Footballers David Goodwillie and David Robertson lose appeal against ruling they raped woman

David Goodwillie (left) and David Robertson (SNS Group)

FOOTBALLERS David Goodwillie and David Robertson have lost an appeal against a court ruling that they raped a young mother.

Ex-Scotland striker Goodwillie and his former Dundee United teammate Robertson had brought a legal challenge against Lord Armstrong’s finding in favour of Denise Clair.

He ordered the pair to pay £100,000 in damages in the civil ruling early this year.

Their appeal was unanimously rejected by three appeal judges at the Court of Session today.

Miss Clair, 30, had claimed in that she was a victim of sexual assault and rape by the men at a flat in Armadale, in West Lothian, after she had gone for a night out on January 1 in 2011 in nearby Bathgate.

Both Goodwillie, 28, and Robertson, 31, had accepted that they had sexual intercourse but maintained that it was consensual. A full police investigation was carried out into the incident but no criminal prosecution took place.

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Following Lord Armstrong’s ruling, lawyers acting Goodwillie and Robertson originally put forward five grounds of appeal.

Only two of the grounds were advanced at a hearing before the Lord Justice Clerk, Lady Dorrian, sitting with Lady Clark of Calton and Lord Malcolm, at the Court of Session in Edinburgh.

Lady Dorrian ruled: “It was a feature of both these grounds of appeal that they did not specify what the consequence of these alleged errors of assessment were said to be, or in what way they were said to impact on the Lord Ordinary’s approach to the evidence generally, undermine his findings in fact or vitiate his conclusions.”

She said the appeal failed to demonstrate the pair had acted in accordance with “the modern law of consent (that) requires that an individual has the capacity to give free agreement.”