The three-person disciplinary panel hearing the case in which Robbie Dunne is charged with bullying and harassing his fellow jockey Bryony Frost over a seven-month period in 2020 adjourned on Wednesday to consider its decision, having been told by Louis Weston QC, representing the British Horseracing Authority, that the case highlighted a “sour, rancid” weighing-room culture which should be “thrown out and discarded”. Weston was presenting his closing statement to the panel on the fifth day of the hearing, and sought to present Dunne’s behaviour towards Frost on a number of occasions between February and September last year as part of a pattern of bullying behaviour. “It is unacceptable for the sport to have this going on,” Weston said. “It is unacceptable that Miss Frost should be allowed to compete on a racecourse on a level playing field, only to find when she comes back to the weighing room that she’s met by Mr Dunne, acting out a role as head of some patriarchy, re-enacting social attitudes of the 1950s in his capacity as a self-appointed enforcer of ‘weighing-room traditions’.” Weston said an incident at Southwell racecourse in September 2020, when Frost says that Dunne “promised to hurt” her by “putting her through a wing” in a future race, was “the culmination of Mr Dunne’s conduct over months and years”, rather than “a one-off flare-up of anger”. He also suggested a tweet by Dunne which apparently mocked Frost’s post-race interviews, posted in April 2020, showed he had been targeting the rider for several months. When Weston also highlighted an incident at Stratford in July 2020, when Dunne was seen to ride up to Frost and apparently remonstrate with her and is alleged to have directed a torrent of misogynistic abuse at her. “If there is a weighing-room culture that allows jockeys to threaten serious injury to another or their horse, to call another a whore, a slut and a slag, then that culture is sour, rancid and one that we say should thrown out and discarded,” Weston said. “It’s time, if it ever had its time, has gone.” Summing up the case for the defence, Roderick Moore suggested the BHA’s decision to charge Dunne with a seven-month series of alleged incidents of bullying and harassment had produced a case like “a jigsaw puzzle with numerous missing pieces”, and that “when you look at the bigger picture, it doesn’t make sense”. He told the panel that six female jockeys interviewed by the BHA during its investigation of Frost’s complaint “had not supported” her allegations against Dunne “in any meaningful sense”. He also suggested that for the panel to “get to the right answer” it would be “essential to understand the weighing room”. Moore said: “It is hard to imagine a tougher or more dangerous sport. The weighing room has a culture which you have now heard a great deal about, from a number of witnesses [including current and former jockeys]. “Mr [Tom] Scudamore, Mr [Nico] de Boinville, and Mr [Richard] Johnson are highly respectable, impressive individuals. They gave their take on stuff that happens in the weighing room. It is a dangerous sport and they have to tell each other if they think there is a danger, including in the way they think one of their colleagues is riding. That’s what happens and has to happen to keep them all as safe as possible.” Moore added: “If something needs to change, that’s for the future. That’s a policy matter, a political matter. You can only judge Mr Dunne against the present weighing room.”