Night Games

by Anna Krien

  Brazel: [Laughs] Yeah.

  Purcell: And Bryan Fletcher got a head job on the front, ah, the front garden.

  Brazel: Yeah, yeah.

  Purcell: Um, and came in.

  Brazel: Yeah.

  Purcell: They both started having sex with her and –

  Brazel: They, Bryan Fletcher?

  Purcell: No … No. The brother, the brother and ———.

  Brazel: Right, right.

  Purcell: And Bryan was watching –

  Brazel: Right.

  Purcell: – ’cause he’d already got the head job.

  Brazel: Yeah.

  Purcell: And then she said no, no, that’s it –

  Brazel: Yeah.

  Purcell: – and he ran away.

  Brazel: He ran away? Bryan Fletcher ran away?

  Purcell: Ran away, ran home.

  Brazel: [Laughs] Right.

  Purcell: And he, he swears that when she said no, that was it.

  Brazel: And they all stopped.

  Purcell: Yeah. Well, so he said, told me, I don’t give a fuck.

  Brazel: Mmm, mmm.

  Purcell sounds pumped. He was, after all, in the thick of it, with ‘the boys.’

  *

  It is impossible to know how many police officers trying to do their jobs investigating complaints against footballers have been thwarted by this pervading ‘the boys are alright’ attitude. As for how useful Purcell was in his ‘educational’ role at the Blues, one can’t help but wonder if he taught them about their responsibilities, or just their rights.

  Where does this sense of entitlement start? I remember something a footballer told me when he briefly tried out as a rookie in an AFL team. It was the smallest thing, but perhaps this is where the lines begin to blur. He told me about how, when he wore his new uniform home, he stopped to grab a burger and chips. To his unease, the shopkeeper wouldn’t let him pay. It was nothing really, he told me, six bucks or something, but still it played on his mind. It was as if the old boundaries and rules were disappearing.

  CHAPTER 17

  Next to give evidence was Sarah’s friend Olivia Beaumont, her face luminous like a doll’s. Nervous, she peered around the courtroom before turning back to Ryan, her big eyes clinging to him. The prosecutor took her through the evening, step by step. It was an airbrushed examination and when Ryan finished, Olivia’s eyes widened as defence counsel Thomas stood up to ask his questions.

  Thomas asked how long she and Sarah had been friends, and Olivia responded with a high-school certainty – a time when friendship can be easily mapped by grades: ‘Year 8, 2003.’

  Thomas took her to Eve nightclub. ‘Is it fair,’ he asked, ‘to say that Tom was unhappy that Sarah had gone off with Nate?’

  Ryan sprang to his feet. ‘I object to the question. What is the relevance of it?’

  Taft agreed. ‘What is the relevance?’

  Thomas shrugged nonchalantly. ‘It leads into further text messages,’ he responded and added, as if seeing no need to make a fuss, ‘I can just take the witness to the text messages.’

  That was all Thomas had needed to do, to insinuate that Tom Shaw liked Sarah a lot more than she liked him – I had been wondering the same thing. But, as Judge Taft queried, what was the relevance?

  In terms of real evidence, none whatsoever – but, as Thomas was well aware, seeds of doubt could grow from this insinuation. Why else would Tom be phoning Sarah somewhat manically after she left the club with Nate? And why did she not take any of the calls? Did Sarah feel bad about ignoring his calls? Did guilt add to her distress? With one simple question Thomas had alluded to all of this.

  Thomas then asked Olivia about the drive after Eve nightclub. She relaxed and said, ‘Tom loves driving,’ and I saw him, side window open, taking in the night and drunkenly eating McDonald’s. Cruising around, the two talked and played music, Tom texting all the while and trying to get through to Sarah.

  ‘Tom was expressing frustration that he couldn’t get in touch with Sarah, wasn’t he?’ said Thomas.

  ‘Yes.’

  Again, Ryan objected and again Thomas deferred. Next he brought up the text message Tom sent to Sarah saying they could pick her up.

  ‘You would have gone and picked her up if you had gotten a call from her?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘Yes,’ said Olivia.

  A good friend, I thought, as I watched her wringing her small hands, listening carefully to the questions.

  To finish, Thomas asked Olivia about the phone call she had received from Sarah around 11 a.m. the next day.

  ‘The first thing she told you was that she had a $40 cab ride home?’ said Thomas.

  ‘Yes.’

  Nice, I thought, glancing over at Justin. How very kind of you.

  *

  It’s not during the act, it’s the way you treat them after it. Most of them could have been avoided if they had’ve put them in a cab and said, you know, thanks for that, sort of thing, not just kicked her out, call her a dirty whatever, that sort of thing. It’s how you treat them afterwards that can cover a lot of that sort of stuff up.

  When ‘Code of Silence’ aired footage of a young Newcastle Knights player saying this during an NRL education session, he was howled down in the aftermath. The outrage was anticipated by the program’s reporter, Sarah Ferguson, who drily noted, ‘The NRL says it is making progress but judging by the final answer from this young player on recent scandals involving group sex, they still have a long way to go.’

  For many, this comment epitomised the issue, illustrating that rugby players are a bunch of buffoons who think that being nice to a woman after raping her will head off any problems. And indeed this is a defence that has been put forward in well-publicised cases to explain rape allegations. During the trial of the world champion boxer Mike Tyson, his lawyer contended that the complainant took action not because she was raped, but because Tyson said she could either walk home or take a limousine immediately after sex. The lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, continued:

  This woman came on as a groupie. Everybody knows what the rules are for groupies who hang around famous athletes and rock stars. They get 15 or 20 minutes of not very good sex, no kiss goodnight, no telephone number, no appreciation. All they get are bragging rights – ‘I slept with the champ.’

  But is this what the inarticulate twenty-year-old rugby player was trying to say – that you could cover up a rape with a few nice words and a taxi fare home? His club didn’t think so.

  The Knights’ chief executive, Steve Burraston, said in the player’s defence: ‘I understand he was responding to something that they had actually been taught in the training module, and it was along the lines of: if you’ve gone back and had a relationship with a girl, don’t throw her out there; make sure that she gets home; treat her with respect; if you’re drunk, don’t drive, put her in a taxi and make sure she gets home.’

  Justin had said he wanted to make sure Sarah got a taxi home. So does he get a gold star on his Respect & Responsibility test? Hardly. Sure, he offered to walk her to Clarendon Street, but was this so-called gentlemanly act simply a strategy to get laid? Did he see what was on offer in the house and want a piece of the action: first in the alley, and second by ‘sharing a cab’ and directing it to his place – on the opposite side of town to Sarah’s – where she then, sticking to her word that she wanted to go home, found herself paying for an extra ten kilometres?

  It could be said that a fair amount of strategising goes into most sexual encounters, but Justin’s doggedness makes me uneasy. His asking to be finished off, his decision to have the cab drive to his home first, and then getting Sarah to promise to come over the next afternoon – there was something rotten about this persistence. By his own account it was clear Sarah had had enough. But he wou
ldn’t respect that. He kept pressing. He stayed close.

  And why did he say to her, after they left the alleyway, ‘You’re not going to tell the police Collingwood raped you, are you?’ Just how ‘off-the-cuff’ was that? Did he say it because she was upset – and if so, why was she upset? And if she was upset and had obviously had enough, why did he persist in trying to get her to go home with him? Did he think she was a spittoon for one boy after another to come in? After all, he hadn’t managed to finish the job with her in the alley – did he now want another chance?

  Why didn’t he see her as fully human?

  And yet – again by his own account – Justin was better behaved than the other young men in the house that night. After having their way with her, none showed any inclination to see her home (seeing her to the front door seemed hard enough), let alone phoned the next day to check if she was okay. But then again, would Justin have offered to see her home if he’d managed to have sex with her in the house alongside the others?

  Justin wasn’t thinking of Sarah so much as he was thinking of how to leverage off his mates, how to get in on the act. He was thinking about scoring. He was hardly a gentleman. But by whose standards should we judge him?

  Burraston said of the Knights player, ‘He didn’t articulate it very well, and that’s the danger.’ By ‘danger,’ did the CEO mean that all of us – players, critics, support staff, fans, spokespeople, academics, feminists, the media – keep getting confused over what we’re talking about?

  Is it rape, or is it treating women like shit? Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, an anonymous NRL player had said that, ‘Players get a lot of attention from girls in the clubs because they’ve got a high profile. That’s not the players’ fault. Most of the time the girl goes back willingly and consents to everything, but sometimes regrets it when she wakes up in the morning and says, “I didn’t want that to happen,” and that’s when the problems start. I don’t know one single guy in the NRL who would resort to holding a woman down against her will or raping her, and nobody would condone that. I do see what they’re saying about risk; you just never know how a girl’s going to react afterwards. You’re not supposed to say it publicly, but everyone knows that if you’re polite afterwards and pay her cab fare home you usually don’t have any problems.’

  Could that be true? That jumping on the Xbox after consensually gangbanging a girl, or high-fiving others in the room and letting the woman make her own way out, could motivate her to make a rape allegation?

  If young men are going to be educated about rape and consent, as the AFL and NRL are trying to do, then they need to be taught about respect and decent behaviour as well – before, during and after sex – and not have their adolescent attempts to struggle through the nuances of relationships subjected to jibes from those who think everything about sex is obvious.

  *

  In 2004, Dr Angela Williams helped to develop the program about respect for women within AFL football clubs – and spent two years in the league’s clubrooms, talking to players about her work and their relationships with women.

  ‘It was momentous when Andrew Demetriou publicly asked all women who felt they’d been assaulted by a football player to come forward,’ she recalled, adding that the AFL was one of the first organisations in Australia to have a program for men about the abuse of women. ‘Traditionally we’ve always spoken to women.’

  In hindsight this seemed obvious, but it still came as a revelation to me. I thought about all the sexual assault awareness education fed to schools – it was as if only half of the job was being done. How to avoid being raped, not how to avoid being a rapist. Except that many complaints to police and calls to rape crisis centres revealed something different – girls are being raped at parties, on dates, by men they meet on a nightclub dance floor, by their peers. And when these perpetrators are called to account, their jaw drops. They’re not guilty, most say.

  To be guilty, do you have to have some idea of doing something wrong? And here we may be starting from a long way back. During the same NRL education session for the Newcastle Knights, the educators attempted to reveal to the players how a sexual act they might consider to be consensual could well be rape.

  A DVD showed a drunk woman going home with two men, drinking with them in the kitchen, all three having a great time (during our conversation Williams made the point that while a woman may be thinking ‘safety in numbers’ going back to a house with a guy and his mates, the men may be thinking, ‘Oh, we’re all going to get a go’).

  The woman in the video agrees to have sex with one of them, who then ducks out of the bedroom, pulling up his trousers and gesturing to his mate to take over. The camera cuts to the woman coming out of the bedroom in a teary rage, pulling her clothes back on, yelling at the first guy, ‘I thought it was you.’

  After the film, the group had a discussion. ‘She put out first,’ said one of the young players, another adding that she had flirted with both of them.

  Then a second DVD was shown, revealing a couple of men getting drunk together and getting along. One man helps the other man – now extremely drunk – back to his apartment and has sex with him. In the morning, the victim wakes up, puts on his clothes and rushes out of the apartment, immediately on his phone to a sexual health clinic.

  A moaning male angst soundtrack played while the watching players’ eyes went moist, their lips parting slightly. When the film finished, the group was silent.

  The teacher asked how they thought the man might be feeling.

  ‘Shattered,’ said one player.

  Another piped up, ‘You don’t really ask for trouble if you have too much to drink and get raped by a bloke. You don’t ask for that.’

  ‘Can we see that there’s some sort of double standard that may apply here?’ said Mark O’Neill, the former rugby league player running the seminar. It was an interesting tactic – playing on homophobia to convey a point about treating women properly – and yet it was difficult to be sure the young players understood the two-way street they were being taken down. You could see their brows crease as they tried to get their heads around it.

  *

  At a panel on pornography at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, the writer Kate Holden, a former sex worker, recounted an incident at a brothel she had worked in when two young men, ‘somewhere over eighteen and under twenty,’ requested to come on her face.

  ‘What we’d really like to do is ejaculate on your face.’ Holden recalled them saying. ‘I said, “Oh, I don’t think so.”’

  ‘But wouldn’t you like it?’ they replied.

  ‘I said, “Well, not a lot, why would you think I would enjoy that?”’

  ‘We’ve seen lots of porn movies – you know, the money shot.’

  ‘Well, apart from the fact I’d have to redo all my make-up, there are sexual health issues … and it’s just not a very nice thing to do.’

  In pornography, the women tend to be ecstatic to have men ejaculate on their faces – but they’re acting. These two customers, explained Holden, were not yet able to differentiate between life and porn. She went on to say that in the majority of her experiences, both at work and in her everyday life, she found men were more likely to be stupid in bed than malign. ‘I think very few people understand how many men are kind of cretinous in bed, but it’s out of ignorance rather than spite.’

  But this court case is not about ignorance, is it? It’s about rape. Surely the two things are not the same? And I guess here is where the complicated clause in a conviction of rape comes in – was the accused aware that the victim was not or might not be consenting or was he indifferent either way? In the bedroom, did the guys believe Sarah was consenting? Did they care? And in the laneway?

  CHAPTER 18

  ‘They want to go where their teammates have been before them,’ Charmyne Palavi wrote in the Daily Telegraph in
2009 of the rugby players who contacted her for sex, adding that anyone who thought the gangbang culture was going to change ‘just because the story’s out there … are kidding themselves.’

  ‘Code of Silence’ had introduced Palavi to the nation, a forty-year-old Brisbane woman who ran a tanning salon and sought out the company of footballers. The media quickly dubbed her ‘the cougar’ and a spate of racy tabloid headlines was created in her honour. ‘Cougar bags fresh trophies,’ read one.

  In the Telegraph, Palavi continued:

  I was messaging a young player, a Facebook friend, last week and asked what he was doing. He replied: ‘Learning how to respect women. LOL (laugh out loud).’

  I wrote back: ‘Yeah, and I’m still a virgin.’

  Critics of footballers’ behaviour towards women tend to think of the players as acting out in ‘normal’ heterosexual scenarios, but the reality is that for many, this is not the case. Footballers may find themselves in a world – and get used to this world – where the ‘normal’ barriers to consent don’t exist.

  *

  When the rape allegations against Stephen Milne were raised in 2004, the former AFL footballer and coach Tim Watson wrote an opinion piece in the Age:

  Count the number of people you have heard say in the past 24 hours, ‘If there was going to be an AFL club involved in a sex scandal it had to be St Kilda.’

  An AFL coach told me only hours after the Saints’ story broke of a club trip to the country in the past six weeks. Upon arrival the coach spelt it out to the players they were on a training trip and that even though they would be socialising at different stages, alcohol was prohibited.

  On the first night in the town, the players and officials were welcomed at a function where the players mingled with the locals. A couple of girls made it clear to everyone that they were keen to attract the attention of a couple of the players. One girl was so convinced of her intentions she sidled up to the coach to explain to him what she planned to do later in the night to one of his players.