Night Games

by Anna Krien

  Copyright

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

  37–39 Langridge Street

  Collingwood Vic 3066 Australia

  email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com

  http://www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Anna Krien 2013

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Krien, Anna.

  Night games : sex, power and sport / Anna Krien.

  ISBN for eBook edition: 9781921870965

  ISBN for print edition: 9781863956017 (pbk.)

  Australian football players--Sexual behaviour. Athletes--Australia--Sexual behaviour. Power (Social sciences) Sports--Moral and ethical aspects. Sex crimes--Australia. Men--Sexual behaviour. Professional sports--Australia.

  362.883

  Book design by Peter Long

  Cover mannequin courtesy of Creative Colour

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART 1

  The Footy Show

  PART 2

  The Grey Zone

  PART 3

  The Winmar Moment

  PART 4

  End Game

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have changed the name of the defendant in the following account of a rape trial. On grounds of confidentiality I am not permitted to give the complainant’s name, and in fairness I believe the defendant’s name should be suppressed here for the same reason. Several other names have also been changed.

  As is customary in rape trials, the complainant’s evidence was given in closed court and cannot be reported.

  PROLOGUE

  When the members of the jury – ten men and two women – emerge from the back room, they don’t look at him. Their eyes do a darting sweep of the court, lifting up and over our outlines. The defendant’s seats are full, the complainant’s seats behind the prosecutor – except for a lone policewoman who has arrived to hear the verdict – are empty, as they have been since the beginning of the trial, and the press seats – where I am – are largely vacant.

  Five days ago there had been barely any standing room as the reporters crammed in, opening and shutting the door in the middle of proceedings. A star footballer had arrived to give evidence. The Collingwood player took the stand jauntily, swinging a little in his chair as he spoke.

  Today it’s just an ordinary man in the dock, his face grey with dread, eyes rimmed red, no big deal as far as headlines are concerned. ‘He’s not a footballer at all,’ the judge and prosecution had agreed before the jury was selected and the trial commenced. I turned to look at Justin Dyer then. Disbelief flickered across his face. He’d been dropped from his team in the Victorian Football League after the charges were laid.

  ‘No, he’s a hanger-on,’ said the prosecution.

  ‘Exactly,’ said the judge.

  ‘Have you reached your verdict?’ the judge now enquires. The foreman of the jury nods and stands up. The 23-year-old in the dock is answering to six counts: one of indecent assault, the rest – rape.

  ‘As to the charge of rape, verdict as to count one, we the jury find the defendant not guilty.’

  Justin buckles and lets out a huge wracking sob. His gasps seem to heave over his cordoned-off area, over the wooden banister, to his family. They let out a choking sound. The jury foreman trails off, looking at the man in the dock, the document in his hand shaking.

  The judge nods at him to continue, and with each verdict of not guilty the sobbing grows louder, the family now holding themselves, arms crossed over one another, as if forming a kind of dinghy on a rough sea and taking the waves of Justin’s gasping as their own.

  The jury members shift in their seats, fiddling with their hands, with the rings on their fingers, stealing wide-eyed looks at the dock. It is as if they are seeing Justin for the first time.

  With my fingers, I try to push my own tears back into the seams of my eyes. I squeeze my nails into my palms, etching the skin, for distraction. The solicitor for Sarah Wesley, the complainant, sits facing the court. She exchanges a long, knowing look with the policewoman in the front row behind the Crown prosecutor.

  As the jury is thanked and dismissed, I stare at my notepad. ‘Now they know the difference between what is said in popular media and reality,’ the judge says of the jurors to the lawyers. We all try to ignore the whirlpool of emotion in the corner of the room.

  After the judge departs, the reporters stand awkwardly at the door, leaving for the family to settle, to sort themselves out and start leaving so they can ask for a quote or two. I stand with them, but I don’t really belong. I know this family now. I’ve sat with them outside for the past three weeks, waiting with them in that dead space. I put my pencil and notebook away, take a deep breath and cross over the empty seats into this flooding family on the defendant’s side.

  His grandmother envelops me in a hug and I think, well, there goes my objectivity. And I’m struggling with this. It’s as if I’m inside out. The journalists at the door, their faces are unreadable, they have cool exteriors. I admire their poise, their unmuddied positions, absolved in their detachment. It’s all backwards for me. Because despite the verdict, I still don’t know who is guilty and who is innocent, and yet here I am, hugging the grandmother in the defendant’s corner, and that’s a problem, don’t you think?

  PART 1

  THE FOOTY SHOW

  CHAPTER 1

  Much like the federal election of 2010, the Australian Rules Football grand final that year was a draw. It was an unfathomable concept for players and spectators: how do you party when there are no winners and no losers? Then, to the delight of pubs, merchandise sellers and sausage makers, the Australian Football League announced a rematch between Collingwood and St Kilda. The Pies beat the Saints and the city of Melbourne was still cloaked in black and white crepe paper when the rumour of a pack rape by celebrating footballers began to surface. By morning, the head of the Victorian sexual crimes squad confirmed to journalists that they were preparing to question two Collingwood players, the young recruits Dayne Beams and John McCarthy. And so, as police were confiscating bedsheets from a townhouse in Dorcas Street, South Melbourne, the trial by media began.

  ‘Yet another alleged girl, making alleged allegations, after she awoke with an alleged hangover and I take it an alleged guilty conscience,’ the retired footballer Peter ‘Spida’ Everitt announced on Twitter, and followed it up with ‘Girls!! When will you learn! At 3am when you are blind drunk & you decide to go home with a guy ITS NOT FOR A CUP OF MILO!’ The morning TV host Kerri-Anne Kennerley picked up the thread, sympathising with players, saying that they ‘put themselves in harm’s way by picking up strays.’

  When Justin Dyer first had an inkling that the weekend he’d had was going to be turned upside down – and it had been a good one too, grand final day, his mates had won, he’d picked up that night, gone one up in the ‘rooting competition’ he was having with his mates – he was driving to work in his ute, carpentry tools in the tray. Beams’s housemate called him on his mobile and said, that girl, she’s gone to the cops, said she’s been raped.

  The rest of the drive was surreal, said Justin.

  Then he got another call, this time from Beams, who said the cops were going to call him and no
t to say anything. To call Dale Curtis, Collingwood’s director of legal counsel, instead. From there, Justin was put in touch with David Galbally QC, the club’s lawyer. ‘I went to Galbally and wrote up my statement to take to the police. He said you’re a witness, not a suspect.’ But when he arrived at the station, police told him he was a suspect. ‘I felt sick. I kept wondering if this was really happening. Her original complaint was about Collingwood and then I came along.’

  When Justin was charged with six counts of rape, one of attempted rape and one of indecent assault, Galbally told the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court that his client would contest the charges. At this, a few astute observers on AFL forums pricked up their ears. ‘Why is Dave Galbally QC the defendant’s lawyer?’ asked one commentator.

  Apart from being friends with Dayne Beams – they had played together back in Queensland – Justin had nothing to do with Collingwood Football Club. The club he was playing for in the state league, the Coburg Tigers, was affiliated with Richmond, and rather than offer support Coburg decided to drop him. The board called him to a meeting and said, ‘You’re never going to get another game here.’

  Justin was a small fish in big trouble. He knew no one. He was twenty-two years old, had recently broken up with his girlfriend of four years and was living out of home for the first time. He and a mate had driven to Melbourne ten months earlier, to the home of Aussie Rules, where the two midfielders could play footy closer to the roving eyes of talent scouts. So, when the shit hit, he was grateful to find himself tucked under the arm of Galbally, despite not really knowing why.

  But with Beams and McCarthy not yet in the clear, the reason for the QC’s presence seemed pretty obvious to an outsider like me. It made sense to control the narrative. Dyer was a nobody, but what had happened that night and how it revealed itself could affect ‘real’ footballers, not to mention the richest footy club in town.

  Other things about the case interested me, too. There was the girl, Sarah Wesley.

  *

  Over a decade ago, in the front bar of a pub in North Fitzroy, I listened to the pub trivia going on in the back room. ‘What was the name of the girl who died in a hotel room with Gary Ablett?’

  I remember sucking in the air as though I’d been punched. Surely this isn’t pub trivia, I thought, then just as quickly I prayed that someone would remember her name, the twenty-year-old footy fan who lay comatose from a drug overdose in Melbourne’s Hyatt hotel while forty-year-old Ablett Senior, known as ‘God’ to his admirers, called an ambulance and then did a runner, hiding out with his manager, Ricky Nixon. For hours the girl was simply a ‘Jane Doe’ in the hospital.

  ‘Horan!’ one guy yelled. ‘Alisha Horan!’ His trivia team whooped.

  I wrote the incident down on the back of a beer coaster.

  Three years later, in 2003, two sports journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald, Jacquelin Magnay and Jessica Halloran, wrote about the ‘Dark Side of the Game,’ revealing a culture of sharing women in rugby league. Describing ‘gangbangs’ as a rite of passage, the reporters highlighted two incidents.

  A 42-year-old Coffs Harbour woman had laid a sexual assault complaint against the Canterbury Bulldogs. She said she had consented to sex with one player when they visited her hometown, but not a second, while a third had been in the room as an ‘observer.’

  The second incident, which later became infamous on the ABC’s Four Corners, involved the Cronulla Sharks’ trip to New Zealand and a nineteen-year-old female hotel employee. Magnay and Halloran wrote: ‘After the Sharks complaint, one club called a team meeting and warned its players not to share women. After the Bulldogs incident, an official at another club told its players “to make sure the woman leaves happy and then she won’t complain.”’

  Following the article’s appearance, the National Rugby League’s then chief executive, David Gallop, wrote a five-page letter of outraged complaint to the Sydney Morning Herald’s publisher. Magnay, who has covered rugby league on and off for almost two decades, said the scepticism about the story, and the impulse to dismiss it or ‘shoot the messenger,’ was maddening. ‘At the time, we were perceived as troublemakers, as if we were making it up, that we were fantasists. It really annoyed me that we were not being taken seriously and people considered what we wrote to be so trivial.’

  Then, twelve months later, the Canterbury Bulldogs were involved in another incident at Coffs Harbour. A brawl broke out at the Plantation Hotel after locals took exception to players groping women on the dance floor. By morning a 21-year-old woman had been taken to hospital in an ambulance, claiming that up to eight players had raped her. They were staying at the same hotel where the 42-year-old woman had made her allegation – her case having been subsequently dropped by the director of public prosecutions because, like so many rape complaints, it boiled down to the woman’s word against that of the players.

  Agreeing to speak to 60 Minutes, the 42-year-old woman, ‘Kate,’ who still lived in the town, described her reaction on hearing the new allegations on the radio:

  It just sort of threw me back, bang, and I started, nervous, I was like sort of really shaking, thinking that they’ve actually done it again. And how dare they even think to come back to Coffs Harbour where they were staying and just do it again, just exactly the same.

  She went on to describe the night that had led her to the police. She had agreed to have sex with a player at the Pacific Bay Resort. ‘I consented to that and I had no problems there,’ she said. ‘He went downstairs … I thought he was going to get a glass of water.’ When he returned, the lights were out and the room was dark. ‘I didn’t sort of have face-to-face contact with him … as we were having sex on the bed [a second time] I saw a flash or a shadow from the side of me and as I’ve looked up there was another footballer … standing there masturbating. So I’ve quickly turned around and moved what I thought was [name deleted] away from me and it wasn’t [him].’

  Kate said she started screaming and yelling, gathered up her things and fled the apartment. She was followed by the player she’d originally consented to have sex with, who now pleaded with her not to go to the police, that it would ruin his reputation, that he had a new wife and baby. As she sat in the gutter, crying, two club officials approached her.

  They said, ‘Well, what’s happening, what’s going on?’ And I gave them the rundown and one of the officials, he said to me straight out, ‘Well, is this a habit of yours? Do you always go out doing this sort of thing?’ … I said, ‘I’m going to go to the police.’ And they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, don’t go to the police, we’ll deal with it, we’ll deal with it in our tribunal, they won’t get away with it, you know, please just write us your statement and we’ll deal with it.’

  When news of the second Coffs Harbour incident surfaced, Magnay rang David Gallop for a comment. The first thing he said to her was, ‘Are you going to say I told you so?’

  ‘He’d obviously been mulling over it for some time and come to the conclusion, whether these new allegations were true or false, that there was a serious problem,’ Magnay told me.

  The Bulldogs, on the other hand, quickly closed ranks. The club’s football manager selected four players to speak to the police that Sunday and then they all flew home to Sydney. On Tuesday, after training, the players and club management met in private to discuss what had gone on at Coffs. This discussion became known as the ‘truth meeting’ or, as critics put it, the ‘let’s get our stories straight’ meeting. The players reacted angrily to the media scrutiny, complaining they were being portrayed as a ‘bunch of rapists.’ At a training session as the team ran past journalists and photographers, one player yelled that they should ‘pull their dicks out and come all over them.’ In Coffs Harbour, a sign saying ‘Charge the Dirty Dogs’ was hung on an overpass over a local road.

  Down south, the AFL was no doubt holding its breath, praying for the ensuing sto
rm to pass them by. It didn’t.

  Less than a month later, in March 2004, police questioned two St Kilda players, Stephen Milne and Leigh Montagna, over the alleged rape of a nineteen-year-old girl. The girl claimed to have been on the receiving end of a now disturbingly familiar ‘prank,’ telling police that at one stage in the night she had thought she was having sex with Montagna, whom she’d been seeing for a couple of weeks, and ran screaming from the room when the light through a door opening revealed Milne lying beside her.

  It was now official: something dark and malicious had seeded itself within football culture. Sensing a shift in public perception, the chiefs of the Australian Football League and the National Rugby League decided to acknowledge the problem. The AFL’s chief executive, Andrew Demetriou, called on women to come forward with their stories, while David Gallop put together a team to produce a plan to change the attitude of league footballers towards women. The team included a feminist academic, Dr Catharine Lumby, the manager of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, Karen Willis, and a writer and queer politics educator, Dr Kath Albury. ‘He could have hired a public relations firm,’ Lumby told me, ‘but he hired us instead.’

  *

  The game has changed. Whomever you talk to in the world of Aussie Rules says as much. For some people – such as indigenous players – that’s a good thing. Following the introduction of its policy against racial and religious vilification in 1995, the AFL can now boast that more than 10 per cent of its players are indigenous, substantially more than the 2 per cent of the larger population that is indigenous. But for others, well, football just ain’t like it used to be.

  In a Herald Sun Q&A column in 2011, the sports journalist Jon Anderson and a former Carlton player, David Rhys-Jones, bemoaned the passing of the glory days. ‘In many ways I feel sorry for today’s players,’ said Rhys-Jones. ‘Okay, they get the money, but do they have the fun? No way.’ Back then, he said, journalists rolled around in the ‘same drip tray’ as the footballers. Anderson chipped in with a memory. Remember when someone let loose with the fire extinguisher at Brian ‘The Whale’ Roberts’ pub? Sigh.