by Anna Krien
Thomas continued to wound. He suggested to Sarah that others had seen her be affectionate with Justin in the street. There were witnesses who had seen them leave the house together. And again, Ryan later took issue with this. Sarah was the foreigner in this world, he said, the outsider, and whatever evidence was at odds with her version was a result of something sinister. A conspiracy of mates. As Thomas ticked off his lowest common denominators, so too did Ryan. Justin was a footballer, he had mates, and you know what that means.
But in a sense both Sarah and Justin were outsiders. In the long list of witnesses called to give evidence, only two were friends of Justin, and only two friends of Sarah. As for Nate Cooper, Justin knew him only vaguely, just enough to be his friend on Facebook.
Justin was on the fringes. And this was why he was interesting. Yes, he had a foot in the football fraternity, especially now that his former teammate was an A-grade player, but he was also an unremarkable young man in an ordinary world. There was no club drawing him to its protective flank. He was not on his own as Sarah was that night, but he wasn’t part of the inner circle. Even in the bedroom, he was on the fringes. A lurker, not a player. Outsiders and insiders were not always so easily distinguished – as the case of Andrew Lovett showed.
CHAPTER 12
In 2009, Christmas Eve morning, Andrew Lovett, an indigenous player, was alleged to have raped a woman on the bed of his St Kilda teammate, Jason Gram, after a night of drinking at a pub in Richmond. The woman and her friend had returned to the apartment with Lovett and Gram.
The alleged victim had been kissing Gram, but was so drunk that she was put on his bed to sober up. In court, the friend gave evidence that she had tried to take the woman home, but she was a dead weight. The friend said she grabbed her by the ankles and tugged. In slurred speech, the woman said, ‘I can’t move.’
The friend left the bedroom, and Gram and the woman kissed. Lovett was then said to have come into the room and implored Gram not to let the girls leave: ‘Don’t let them leave yet, don’t let them leave.’ Gram testified that he then left the room and joined the friend on the balcony.
Some fifteen, twenty minutes later, three more players arrived from the pub, and from here everything seemed to happen at once. The new arrivals saw the woman slumped against the wall in the hallway, crying. One player stepped over her to see ‘what the boys were up to’ and grab a beer from the fridge. Another shouted, ‘What the fuck is going on with this chick crying at the front door?’
Gram and the woman’s friend emerged from the balcony. The woman’s friend said that she went to the bedroom first, only to find Lovett in there. ‘He just kind of stared at me,’ she said. ‘It was just a weird look.’ In the hallway, she found her friend curled up in a ball and crying. ‘He fucked me. He fucked the shit out of me,’ the woman eventually said, ‘the dark guy.’ She was heard to say to Gram, ‘I feel like a slut. I thought it was you.’ Her friend later testified that the woman had whimpered to her, ‘I was asleep, you know. I said no.’
When the woman tried to call her ex-boyfriend, struggling to tell him where she was, one player took the phone from her and told the person at the other end of the line the address.
After the woman left the apartment, the players said they crowded around Lovett, trying to find out what had happened. St Kilda’s ruckman, Adam Pattison, told the court, ‘I remember Fisher saying, “Did you chop her?” and Lovett said, “Yeah, I did, but she had no problem.”’ Another player told Lovett to ‘fuck off and that he wasn’t wanted at St Kilda anymore.’ ‘How could you bring the club down like this?’ said another.
Following Lovett outside, Jason Gram and his housemate, the player Sam Fisher, called him a ‘dog.’
According to Gram, Lovett collapsed at that point and was in tears. ‘Are you serious? This is bullshit,’ he said.
Gram suggested they go back upstairs and make some calls. ‘When something like this happens,’ he explained to the jury, ‘we normally have to call our football manager.’
Lovett refused. He later sent one of the players a text message. It read in part, ‘Hey mate, as far as I’m concerned I thought we were OK to hook up … I feel terrible for her, but I am not the type!’
From that morning, Lovett had no contact with most of his teammates. It’s believed that club officials at St Kilda told them not to associate with him. You could say this was an impressive instance of players standing up for a woman, but it’s also true – albeit cynical – to note that Lovett was not yet bonded to this team. Having just been recruited to St Kilda, he hadn’t even played a match with them.
As the prosecution later suggested, Lovett may have had a sense of entitlement to the woman, interpreting Gram leaving the bedroom as a kind of ‘hand-pass,’ but may not have realised that he was not yet ‘one of the boys.’
The protective flank of the club was nowhere to be seen. This was entirely unlike what had happened with St Kilda players Stephen Milne and Leigh Montagna, both of whom were rallied by the widespread support they received when they were questioned for rape. Teammates and fans came out to wish the boys well. The coach, Grant Thomas, said to reporters then that the rape allegations could ultimately strengthen the club: ‘I’ve got no doubt that it will galvanise us and make us even stronger and closer and better.’ The club president, Rod Butterss, said that he felt ‘absolutely empowered’ as fans rallied around the Saints. St Kilda said Milne and Montagna had the right to be presumed innocent.
Lovett received no such support or presumption. He was immediately suspended and banned from group activities indefinitely. Twice a week he was required to complete a skills sessions with a development coach and run solo time-trials. After he was charged, St Kilda terminated his contract, a three-year deal worth more than $1 million.
So was Lovett’s dismissal a sign of better times – that the league’s hardline stance regarding its Respect & Responsibility policy has seen even the most rebellious of clubs fall into line – or was it just a lack of mates? And if the former, then confronting one problem has led to new issues. How to uphold certain standards while maintaining an individual’s basic rights?
As the sports commentator Tim Lane wrote in the Age, Andrew Lovett represented ‘the awkward issue of the fundamental right of the individual to be considered innocent until proven otherwise.’
There is also the reasonable question as to whether an AFL footballer is entitled to expect that his employer won’t act precipitously in circumstances which might prejudice public opinion of him. For while the AFL and its clubs are public institutions whose reputations are vital to their success – hence the ‘bringing the game into disrepute’ clause – so too are the players judged by the public. They, too, are entitled to reasonable protection of their professional and personal reputations.
The AFL is a ‘juggernaut that is a law unto itself,’ said the outspoken criminal defence lawyer Rob Stary when the Geelong Cats banned a player from senior selection for the rest of the 2012 season after police were called to his home to investigate an allegation of domestic assault. The Players Association agreed, and feared such a penalty could prejudice the footballer’s case.
A statement by the AFL applauded the Cats’ decision, in words that implied guilt. ‘With this sanction, the Geelong Football Club and its leadership group have sent a powerful message to the AFL industry and the community more broadly that violence against women is never acceptable,’ said Adrian Anderson, the league’s general manager at the time. ‘The AFL’s Respect & Responsibility policy is very clear that inappropriate player behaviour will not be tolerated …’
Both football codes now find themselves in a no-win situation, damned by critics if they act and damned if they don’t. In the NRL, when a star player for the Manly Sea Eagles, Brett Stewart, was charged with sexual assault in 2009, his team’s board decided – after a meeting that took them well past midnight – t
hat Stewart could continue playing. The decision was met with bristling anger from commentators. Peter FitzSimons, a former Wallaby player and now writer, told ABC’s Lateline:
In the realm of the bleeding obvious, it doesn’t get much more bleeding obvious than that. Stewart should not play on Saturday night. And that’s not to judge his innocence or his guilt; it’s to say there are serious matters that need to be resolved and until such times as they are resolved, you won’t play, you won’t wear our proud jersey.
The league’s own sexual assault adviser, Karen Willis of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, agreed, while the state’s premier, Nathan Rees, said simply, ‘The decision of Mr Stewart to be allowed to play this weekend should be reviewed by Manly. It sends entirely the wrong messages.’
The club remained resolute while the league struggled to find its position on the matter, tiptoeing through a moral quagmire: how to uphold the NRL’s newfound standards while not pre-empting judgment of Stewart?
The NRL then decided to suspend the star fullback for four rounds. The club and his teammates were up in arms, but the league insisted the suspension was actually imposed to punish Stewart for his drunkenness at the club’s season launch, an event which preceded the alleged sexual assault.
Stewart was eventually acquitted of the assault charges. Andrew Lovett, too, was found not guilty. He walked free from his trial but despite his attempts to get redrafted into the AFL, his playing career was effectively over.
*
How to balance the two imperatives? Without suspension, penalties, dismissal and some act of acknowledgment, what can complainants take comfort from? How to avoid the endless victory photos in the press, players carried on the shoulders of their teammates, the news coverage, the TV footage, the roar of the crowd, the lit-up night as floodlights stream from stadiums, chanting of football fans spilling onto the streets, even the blue glow of TV screens on your own street? A complainant may want to be sick, dead even, among all this. Knowing that certain players – now focused on the ball as intently as they were on her – are the source of all this adoration, that she is dismissed as nothing more than an off-field distraction.
And yet an eagerness to judge is a dangerous thing. Just as the myth of the ‘deserving’ rape victim persists – a woman who is drunk is more likely to be seen to be ‘asking for it’ – a fixed image of footballers and male athletes as badly behaved jocks and potential rapists is also beginning to take shape.
In the spring of 2006 in North Carolina, allegations that a young black woman was raped, sodomised, robbed and strangled by members of the Duke University lacrosse team mobilised the left-liberal members of the university faculty and grabbed the attention of the US media.
Known as ‘the group of 88,’ professors and affiliates at the university signed a full-page advertisement (although the academics involved preferred to call it a ‘listening statement’) and published it in the college’s daily newspaper less than two weeks after a woman was hired to strip at a party organised by the team’s captains, where she said she had been raped.
‘What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?’ the headline read. It continued:
We are listening to our students … Regardless of the results of the police investigation, what is apparent every day now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism, who see illuminated in this moment’s extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday … These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and to themselves.
Residents, students and faculty members – upset with the team members’ silence and the university’s handling of the case – staged five protests in four days, while activists handed out WANTED posters with pictures of the team. One professor, Houston Baker, established himself as a ‘leading dissident voice’ on campus, and issued a public letter to the university administration two weeks after the allegations – a period which he called one of ‘silent protectionism.’
How is a Duke community citizen to respond to such a national embarrassment from under the cloud of a ‘culture of silence’ that seeks to protect white, male, athletic violence and which apparently prevents all university citizens from even surveying the known facts? …
The lacrosse team – 15 of whom have faced misdemeanor charges for drunken misbehavior in the past three years – may well feel they can claim innocence and sport their disgraced jerseys on campus, safe under the cover of silent whiteness. But where is the black woman who their violence and raucous witness injured for life? Will she ever sleep well again?
Although Duke University cancelled the remainder of the lacrosse season and the coach was forced to resign, it was not enough for Baker.
There can be no confidence in an administration that believes suspending a lacrosse season and removing pictures of Duke lacrosse players from a web page is a dutifully moral response to abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed among us.
The media then took up the baton and ran with it. On CNN, Wendy Murphy said, ‘Look, I think the real key here is that these guys, like so many rapists – and I’m going to say it because, at this point, she’s entitled to the respect that she is a crime victim. These guys watch CSI, they know it’s a really bad idea to ejaculate on or in the victim.’
Newsweek magazine plastered mug shots of the boys on its cover. Headlines hollered ‘Duke lacrosse rape case’ and ‘Gang Rape Case.’ Many in the media took the words of the prosecutor, Michael Nifong, as gospel. He told reporters that the lacrosse team was sticking together in a conspiracy of silence, and lo and behold, Johnette Howard, a columnist at Newsday, wrote:
There’s something disgustingly wrong when a Duke University men’s lacrosse team … puts some skewed code of silence ahead of telling Durham, N.C., police everything they know.
But it wasn’t true. The team was talking to police and all players were complying with DNA tests, minus the team’s one black player, who was never implicated. They had even offered to take polygraph tests.
Three players were charged, banned from setting foot on campus and, for the year that they faced accusations, used constantly as examples of privileged jocks by an insatiable media. But the sexual assault allegations, it turned out, were false – disastrously so.
Twice, DNA tests found no matches. The prosecutor, Nifong, misleadingly claimed that this was not unusual. Worse, when the defence cross-examined the DNA expert, he said that Nifong had persuaded him to withhold evidence from authorities that while the DNA of several men was found on the complainant, none matched that of the Duke players.
The police line-ups were also curated by Nifong, with only photos of the lacrosse players provided for the complainant to choose from, unlike in standard line-ups where suspects are mixed in with others – it was a ‘multiple-choice test in which there were no wrong answers,’ as the defence lawyers put it. Even so, it was only on the third occasion that, with obvious uncertainty, the complainant picked out three of the young men. To top it all off, a second stripper who had performed at the party said there was no rape, later telling 60 Minutes that the allegations were a ‘crock.’
Nifong was eventually disbarred over his conduct and later charged with criminal contempt – he spent one day in jail. The Durham police also came under fire for allowing Nifong to act as a kind of de facto head of investigation. A year later, when the case was finally dropped, the new prosecutor took the unusual step of clearing the men’s names. He said he did not just find ‘insufficient evidence,’ but declared the three players were innocent, that no rape had occurred, a ‘rogue prosecutor’ had not been reined in, and that ‘in the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly.’
Stephen Baldwin, a professor of chemistry at Duke University, summed it up nicely: ‘There was a collision between political correctness and due p
rocess, and political correctness won.’ It seemed that alongside that of the slut, the stereotype of the vicious, stupid and pampered jock was gaining momentum.
The Duke University president later apologised for ‘causing the families to feel abandoned when they most needed support.’ But what ought he do in the future? Even when the university did the ‘right thing’ – suspending the lacrosse season and the indicted players – these symbolic gestures were not enough. Must we leapfrog from one stereotype to another? Provide scalps for a baying public? Surely the first thing one ought to do is distinguish what exactly the athletes were being tried for – was it for gang rape, or for being privileged white male athletes?
*
When I took my seat again in the courtroom, the screen above the witness stand was black. Opaque. The feeling in the room was different. The jurors’ eyes were bright. They were sitting up straight. Sarah had given her testimony. Everything about the space was more charged, electric. In the far back corner, however, was a weight. Justin seemed smaller, deflated, as if the air had been sucked out of him. The trial had only just begun, but he was exhausted. Ashen, he had turned the colour of the city streets, of the cigarette smoke on the courthouse steps.
CHAPTER 13
In the heat, the blisters and Band-Aids on my feet from wearing nice shoes chafed. Court had finished for the day, and with a slight limp I headed for the train station. On autopilot, I crossed the streets at the lights, turning the trial over in my head. Then suddenly, deep in thought, I found myself bowing as if I was still in the courtroom and the passers-by were judges. I looked around sheepishly to check if anyone had seen me.
My thoughts were occupied with Sarah – or better, occupied with her absence, the empty seats behind the prosecution. Three times I had tried to contact her – through her lawyers, the police and her Facebook page – each attempt more panicky as I grew closer to Justin and his family. I had received no response. I tried again, pleaded with Sarah to let me know if she did not want to talk, but there was nothing.