St George Dragons forward Jack de Belin was reportedly hiding under a bed, when New South Wales police broke up a party at teammate Paul Vaughan's house.
De Belin, 30, was one of 13 players busted at the party hosted after the Dragons' 19-18 victory over NZ Warriors on Friday, with the NRL handing out severe punishments as a result.
According to Sydney Morning Herald sources, players "scattered upstairs", once police arrived to break up the party that breached New South Wales' COVID-19 restrictions.
De Belin is understood to have hidden under a bed, with other players hiding in cupboards to cover up their involvement.
The forward is four games into his NRL return, after missing two years under the NRL's no-fault stand-down policy, while he faced sexual assault charges.
Those charges were dropped in May.
Twelve players, including de Belin, will serve one-match bans handed out by the NRL, which the Dragons can spread over four weeks to field a side. De Belin has also been fined AUS$41,000.
Meanwhile, Vaughan has been fined more than $50,000 and suspended for eight games, ruling him out of the rest of the NRL's regular season.
NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo says the actions of the players "were deliberate and some of the players withheld key information from the Integrity Unit".
"On the information we have, the players understood the protocols and deliberately chose to ignore them,” he says. “They chose to risk the continuity of our competition."
The fines take into account past indiscretions and the varying salaries of the players. Vaughan was also sanctioned by the NRL last year for breaching bio-security rules.
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