by Anna Krien
If the moment can be pinpointed when some footballers’ respect, or lack of it, for their fellow human beings first came under serious scrutiny, it was in 1993, when Nicky Winmar responded to on-field racist abuse by lifting his jersey and pointing to his black skin. The photograph of that event is now iconic. This defiant act, said the footballer Andrew McLeod at a recent United Nations forum on racism in sport, ‘made the AFL sit up and take notice.’ Two years later, the racial vilification policy was rolled out across the league and extended to every football competition in Australia.
While the new rules soon became a source of pride for some, to others they signified the disinheritance of a certain type of footy culture. Criticising Demetriou’s 2004 call for women to come forward, John Elliott, the former president of the Carlton Football Club for twenty years, said the AFL was opening up a ‘Pandora’s Box.’ Elliott claimed that while he was president of Carlton during the eighties and nineties, the club had paid at least four women $5000 each to dissuade them from making public claims of sexual assault.
I think we had people who claimed to be raped by our players – women they were, not men – on four or five occasions. Not once did any of those stories get into the press because in those days we probably had only twenty people writing in the press and they weren’t interested in all that sort of nonsense. We’d pay the sheilas off and wouldn’t hear another word.
Elliott, also a former leading businessman and Liberal Party president, implied that many women had been paid by clubs to keep their silence in settlements now referred to as ‘hush money.’ The past had been paid for, he believed, no point in revisiting it.
And so, as the codes strove to do the right thing, it became clear that something or someone was resisting.
Back in 1995, when the football personality Sam Newman impersonated Nicky Winmar by ‘blacking up’ on The Footy Show, it was a way of saying ‘up yours’ to the new racial and religious vilification policy. A decade later, as the AFL rolled out its Respect & Responsibility program towards women, The Footy Show responded with another ‘harmless’ prank.
On live television, Newman staple-gunned a photo of the Age’s senior football journalist Caroline Wilson to a mannequin’s head. The mannequin was wearing a satin bra and underpants. ‘I tell you what, she’s a fair piece, Caro,’ he said, standing back to admire the dummy. As he held up items of clothing, fumbling around the breasts, one of the show’s hosts, Garry Lyon, laughed and wrung his hands.
‘You getting nervous about this?’ asked Newman, as he approached Wilson’s teeth with a black texta. ‘Garry – can I just say something, Garry?’ he continued. ‘We’re only having fun … and I know you’re getting nervous about it, but we’re only having fun. If you’re on our show, you’re on our show –’
‘We are!’ yelped Lyon, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. The studio audience whooped and cheered for Newman. ‘We are!’ Lyon said again.
Consciously or unconsciously, Newman’s gag and many others like it were designed to pull down these new values. Newman tested Lyon’s loyalty on air, later defending the mannequin gag as a kind of ‘male’ compliment. It was a sign, he said, that The Footy Show, aka Sam Newman, accepted Caroline Wilson. And this gets us to the crux of the problem, not just with Aussie Rules and Rugby League, but also with American football, European soccer – turn the ball into a puck, put a stick in their hands, and it’s a problem in ice hockey. The problem is not the game per se, but the macho culture of humiliation that tends to shadow and control it.
CHAPTER 2
David Galbally surveyed the Magistrates’ Court with the assurance of a top predator. His hawkish features, sharp blue eyes and ruffle of silver hair put the court to a kind of clunky shame. The prosecutor appeared on the back foot, he hadn’t got copies of this or that, his hair was a mess and his suit untidy. While he was blustering through his papers, Galbally was at ease, making jokes, working the room. I was at Justin Dyer’s committal hearing, a mini-trial compressed into two days in July 2011, a brief parade of witnesses for the magistrate to test if there was sufficient evidence to take the charges to trial.
In a light grey suit, Justin sat silently behind his lawyer, his parents beside him. He watched as people appeared on the stand – apparitions from a solitary Saturday night nine months ago. People he knew, others he’d seen that night also partying but didn’t know – friends of friends, friends of hers, there was even the taxi driver who had driven him home – all lined up to weave their fading fragments of a night into a single narrative.
And finally, she was there, not physically but on a screen.
Later I asked Justin how he felt seeing her, if he had changed the way she looked in his mind. After all, he’d only met her that once. A quiet man, Justin shrugged. ‘I don’t know, I was angry.’
It was seven and a half months since Justin Dyer had been charged with the rape of Sarah Wesley. He had first been summoned to court six weeks after the grand final celebrations. Camera crews and reporters had crowded around him, the footage later rolling on the evening news while newspapers immediately posted photos of him online.
In one photo, he looked defiant, head held high, eyes slit thin like the gaps in a venetian blind – but those slivers revealed nothing, they were glassy, shadowed and unfathomable. Pale skin, the kind of stubble that re-emerges five seconds after a shave, his brown hair trimmed in a typical barber’s cut – short sides, long top.
What was most striking about the image was Justin’s lone figure. He was without his team, carefully cut out from the pack – the story being as much about who wasn’t in the photo as who was. And while none of the news media said as much, the innuendo was there – the initial police leak had suggested an evening with several protagonists, so where were the others?
On a post-season training camp in Arizona apparently.
Six weeks had passed since Sarah’s initial police report. Beams and McCarthy were not yet in the clear, but as Justin fronted up to court to hear his charges, they were completing high-altitude training with Collingwood. The police were still investigating the young players, but so far rounding up Justin had been easier.
Once the charges were laid, photos of Justin had multiplied on the internet – walking with his mother from court, emerging with his lawyers through a glass revolving door – and each time he appeared steely, a shell. But a scrum of cameras can do that.
*
Galbally handed a young redheaded man in the witness box a copy of his original police statement and asked him to read out the highlighted portion to the magistrate, which he did:
I asked her if she had sex with Nate because I knew she went home with him. She said she did and then I asked what happened. It took a while for her to get it all out. I knew something was wrong because I’d never seen her crying like this … Then she said there were Collingwood footballers there. She repeated she had sex with Nate and that while she was having sex with Nate he couldn’t get an erection. Then she said she had Beams on one side and Nate on the other …
This was Tom Shaw reading. Studying law, he lived at the same residential college as Sarah. His room was one down from hers and they were good friends. Best friends, even. Sarah had celebrated her twenty-first birthday not long before the events and Tom had made one of the speeches.
Shaw told the court how he, Sarah and another friend, Olivia, got ready to go out that Saturday evening. Pouring Red Bull and vodkas, they went back and forth between each other’s rooms, playing different tunes on a laptop. Sarah was wanting to meet up with Nate Cooper, a VFL player she had met two weeks before at the Turf Bar, and so the three of them were planning to head to Prahran where he was at a party. But then she got word he was on his way to Eve nightclub in South Melbourne, so they went there instead. Olivia, who wasn’t drinking, was driving.
It was about midnight as they queued to get into Eve, and Tom reckon
ed they – he and Sarah – sobered up a little in the cool air. Tall, blonde and striking, Sarah was in a colourful dress and strappy high-heel sandals, her legs bare and a small black purse slung across her shoulder. Tom was wearing – well, who cares? Inside, it was rounds of raspberry vodkas, dancing, and the three lost sight of each other. Around 5 a.m., Tom was trying to get in touch with Sarah on his phone and then Olivia received a text from her saying she had gone home with Nate.
The next morning Sarah called Tom, crying, and he went to her room.
‘She detailed and complained about the fact that she had sex with these people, Nate and these other people, in the room?’ asked Galbally. ‘She was telling you that she had sex against her will?’
Tom nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And that she was effectively raped by them?’
‘Yes.’
Galbally continued: ‘Alright, then you detail everything else that she said to you. At that point in time the names that she mentions to you are primarily, well, are Nate, Beams and Macca?’
‘Yes.’
Sarah knew only the nicknames of the men and that they were from Collingwood. So Tom got his laptop out and brought up Nate’s Facebook page and typed ‘Beams’ into the Collingwood website.
Galbally again: ‘And she told you that there are a number of males coming in and out of the room?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did she tell you that those males were naked?’
‘Not at that time.’
‘Did she tell you at a later time that they were naked?’
‘Someone had their pants around their ankles, yes.’
By this stage, as Tom sat with Sarah in her room, laptop open on the bed, her parents were on their way to the college. Soon Olivia, who lived nearby, would be there too. In this time, Sarah hadn’t mentioned Justin to Tom. But then his name flashed up on the screen of her phone. It was a call that simultaneously drew Justin into the allegations but also made them far from clear-cut. Tom picked up Sarah’s phone and answered.
Not realising that it wasn’t her on the line, Justin said, ‘Hi, it’s Justin. From last night.’
There was a pause until Tom said, ‘It’s Tom, Sarah’s friend.’
Justin explained that he was checking to see if Sarah had got home okay, that he had put her in a taxi. Tom thanked him. They hung up.
Soon after Sarah called the police.
*
When the policewoman in charge of the investigation, Detective Senior Constable Christine Stafford, took the stand, Galbally read from her original notes, asking her to confirm them.
‘“Had consented sex with Nate” … then goes on to say “Nate introduces victim to Dayne Beams”?’
The policewoman, her finger tracing the words in her notebook in front of her, nodded. ‘Correct.’
‘“Then Collingwood player, felt compelled to have sex but … not forced.” Not forced?’
‘Correct.’
‘“Two to four other naked males in the room?”’
‘Correct.’
‘“Then they grab her and force her to perform oral sex on male and vaginal rape?”’
‘Correct.’
‘“Remember saying ‘No’?”’
‘Correct.’
‘“Felt trapped.”’
Stafford nodded again and repeated after him, ‘Felt trapped.’
Yet despite the allegations Sarah made against the young men in the South Melbourne townhouse, it emerged that the police had wound up their investigation of the two Magpie players six months before today’s hearing, deciding not to lay any charges. Instead Justin was charged with raping Sarah in an alleyway after she left the townhouse. The difficulty was this: how to discuss what had happened in the alley without referring to the incident in the bedroom some 500 metres away? And had Justin been in the bedroom? Was he under the impression that Sarah was happy to ‘do the rounds’?
When the reporters present at the committal hearing discovered that the two Collingwood footballers wouldn’t be called to give evidence for the time being, they gathered up their things and made for the elevators.
One veteran journalist, noticing I was going to stick around, said disbelievingly, ‘You don’t really think there’s something in this, do you?’
I shrugged, and then gestured at the Collingwood lawyer in a huddle with Justin and his parents in the foyer. ‘Then why is he still here?’ I said quietly, nodding towards Galbally.
The journalist looked at Galbally, who was doing all the talking while the Dyer family listened, and then back at me. ‘You think it’s some kind of conspiracy?’
I recoiled. ‘No, of course not.’
The journalist smiled at me and said goodbye. I sat down and watched the huddle, the pale-faced Justin intently listening to Galbally as he would to a coach. Conspiracy. It was definitely not the word I was looking for. After all, Galbally was looking after his client – that was clear as you watched him in action. But at the same time, the lawyer had succeeded in keeping the star footballers from attending the hearing, while every other bit player from the evening had appeared.
And now the entire bedroom episode was being sidelined. I couldn’t help wondering why Justin was the only one left facing charges.
‘Does it matter?’ a former policeman said to me when I rang him to ask how police decide whom to charge when there are not only several events, but also several people involved.
I was unsure. ‘What if someone is potentially more guilty than another?’
‘Guilty is guilty,’ he replied.
Towards the end of the committal, the prosecution called Kathy Hackett to the stand. Hackett was living in a house in one of a few alleyways that came off the street that Sarah and Justin had walked along to get a cab. Responding to a police door-knock, Hackett said she’d heard something outside her bedroom window, and the police soon decided that it was her alley where the alleged rape had occurred.
‘I felt sick to the stomach when I heard what happened,’ Hackett said boldly on the stand.
I sat up sharply. Had she heard about ‘what happened’ before she spoke to police, or worse, did the police tell her what they were investigating before they took her statement?
Hackett told the court that she had been sleeping that morning when she heard people outside her window. It was ‘muffled,’ she said, and she thought she heard someone say, ‘No, stop it.’
‘Now, is there anything you want to clarify or add or change to your statement that you made?’ asked the prosecution.
Hackett nodded. ‘Just as when, when I thought about after I spoke to the police that I could have swore I heard, um, clip-clop noises, noises like she was running away.’
‘Right, so what you said you heard – clip-clop noises. When did you hear those?’
‘After whatever because I’d – I’d heard her go off.’
I didn’t realise it to begin with, but my mouth was hanging open. I looked around the courtroom, trying to catch someone’s eye.
Is this for real? I wanted to say. This can’t be taken seriously: surely the further away you are from an event, the less you remember – not more.
*
After a break, we returned to the courtroom to hear the magistrate’s decision. Justin was asked to stand. The magistrate cleared his throat and announced that the case would be going to trial. The Dyer family looked stunned. The evidence had seemed so flimsy, mostly the recollections of drunk twenty-year-olds and then Hackett with her recent recollection of clip-clop sounds. But then there was Sarah’s evidence in closed court: what had she said? Was it credible? The magistrate must have thought so. Justin was going to trial early next year and although the Dyer family didn’t know it yet, David Galbally wouldn’t be accompanying them.
CHAPTER 3<
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‘It flows into the record of interview, it flows all over the place, Your Honour,’ said Malcolm Thomas, Justin’s new defence counsel. ‘It flows into complaint evidence, it flows into medical evidence.’
It was day one of Justin’s trial. He sat silently in the dock, watching as his barrister, the prosecutor and the judge wove a special kind of magic – a triangle of dialogue peppered with mysterious numbers and references. A second lawyer, female, sat next to Justin’s barrister – ‘They thought it would be good for the jury to see a woman on the defence team,’ Justin confided to me later. Solicitors also sat with the barristers – for the Crown, one with long auburn hair and a Mona Lisa smile. Busy scribbling notes and flicking through files to fish out documents, the solicitors did much of the legal grunt work, their notes fuelling the orators in the magic triangle. Justin’s mother, a largish strong-looking woman with a blonde bob and wearing a blouse and brooch, sat behind his lawyer. His younger brother was also there, wearing a black suit, and so too a young woman I later found out was Justin’s girlfriend.
Frowning in concentration, they cocked their heads as they tried to snatch at fleeting fragments of clarity. ‘You can’t isolate 200 from 201,’ said one lawyer. ‘It flows from 199.’ The three men in the triangle were trying to untangle the events on the evening of Collingwood’s premiership win. How to separate whatever occurred between Justin and Sarah in an alleyway from the incident in the bedroom of the South Melbourne townhouse? How to stem the flow of the bedroom narrative into the alleyway? Where did the narrative of the trial begin, how did it end, and what to do with the middle? How to question witnesses without them slipping up and revealing to jurors that there was more to the night than a solitary rape complaint?