put on trial, and thus had not been able to defend himself.
Ireland and Northern Ireland have ann open land border.Credit: Alamy
Attempts to contact him in the years before with letters to addresses where he said he had never lived or worked at – or where he no longer lived – have also dented his trust in the system. He also questioned why an arrest warrant issued for him last year wasn’t publicised, given his profile.
The address listed as his home on the court’s written judgment, seen by this masthead, is 87 Epsom Road, Rosebery. It is the site of a Sydney storage company where he has had items sent, but he said it did not forward on mail.
“Not informing me, not allowing me to be there, running a rumour campaign for eight years … the most concerning thing is thinking that it was intentional … that it was intentionally done to make things harder for me,” he said.
“The important thing to remember is if I am in custody, my defence gets a lot more expensive and a lot harder. If I’m detained, I’ll need to engage a lawyer to do everything for me … all the phone conversations, to try and find documents, to talk to people, to try and defend myself.”
Elsom has become an outsider in rugby and said he was forced to re-skill and open a construction business on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast because sniping about his time as president of Narbonne in 2015 and 2016 meant he struggled to get a job in the sport.
It’s why he said he jumped at the chance this year to coach at a school in Dublin, where he starred for Leinster in a European Cup triumph in 2009.
“They didn’t have a rugby programme before this year really, so it’s not as if you’re rolling into a Joeys or a Nudgee [College],” Elsom said.
“They were going up against much bigger teams and just being a part of it, being on the field all the time, taking the weights sessions, doing the reviews with them … it was great to be there. It was something that had been missing for a long time.”
Elsom comes from a big family, with six brothers and three sisters, including half siblings.
His predicament was not easy for them either, he said.
“It’s often more difficult for the people around you because they can get scared, and also too, if they feel that it’s unjust, that’s harder,” he said.
While acknowledging that “right now life is different”, Elsom is trying to focus on the legal obstacles before him with the same discipline he brought to his playing career.
Having been on the end of a years-long wave of negative publicity and convicted in his absence, he hopes the Australian government takes notice.
“If an Australian citizen is unlikely to get a fair trial in a foreign country then at the very least I think they are obliged to look into it,” he said.
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