By Cassandra Wiener and Tanya Palmer
In December 2018, British man John Broadhurst was sentenced to just three years and eight months in prison for the manslaughter of his girlfriend Natalie Connolly. While Connolly sustained 40 injuries, including a lacerated vagina and a fractured skull, Broadhurst claimed Connolly died accidentally as a result of consensual rough sex.
Three years later, Sam Pybus received a similarly short sentence for strangling his partner, Sophie Moss, to death. Like Broadhurst, he said the death was the result of consensual sex.
These are just two examples of defendants using the “rough sex defence” in assault or homicide cases to claim the injuries they inflicted were the result of “sex games gone wrong”.
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