PORT ADELAIDE FOOTBALL CLUB CEO Keith Thomas made the following statement at a media conference this afternoon regarding the AFL Integrity Department’s investigation into an incident involving Sam Powell-Pepper at an Adelaide bar on Sunday, April 8.

The AFL handed Powell-Pepper a three AFL game sanction, a sanction which Powell-Pepper has accepted.

Powell-Pepper’s sanction includes the AFL games he missed in Rounds 4 and 5 while the investigation was ongoing, and this weekend’s Round 6 game against North Melbourne.

Powell-Pepper will then be available for selection for Port Adelaide’s AFL Round 7 game against West Coast”

Sam and the club have accepted the three-game sanction handed down by the AFL Integrity Department.

Sam has accepted responsibility for his actions, that he was intoxicated and behaved in a manner which made a woman feel uncomfortable.

I can assure you that we took the woman’s complaint very seriously from the moment we were notified.

These allegations are very serious.

What we’re dealing with here are the reputations of two 20-year-old people. I’m a father and I’ve got two kids in their 20s and I am acutely aware of how impactful such allegations and these sorts of issues can be on their reputation, their employment prospects down the track and really importantly the mental health of the people concerned.

As a club we’ve been involved with a number of incidents over the last few years where we’ve seen people really seriously affected by the intense scrutiny that goes on around these issues and it’s really important that we understand that.

And that’s why this investigation for us has become an issue of fairness and natural justice.

I’ll take you through the timeline of events as we understood them.

On Monday morning, April 9, our General Manager Chris Davies was provided the details of the woman concerned and her complaint and he made immediate contact with her and made available to her support contacts at the AFL, which is standard procedure.

We notified the AFL immediately and they sent their investigators to Adelaide to commence the investigation.

On that Tuesday, Chris went to the nightclub to view the CCTV footage of the night. That was really important because at that stage the media reporting had already taken hold and it was critical that we got to see it and understood what we were dealing with.

The AFL commenced their investigation on the Wednesday.

So let me just get back to what we consider to be the most critical aspects of this whole investigation.

Firstly, we don’t shy away from the fact that Sam was out, intoxicated and behaving inappropriately. Not good enough, we don’t accept it.

But from the moment the first tweet from Channel 7 hit the public, which had words around it such as “Port Adelaide Football Club has launched an investigation amid claims a player sexually assaulted a young woman in a night club on the weekend” – we believe that set the tone for the entire investigation.

The opening line of the journalist concerned continued the narrative: “A group of girlfriends out on a Saturday night. It should have been fun but this 20-year-old says her evening at Mr Kim’s took a sickening turn.”

Now the reporting from that moment, throughout the 16-day investigation was about sexual assault, groping, sickening turn of events and we believe in hindsight, having viewed the evidence, way overplayed the incident.

So what that meant was that the investigation was immediately on the back foot if you like. It was dealing with a public perception that was being created and not controlled.

Sam had no opportunity to defend his position. His name was out there. Thankfully the woman concerned is anonymous – and that is one of the few good things that has happened out of all of this.

But at no stage was Sam afforded that opportunity. We’re dealing with an incident that occurred at 3am or thereabouts, on the dancefloor of a nightclub. Very difficult to achieve fairness when an incident is being reported as it was.

When we saw the footage, it became crystal clear to us that there was a huge discrepancy in regards to what was being reported and what we could actually see had occurred.

That’s why it has taken us so long to reach an outcome.

As a club we felt duty bound to deal with the accusation of sexual assault and for the reasons that I gave earlier, in that a charge like that can leave a stain on someone’s reputation and life forever.

Now I put myself in Sam’s position and say in five years’ time he’s out of footy, going for a job interview and I google search him as a future employer and this incident is going to come up. Put yourself in that position.

So we come to the finding and the term inappropriate touching.

We’ve accepted the finding. We accept that inappropriate touching is a matter of personal opinion and it’s subjective and I don’t know that it’s respectful to actually delve into that too greatly, other than to say that the evidence that we have seen shows clearly and distinctly, as does the finding from the AFL, that that touching was a long long way away from sexual assault.

And we’ve been very keen for the finding and the wording of the finding to enable us to make that distinction.

It wasn’t a matter for us about the number of games – some people have been criticising us for accepting a three-game sanction if he didn’t do anything wrong – well we’re not saying that.

In the end the number of games was irrelevant. It was drawing the distinction between what happened and the claims of sexual assault – that was the whole issue.

Can I also make it clear that Sam’s position on this has not changed from day one, even though there has been some reporting on that.

Sam can’t recollect a whole lot of what happened on the night and he’s been clear about that from day one, and he hasn’t tried to deny that claim – that’s been his position and it hasn’t changed.

For us, the stakes for both parties were really high. It required us to take all the time that we, or the AFL felt necessary to arrive at their conclusion. They’ve done that.

I think it’s important to note that this is a new policy. The Respect and Responsibility policy is new and I think it might be the first testing of this and we can all learn from it, and we will certainly take our feedback to the AFL and I’m sure they’ll have feedback on our approach and a whole range of things – and that’s fair and reasonable.

We’ve arrived at an outcome, which we now accept.