Night Games

by Anna Krien

  ‘But she could have, right?’ I replied. ‘I mean, people do go along with it. How else did these guys get it into their heads that it was okay?’

  ‘Well, it sounds shithouse,’ she said. When I added that the trial wasn’t even about what had happened in the house, but in an alleyway afterwards, her disgust only deepened. ‘You mean to say that this guy says she consented to having sex in an alley after that? How is it even possible to be mentally capable of saying “yes” after all that?’

  ‘She could have …’ I said, trailing off, unnerved by my friend’s conviction, and my lack of it. Then I remembered the policewoman at the committal. Sarah had told the police that she’d felt ‘compelled’ to have sex with Beams, but ‘not forced.’ I passed that on to my friend, adding ‘she’d felt duty-bound to go through with it.’ I paused, then said tentatively, ‘At what point does peer pressure become so threatening that it’s rape?’

  A little appalled, my friend looked me in the eye. ‘Those men had all the power,’ she said. ‘She was in a strange house, in a bedroom with most of her clothes off, and a bunch of guys she does not know came in expecting to fuck her. I mean, did they even prepare themselves for the possibility of her saying no?’

  *

  ‘There is definitely a pattern, an attitude across the whole game that was so sleazy and underhand and nasty. We heard stories – horror stories – most of them you couldn’t get people to go on the record, enough evidence and verified to go to print,’ Jacquelin Magnay told me. ‘Most of the stories were of humiliation, of taking advantage of women, and also deceiving women.’

  Never insiders, never initiated into the inner sanctum of football, female journalists were free to ask the questions that had been gathering dust for years. What broke things wide open was, in 2009, the ABC Four Corners episode ‘Code of Silence,’ an investigation into rugby league by the reporter Sarah Ferguson. Among a series of revealing incidents, the program revisited the pre-season tour taken by the Cronulla Sharks to New Zealand first publicised by Magnay and Halloran.

  Sarah Ferguson: In 2002, 19-year-old Clare, as we’ll call her, was working part-time as a waitress at the Racecourse Hotel on the outskirts of Christchurch. After finishing work Clare went with two of the players back to their room. One of them started kissing her.

  Clare: I didn’t want to, you know, make a big deal out of a kiss and even though it was rough and disgusting and I was a piece of meat even at that stage, but it was, you know, it was, you know, it was nothing, it was just a kiss.

  Sarah Ferguson: Over the next two hours, at least twelve players and staff came into the room. Six of them had sex with Clare, the others watched. Five days after the event Clare made a complaint to police.

  Clare described to Four Corners how throughout the evening there were always hands on her, flipping her over, rubbing penises in her face, while others stood around masturbating. ‘Every time I looked up, there would be more and more people in the room and, um, there’s lots of guys in the room watching, ah, maybe two or three that were on the bed that were doing stuff to me.’

  Clare: I only remember this whole time, I only remember one player definitely, it was Matty Johns.

  At this, Four Corners cut to footage of the Logie Awards showing Matthew Johns, former Shark and now TV personality, accept an award on behalf of the NRL’s own version of The Footy Show. At the time of the incident in Christchurch, he was thirty years old.

  Clare: He laughed and he joked and he was very loud and boisterous and thought it was hilarious and, you know, kept it going.

  Sarah Ferguson: Matthew Johns and fellow player Brett Firman told Four Corners they were the first players to have sex with Clare. Firman said ‘she was up for it a hundred per cent.’ Johns denies he kept it going, saying when he had finished he ‘took a step back.’

  Clare: They never spoke to me, they spoke just to themselves, among themselves, laughing and thinking it was really funny. When you have sex with someone and it’s nice and you talk and you touch – and this was awful. This was nothing like, nothing like that.

  Sarah Ferguson: Some players even came into the room through the bathroom window.

  Clare: I had my eyes shut a lot of it and when I opened my eyes, there was just a long line at the end of the bed.

  Sarah Ferguson: What was going through your mind when this was happening?

  Clare: I thought that I was, that I was nothing. I thought I was worthless and I thought I was nothing. And I think I was in shock. I didn’t scream and they used a lot of like mental power over me and belittled me and made me feel really small, like I was just a little old woman.

  Sarah Ferguson: Towards the end Paul Gallen, the current captain of the Cronulla Sharks, went in to see what was happening. Gallen told us it was pretty much all over by then, but nothing bad had happened anyway. After two hours it ended.

  Clare: I think maybe one of the guys said she’s had enough, or something along those lines, like alright guys, let’s wrap it up, she’s had enough. And so I put my clothes on and walked out.

  Sarah Ferguson: Did anybody talk to you while you were putting your clothes back on?

  Clare: No, no one. I was nothing.

  Sarah Ferguson: Afterwards in the car park, Matthew Johns told Four Corners, he went up to Clare and said he was sorry about the other guys coming into the room.

  Clare went on to describe the downward spiral her life took after the incident – drinking heavily, reclusive, suicidal and cutting her wrists. She had even bought a rope to hang herself. The policeman who investigated the allegations said he received several distressed phone calls from her over the years.

  Four weeks after the complaint was made, the police interviewed forty players and staff from Cronulla. As Ferguson reported, ‘In their graphic descriptions, those present said she had consented to each and every act. No charges were laid.’

  Warned about the content of the Four Corners program, Matthew Johns made a pre-emptive apology on Channel 9’s The Footy Show. ‘It’s put my family through enormous anguish and embarrassment, and for that, I’m just …’ He shook his head as if bewildered and tapped the table with his hand. ‘Well, you can’t say sorry enough. But, ah, the police did investigate the situation at the time, the allegation, and there were no charges laid.’

  His co-host, Paul ‘Fatty’ Vautin, then leaned over, patted him on the back and said, ‘Alright, let’s get on with the show.’

  *

  The apology failed to anticipate, let alone fathom, the scale of public response that would follow the Four Corners revelations. Outrage was palpable throughout the nation. Pressure mounted on Channel 9 as sponsors began to withdraw support from the Sharks, the club losing almost a million dollars in annual funding. After ‘monitoring the situation’ for a week, Channel 9 decided to ‘stand down’ Johns from the network indefinitely, as did the Melbourne Storm rugby team, which had him as an assistant coach. (The banishment, however, was short-lived. When the ‘fuss’ died down, Channel 9 tried to woo Johns back with a contract worth more than he’d originally been paid, but he declined and signed on with a rival network for The Matty Johns Show.)

  The NRL was quicker to react. An hour after ‘Code of Silence’ aired, David Gallop apologised on behalf of the game for the ‘appalling’ and ‘unacceptable’ behaviour of some players towards women. At a press conference a day later, he advised players that such sexual activity was degrading to women and warned that those who took part in it could be kicked out of the game. ‘If you are not on board with the change that we are endeavouring to implement, then don’t play rugby league.’

  Some players didn’t agree. A senior NRL player spoke on condition of anonymity to the Sydney Morning Herald’s Jamie Pandaram.

  It’s fine for David Gallop to come out and say you can’t have group sex, but the last thing blokes will be thinking about
on a Friday night at the club is David Gallop. I don’t know how a chief executive can come out and say we can’t have group sex if it’s consensual. It’s like discrimination because that is a person’s private life. It’s like saying you can’t be homosexual, or you can’t have such-and-such sexual preferences. How can he tell us what we can do in our private lives? What if there’s more women than guys – is that wrong, too?

  The reality is that these incidents don’t tend to involve more females than males. It is usually a lone woman with three or more men. And while the act is nothing new – the former coach and sports writer Roy Masters says it has been an unofficial team-bonding activity for some time – it’s only recently that players have been forced to defend it, and part of that defence is calling it ‘group sex.’ But off the record, among coaches and footballers, it’s always been a ‘gangbang.’

  The anonymous player continued his lament:

  We already have so many rules; we can’t drink on these days, we can’t go to these places, now we can’t have group sex. About the only thing we can do these days is go to club functions and just hang around other players. That’s just isolating us more from the rest of the world, and it could lead to even more violent acts.

  The league’s adviser on gender issues, Catharine Lumby, agreed that players’ lives were already subject to endless rules. ‘People say, “All these guys need is a boot camp” – that kind of thing. But these men are already over-trained. They need to learn to think for themselves.’

  She put emphasis on educating players about seeking ‘informed and continued’ consent, a position that saw her lambasted by the media. ‘[According to Lumby] if this teenager consented to group sex, there was nothing more for Johns and his mates to know,’ wrote the Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt sarcastically. ‘Indeed, none seemed to think they had a duty to protect this young woman from what degraded them all. She agreed. End of questions.’

  Bolt wrote equally scathingly of Lumby and the NRL’s Playing by the Rules education program. In his eyes, it was nothing more than a ‘sensitivity course designed by the hippest post-modern feminists.’ The program ‘trilled’ that ‘players were unequivocal that sexual assault of women is always wrong,’ although ‘a majority of players want ongoing education about how to negotiate sexual encounters in a way which ensures informed consent is always obtained.’

  No surprise that boys want to learn how to make a girl always say ‘yes.’ But the real challenge is how to make them listen when she says ‘no’ … I’ve long thought a big stick helps a bozo to hear better, but Lumby’s report is a model of faddish thinking on crime and punishment, relying on two fatal notions: that we can reason anyone out of being a bastard, and can trust him to ‘negotiate’ their morality.

  Next to put the boot in was Miranda Devine writing in the Sydney Morning Herald:

  Who could blame the players for being confused? Lumby emphasises ‘consent’ … But emphasising a legalistic notion of consent, without moral context or any expectation of women to modify their behaviour, leaves players unmoored from the real consequences of their behaviour. It is putting an unsustainable pressure on the ability of young footballers, perhaps drunk, insensitive, or carried away by group dynamics, to discern the subtleties.

  Devine initially put the responsibility on Matthew Johns for the New Zealand incident:

  Plenty of young women are neither assertive nor articulate enough to stand up to charismatic older football stars. Johns was thirty at the time, and married. He knew better.

  But ultimately she laid the blame at the feet of feminism:

  It is unfair to expect men to bear full responsibility for sexual mores as the boundaries of acceptable practice are blurred. Young women are told they can act and dress any way they please, and it is men, alone, with their supposedly filthy, uncontrollable sexual desires, who must restrain themselves … There is no understanding that female sexual attitudes have always been the most successful regulator of male sexuality – not politically correct re-education programs that are exercises in legal risk management for the NRL.

  This is, of course, where the ‘uh-oh’ comes in. The suggestion that women are the regulators and ultimately the suppressors of men’s sexual behaviour returns us to the premise that violence against women is a women’s issue, a corollary of which is that if a woman seeks sex as a man might, then she invites potential violence and mistreatment. For his part, Bolt seems close to proposing a little ‘do’s and don’ts’ sex handbook when he writes that trusting people to negotiate consent instead of providing hard-and-fast rules assumes ‘that people are smart enough and strong enough to work out all by their uncertain selves what’s good for them.’ Such a handbook, likely to be penned by him, would certainly diminish all of our sex lives.

  But Bolt does have a point. As Sarah Ferguson said:

  Four Corners doesn’t say that what took place in room 21 of the Racecourse Hotel was sexual assault. But a woman involved in degrading group sex can still be traumatised whether she consents or not.

  If mere consent can result in a ten-person gangbang with a lone teenage girl at its centre, then what good is it? How to ascertain the calibre of someone’s consent? For all the good intentions of the feminist slogan ‘no means no,’ the resulting awareness has been too simplified and the true meaning of consent has fallen by the wayside. After all, by the logic of ‘no means no,’ surely ‘yes means yes’? But people agree to do things all the time without an understanding of what they are undertaking. True consent relies on three factors: a capacity to say yes, a knowledge of what exactly one is saying yes to, and that the decision to say yes is an independent one, free of threat.

  And so Catharine Lumby’s urging of NRL players to seek continued and informed consent in ‘high-risk scenarios’ such as group sex is good advice, except for one thing: it negates the entire point of a gangbang. The reality is that a gangbang is not group sex, and the difference is in the tone of the act. Group sex implies that multiple participants are mutually engaged with one another and that is perhaps way too gay a concept for footballers. Gangbangs, on the other hand, tend to focus on a central person. Most, if not all, sexual acts are performed on this person.

  Then there’s the terminology of a gangbang – for example, the ‘club bun’ (she’s the bun, the players are the meat and are to ‘put it in’ any way they can), or roasting a pig on a spit (she’s the meat, the players are the skewer). And if a woman is considered nothing more than meat, then what capacity for consent can she possibly have? What in-depth inner life can she have? Who would think to ask a piece of meat for true consent? Gangbangs are about sex, yes, but they’re also about ‘being with the boys’ – the woman involved is no more than a ‘vehicle for bonding,’ as Roy Masters put it.

  Masters wrote that players enjoy each other’s company and ‘anything that unites them,’ listing excursions such as fishing, going to the movies and paintball, before adding gangbangs (although he calls it group sex) to the mix.

  Okay, such relatively innocent outings are a far cry from group sex, but sexual satisfaction isn’t the aim of this sleazy exercise, during which the guys laugh at the sexually incompetent – the ones who are flaccid or, more particularly, the ones rejected by the girl because they are ugly or awarded a mark of one out of ten by her for their lack of sexual prowess. The sex isn’t equalising; rather it’s the intimacy within the tribe, being ‘one of the boys,’ which is the bonding mechanism.

  Despite all the teasing from commentators that players involved in ‘club buns’ obviously just want to fuck one another, the act is aggressively heterosexual, a badge of masculinity.

  Ian Roberts was the first professional rugby footballer in the world to come out to the public as gay. Talking to the Sunday Telegraph’s Claire Harvey, he said that ‘group sex’ encounters such as those with the Bulldogs in Coffs Harbour struck him as ‘not in any way homoerotic
.’

  I’ve got no problem with group sex if everyone’s open-minded and respectful. I’m a gay man, my God, I’m totally aware it happens, but the idea of one poor girl on her own there in that situation – it’s totally disempowering.

  In fact, moments after Matthew Johns’s apology on The Footy Show, with Fatty saying ‘Let’s get on with the show,’ they launched into a comedy skit about ‘the other Johns brother,’ the brother no one spoke of when it came to the league’s famous family. His name was Elton, Elton Johns – get it? Matthew Johns played Elton, wearing a blond wig and big glasses, and was dragged to the hospital by his father, Gary Johns, also a former player, who pulled him up to the triage desk and said, ‘I want to return this. It’s faulty.’

  Andrew Johns, Matthew’s younger brother – ‘the world’s best rugby player,’ according to some commentators – made an appearance (a real family event this skit, just minutes after Johns had apologised for the distress and embarrassment he had caused his family). ‘Like Dad,’ Andrew joked, ‘I’m so ashamed of him.’ And then, just in case viewers didn’t get it, there was this. Still playing Elton, Matthew Johns said to the camera, ‘Dad only knew I was gay when he walked in on me and my boyfriend Ian.’

  ‘You dated Ian Roberts?’ asked the reporter.

  Ian Roberts was sitting at home watching that night. He later told Claire Harvey that he’d tuned into The Footy Show to see what Johns would say in his apology and was disappointed that the apology focused mainly on the pain of his wife and family. The subsequent skit was too much for Roberts: