Alan Jones, Australian rugby’s most successful coach of all time and an influential media figure, was charged on Monday with a string of sexual offences spanning nearly two decades.

Detectives from the New South Wales Child Abuse Squad arrested Jones, 83, at his Sydney harbourside home after eight men came forward to police, including one who was a schoolboy at the time he was allegedly kissed and groped by the former Wallabies coach.

“I wish to commend the victims in their bravery in coming forward,” Michael Fitzgerald, the NSW Police Assistant Commissioner, said.

“They are fully aware, as are the investigators, that the hard work is just beginning.”

Police confirmed the youngest accuser was 17 at the time of the alleged offences. Another is a former Olympic athlete, according to Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

Police in the strike force set up to investigate Jones expected to hear from more alleged victims, Fitzgerald said.

Barrister Chris Murphy said Jones “denies any misconduct”.

“Allegations have been made, nothing has been tested, nothing has been proven,” Murphy told media outside a Sydney police station. “Alan Jones will assert his innocence appropriately in the courtroom.”

In total, police laid 24 charges for incidents between 2001 and 2019. They included 11 counts of aggravated indecent assault, nine counts of assault with act of indecency, two counts of sexually touching another person without consent and two counts of common assault.

‘The get-Jones campaign is nothing new in my life’

Jones’s career has ranged from teaching to sport, media and politics. He was best known in the UK in the 1980s as the rugby union coach who guided the Wallabies to their famous grand-slam victories over England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland.

He later went on to become the most powerful Conservative radio host in Australia – and the most controversial, given his record of commentary about Aboriginals and women in leadership.

In 2019, he called Jacinda Ardern, then the New Zealand prime minister, “a clown” and suggested the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison should “shove a sock down her throat”.

In another rant in 2011, Jones told listeners that Julia Gillard, the then-Australian prime minister, should be shoved in a “chaff bag” and thrown out to sea.

“Women are destroying the joint,” he said of her and several other female leaders in 2012.

Perhaps the most damaging moment of his radio career was the release of findings of an investigation by the Australian media watchdog, ACMA, which concluded that he helped incite the 2005 Cronulla race riots in western Sydney by broadcasting material “that was likely to encourage violence or brutality and to vilify people of Lebanese and Middle-Eastern backgrounds on the basis of ethnicity”.

Jones survived – and thrived – through all of those controversies. He was awarded an Order of Australia Medal and in recent years landed plum roles on Sky News and as a columnist for News Corp newspapers.

All that changed last year when The Sydney Morning Herald published young men’s accounts of off-air encounters with the broadcaster.

One man, who was 20 when he started work at 2GB radio station, with Jones as his boss, claimed he would “corner him and forcibly kiss him on the lips” in the office elevator.

Jones had “wandering hands” and had touched his groin when the pair shared a car ride, the accuser told the newspaper.

“He knew I wasn’t gay, so it was about power dynamics,” the former radio station employee said.

Another man said Jones was drunk when he fondled him in a restaurant then gave him 20 Australian dollars.

Jones has always vehemently denied the allegations, claiming he was the target of a “get-Jones campaign”.

“I refute them entirely and the inferences associated with them,” he said in a video released earlier this year.

Jones was bailed on Monday afternoon to appear in court in December.