‘Rock bottom’: Two years’ jail for ex-NRL cheerleader
Former rugby league cheerleader and reality television star Jordan Finlayson will spend at least two years behind bars for her crimes as a drug peddling addict.
The ex-Penthouse model, who relapsed with smuggled contraband while locked up as recently as January, says jail had potentially saved her life, but it's not somewhere she wants to spend her life.
Finlayson cried as she was sentenced to a maximum four years and three months in prison with a non-parole period of two years and three months at Downing Centre District Court on Friday.
The ex-Cronulla Sharks cheergirl, who appeared on TV show Beauty and the Geek, had pleaded guilty to ongoing supply of heroin and ice and commercial supply of GBL in 2019.
Finlayson and her then boyfriend Martin Roser dealt the drugs to an undercover officer while she was on parole for less serious drug supply offences, and she once handed the cop more than $100 worth of heroin "wrapped in her bail reporting paper."
Judge Phillip Mahony SC said at the time Finlayson was spending $5,000 per week funding her own drug habit, at one point overdosing herself.
"It's shameful, I wish it had never happened… people can die of it," Finlayson told a doctor.
The judge said Finlayson will be eligible for parole next September on the condition she immediately admit herself to a residential rehabilitation centre that has already accepted her as a patient in Byron Bay.
After hitting "rock bottom," the 29-year-old plans to start a promotional modelling agency upon her release and be a positive role model for young women, the court heard.
Finlayson also wants to take care of her father who suffers from multiple sclerosis, and make her parents "proud of their daughter and prove to the world that we all make mistakes, and it's how we come back from them that matters."
"I'm deeply sorry for all the hurt and pain caused to everyone … my actions let everyone down who believed in me," she wrote in a letter to the judge,
Finlayson must also pay the state government a $3,000 drug proceeds order, the court heard.
