NT model Asher Ruth de Rouffignac pleads guilty to drugs charges

A GLAMOROUS bikini model who once dreamt of travelling the world now faces a possible stint wearing daggy prison-issue T-shirts after her latest brush with the law

Asher Ruth de Rouffignac, 29.

A GLAMOROUS bikini model who once dreamt of travelling the world now faces a possible stint wearing daggy prison-issue T-shirts after her latest brush with the law.

Asher Ruth de Rouffignac, 29, pleaded guilty in the NT Supreme Court yesterday to supplying a trafficable quantity of meth and possessing drugs in a public place.

Her arrest was collateral damage in a police phone tapping operation targeting one of her friends, which caught de Rouffignac discussing drug deals. De Rouffignac, of Malak, was arrested in August last year when she spotted drug squad detectives on a stake-out and stuffed a deal bag of meth down her pants.

By then, police had proof she had peddled 17g of meth over four weeks.

Crown Prosecutor Rebecca Everitt said de Rouffignac faced a mandatory 28-day stint behind bars, and that there were no exceptional circumstances to her crimes, or her, that would allow Justice Stephen Southwood to hand her a suspended sentence.

She said de Rouffignac had been in court on drug charges as far back as 2008.

“In those 11 years she has been involved in a series of further offences involving the supply of dangerous drugs,” she said.

Catherine Voumard, for de Rouffignac, said her client first used drugs in her early teenage years, and got her first taste of ice at 14. She said de Rouffignac, who now has a young child, had been through rehab twice.

Ms Voumard, whose submissions were largely heard in closed court, argued de Rouffignac’s circumstances meant she should not have to serve the mandatory jail time.

Justice Southwood adjourned de Rouffignac’s sentencing until later this month.

The drug charges are the latest in a string of run-ins with the law for de Rouffignac, with Judge Alan Woodcock telling her in the Local Court in 2015 she was “coming to the stage where (she) will not be granted much more leniency”.

De Rouffignac, whose modelling jobs included posing for the Sunday Territorian, once said in an interview she wanted to travel the world.

“There’s an endless list of places I want to see,” she said in 2011, when she was 21. “Now I’m getting older I’ve got to grab the bull by the horns.”