Chelsea star Sam Kerr faces trial, accused of racially harassing policeman – INA NEWS

Australia girls’s soccer captain Sam Kerr has gone on trial in a London courtroom, accused of racially abusing a white police officer after a drunken dispute with a cab driver.

The star ahead, who performs for Chelsea within the Girls’s Tremendous League, advised the officer Stephen Lovell: “You guys are f****** silly and white.”

Kerr, who has Indian ancestry, accepts saying these phrases however has pleaded not responsible to at least one rely of racially aggravated harassment. Her lawyer argued she was making a remark about energy and privilege.

The 31-year-old sat within the dock on Monday at Kingston Crown Court docket as prosecutor Invoice Emlyn Jones advised jurors that she and her associate, Kristie Mewis, who performs for West Ham United, referred to as a taxi early on January 30, 2023, after an evening out.

“Their cab journey didn’t go properly,” Emlyn Jones stated.

“The cabbie ended up phoning the police to complain about their behaviour, reporting that they had been attempting to smash a window.”

The cab driver took them to a police station as an alternative of Kerr’s dwelling, after which she made the remark about Lovell’s ethnicity, Emlyn Jones stated.

He added that there was no dispute over what Kerr stated, that means jurors needed to resolve what she meant and the way it made Lovell really feel.

Kerr’s lawyer Grace Forbes stated Kerr’s phrases didn’t make her a legal. “The legislation is a bit more nuanced, slightly extra human than that,” she argued.

“Sam Kerr didn’t really feel hostility to the officer as a result of he’s white. The phrases had been a remark, we are saying – nonetheless poorly expressed – about positions of energy, about privilege and about how these issues may color notion.”

Kerr is without doubt one of the world’s prime feminine strikers, having scored 199 profession objectives throughout the Girls’s Tremendous League, Australia’s W-League and the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League.

She can also be Australia’s all-time prime scorer with 69 objectives in 128 appearances however has been sidelined since struggling an anterior cruciate ligament damage to her knee in January 2024.

Her trial is anticipated to conclude this week.