by Anna Krien
The team left the function as a group and went back to the hotel without the adoring fans. At 2am they were woken up by loud banging on doors by the girls from the function. A senior player eventually convinced the girls they were in the wrong place and that they should head home.
Wow, I thought on first reading Watson’s piece, that must have been ‘scary’ for the boys. And I wasn’t the only one who reacted badly. ‘Some AFL blokes don’t know there’s a difference between sex and rape,’ wrote Phil Cleary, a commentator and former footballer, on Online Opinion.
Seemingly oblivious of the circumstances of the present case, Watson recounted the antics of amorous women in the football subculture. Yet, strangely, none of the examples he offered had anything to do with rape.
With this simple sleight of hand Watson unwittingly reinforced many of the prejudices that beset women who ‘cry rape.’ Suddenly the alleged perpetrator had become the victim, and it was women who were implicated in, if not blamed for, allegations of rape. After all, how can young footballers avoid an allegation of rape when women are banging at their door at 2am?
Cleary went on to write:
Tim, this isn’t a ‘sex scandal.’ A sex scandal is Charles having it off with Camilla, or Lady Di with the butler. A woman who alleges sexual assault is claiming to have been the victim of an act of criminal violence.
The timing of Watson’s piece was irrefutably bad – but it said, no doubt, what many inside and outside the game were thinking: that a rape allegation could just as easily be reinterpreted as a sex scandal. And that different rules apply to the world of football when it comes to sex.
To a degree, this is true. Tony Wilson recalled being wide-eyed as high-profile players told him about bedding 100 women in a year, keeping tally cards and sharing girls. Wilson said that in no other part of society did he encounter the same sense of competition when it came to women.
‘Maybe at high school,’ he conceded, ‘but the ease of access for these players was …’ Wilson trailed off, wonder still evident on his face. ‘In all other interactions in my life, women were the regulating factor. The moderating factor is the handbrake that women put on male sexuality. Perhaps that’s a sexist comment, but that’s how it appeared to me. At the footy club, however, there was a horde of women that wanted to sleep with footballers, and vice versa. It was, in large part, symbiotic.’
But should the prevalence of groupies and allegations of rape be part of the same conversation? Are groupies complicit in promoting a rape culture? Wilson shrugged and said he didn’t know the answers to those questions, but what he did know was that the ‘normal consent filters were definitely jeopardised.’
‘If Buddy Franklin were sitting here on his own for two hours,’ he waved his hand at the empty café seats around us, ‘the opportunity to have sex would have arisen, no doubt. But for the rest of us, you need to find an interested partner. And footballers are creatures of habit, they’re repetitive, you learn a pattern in the game, an agreed framework, and it’s the same with sexual encounters, and these are situations where the normal barriers are not put up by women, and so any exception to their norm would be difficult for them to understand, which is where they’re getting into trouble. If an encounter is ever not the same, there’ll be trouble.’
The words of Mike Tyson’s lawyer came back to me. Everybody knows what the rules are for groupies who hang around famous athletes and rock stars.
And if you don’t know the rules? What about the nineteen-year-old girl in New Zealand whose hotel room just kept filling up with more and more players – was she coached beforehand about these rules? And Sarah?
‘I don’t know what her problem is,’ said an unnamed woman to a reporter after the second Canterbury Bulldogs rape allegations in Coffs Harbour. Having been involved in many a ‘club bun,’ the woman continued, ‘I always had a great time.’
I guess Sarah’s ‘problem’ was that she didn’t know the rules.
Writing in the Guardian in 2004 under the pseudonym ‘Amanda Hughes,’ a woman described her experiences as a football groupie in England, catching ‘the bug’ when she was eighteen years old and feeling the thrill of a player – a man whose name millions were wearing on the backs of their T-shirts – writing down her phone number, a thrill often exceeding five-minute drunken fumbles or one dropping his trousers and saying, ‘Suck it.’
‘Once you were in a player’s room he would encourage you to allow his mates to join in,’ wrote Hughes. ‘I never understood why – the argument seemed to be that it was “only fair” that they have the same as he was having. I cringe to think of it … But if I’m honest it wasn’t the footballer’s behaviour that upset me – it was the fact that I was complicit in it, that I said nothing to challenge them. I let the cycle continue.’
There’s talk of players now filming gangbang encounters on their mobile phones, not just for a laugh and to show around, but also to prove that ‘she,’ whatever her name is, was consenting – that she was ‘up for it.’ Some of these players will point to a smile on the girl’s face in their footage, and say, ‘See! See!’
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During Charmyne Palavi’s interview on Four Corners’ ‘Code of Silence,’ she described an encounter with a player in which he showed her a video on his phone that he and his teammates had made of getting head from some ‘slurry from around Cronulla.’ He told her they had videoed it to prove she’d consented.
‘And that freaked me out,’ said Palavi. ‘This girl was actually in her twenties and [he] told me what they did to her. He said they made her put bunny ears on ’cause Easter’s coming up and made her give head to all of the players one after the other.’
‘Code of Silence’ had made a link between groupies and rape, albeit one that was difficult to define.
Sarah Ferguson: If some young footballers mistakenly think all women want to have sex with them, Charmyne Palavi is one who doesn’t necessarily discourage the idea.She’s getting ready for a night on the town with her girlfriends, applying the finishing touches, bronzer to her legs.
In the interview, Palavi spoke about pursuing footballers for sex and allowing her Facebook page to be used by players and girls to hook up. In practically the same breath, she said that an NRL player had raped her when she drank too much, but the impression given was that this bad experience hadn’t put her off. As she talked, a string of text messages popped up on her phone. She showed them to Ferguson, who was taken aback. Viewers got the impression that they were mostly from rugby players, and mostly pictures of their dicks.
In the aftermath of ‘Code of Silence’ Palavi was hung out to dry. Three days later, the radio host Steve Price discussed the show on air with the reporter Peter Ford. They soon got on to the subject of Palavi.
Ford: … that lady Charmyne Palavi –
Price: Yes.
Ford: – who sets herself up as some kind of matchmaker or madam or something. Now she claims that –
Price: Can I use another word?
Ford: Yeah.
Price: Slut.
Palavi sought damages for defamation from Price and 2UE. But after two years of legal wrangling and a trial which largely consisted of scrutinising Palavi’s sexual relationships with footballers, which the defence submitted as proof of the truth of claims that she was a slut, the jury took just twenty minutes to throw out the case, siding – and essentially agreeing – with Price’s label.
The jury, as is required, simply reflects the common man and woman.
Not long after ‘Code of Silence’ aired, Palavi lashed out at her critics and her portrayal on the program. ‘If you believed Four Corners,’ she wrote, ‘I’m supposed to be the NRL’s biggest groupie, a wannabe WAG who dresses up, heads out to clubs and hunts down players to have sex with.’
‘I’m no angel,’ she continued, ‘but I’ve seen this game play out
from both sides: First as the partner of a pro footballer for nine years, then as a single woman who can have sex whenever, with whomever, I choose. I am old enough and wise enough to know these encounters are nothing more than what they were at the time – mostly consensual, one-on-one sex, on my terms.’
She went on to describe ‘real’ groupies, writing that, ‘They know where they go out after games, where they stay, when they are in town, with many booking themselves into the same hotels as the teams. I’ve got one girlfriend in Brisbane who sits down at the beginning of the year with the NRL draw and works out where she’s going to follow them (North Queensland Cowboys) for the year.’
Palavi, however, saw herself not as a star-struck groupie, but rather as a woman in control of her sexuality, a woman with agency. So is Palavi an empowered woman, purely interested in the physical and catering to her desires? Does she have power, as Roy Masters suggested, during a ‘group sex’ encounter with players? ‘When the girl is giving them marks for degree of difficulty,’ he wrote, ‘like dives being scored off the high-board, she is the one with the power in the room.’
Is this the ideal scenario, where the lone female is one of the humiliators, not the humiliated? Or is she simply a ‘loophole’ woman, as Ariel Levy put it in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: a woman who may ‘be the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior’? Has Palavi fallen for a ruse of empowerment, only to find herself complicit in a male subculture that refers to women as ‘meat’ and ‘buns’?
When Sarah Ferguson asked what the appeal of footballers was, Palavi replied, ‘They’ve just got really good bodies.’ So, by objectifying players’ bodies, has the ‘cougar’ levelled the playing field? Hardly. In a discussion about the large number of female fans at AFL games on ABC’s Radio National fifteen years ago, the feminist historian Dr Margaret Lindley refused to make a comparison between the sexual objectification of women and female fans perving on footballers. ‘A footballer is not a stationary object,’ said Lindley, ‘and not being stationary is actually very important.’ She continued:
A moving object that is powerful, that is surging, and that moreover is moving not for the sake of the observers – none of those players are moving for our sake, for our pleasure, they are doing something for their own, their team’s purposes. And to some degree they are completely oblivious of us. They may hear us, but they’re not performing for us in some sense … Now if you take the strip show: a woman or a man in a strip show is a posed object, even when they move. Every move is designed not to express themselves, their energy, their goals, their motives, but simply to – ‘I think you will be pleased if I move in this way.’
Women who seek out footballers to fuck aren’t equal – and it’s not necessarily because of the fucking. It’s their level of commitment to the cause, the preening and seeking, that gives it away. They’re not the same, they’re mirrors for the players to check themselves out in. As Virginia Woolf wrote in 1928,
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
A footballer does not look at another human when he fucks a groupie. He’s looking at his glorified reflection – and when he performs, he’s doing it for ‘the boys,’ not her.
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Justin’s offering to see Sarah home was opportunistic. There was something rotten, something off, and perhaps something naïve too, about his persistence. Of that much I can be certain. But the rest is murky. Treating women like shit shades into a culture of abuse, which in turn can shade into rape.
CHAPTER 19
In America, Savannah Dietrich felt betrayed when the court offered what she considered a lenient plea bargain to the two teenagers who had assaulted her. Ignoring a gag order, she went public – a stance that saw the defendants’ lawyers file a contempt of court charge, which they quickly withdrew as the public raged in support of her. The court was also caught unawares by the attention and the plea bargain was altered, albeit minutely. But it was enough for Dietrich: the public support she found via social media and the judicial process (not the result) saw her emerge from her experience with an unexpected power. Of her case, Amanda Hess wrote in the online magazine Slate:
the criminal justice process can also rob the victim of control over her own narrative. Reporting to official channels often means keeping quiet in social ones. But here, Dietrich is the editor of her own story. She has the power to delete the comments she doesn’t like and promote the ones she does. Thanks to a few brave tweets, a 17-year-old rape victim is now curating an international conversation about sexual assault in America.
Sound familiar?
Kimberley Duthie is an Australian teenager whose name, by law, no one ought to have known. And while the differences between Dietrich and Duthie are stark – the American teenager was astoundingly clear about her motives in going public, refused all offers of finance and was supported by her family, while Duthie was confused and naïve, her motives murky – both sought to regain their power and voice through the social media, challenging the channels that stifled them.
The fuse was lit in May 2010 with claims that a sixteen-year-old had slept with two St Kilda footballers who visited her school, had a relationship with a 23-year-old player, Sam Gilbert, and was now pregnant. When she confided in her school principal, the principal immediately reported her claim to the Education Department and the police. It didn’t take long for the news to get around. And while investigating police later asserted that contact had come after the school visit and no charges would be laid, it was too late. Word had spread far beyond St Kilda Football Club, through the AFL, the Victorian police force and, finally, to the media.
Then, just days before Christmas, after newspapers refused to publish – the Herald Sun said they’d offered her counselling instead – the teenager posted online the photographs of three St Kilda footballers, dubbed ‘Dickileaks.’
The captain, Nick Riewoldt, is naked and shrugging comically as a younger player, Zac Dawson, holds a condom wrapper close to his penis. It looks like a photo with a ‘before’ story, but at a press conference Riewoldt solemnly assured the public that he had just woken up and was snapped as he got out of bed. In the second photo, mid-fielder Nick Dal Santo is lying on a bed, holding his penis as if in preparation for a wank. And although the teenager claimed she had taken them, it was said – and later confirmed – that the players took these photos of each other while on a footy trip in Miami.
The lawyer Ross Levin, St Kilda’s club vice-president, threatened to tie the teenager up in litigation for the next fifteen years of her life. A Federal Court ruling appeared to resolve the matter, with the judge ordering the photos be removed, no others posted, and requiring the young woman and the club to undertake mediation.
Few observers acknowledged the eerie familiarity of the teenager’s choice of font for her Christmas e-card. Over the images she had typed in red italic font, Merry Christmas, Courtesy of the St Kilda School Girl! Duthie was referencing a viral email that had circulated after her principal went to the police, an email which made its way through the AFL Players Association, to present and past footballers, footy staff, online forums, various government departments, law firms and police officers.
Attached to the viral email was a photo of Duthie taken from her Facebook page. She was wearing black leggings and a St Kilda jersey cut off at the midriff. Someone had typed ‘The Saints Girl’ (in the same font Duthie used for her counterstrike) over the top. Also circulating was a digitally altered movie poster for Three Men and a Baby, with the actors’ heads replaced with those of the players believed to have slept with her.
The internet suddenly became Duthie’s schoolyard. ‘I just wanted you guys to feel how I felt,’ she later said of the photos.
‘I was not sleeping for days on end,’ she told the journalist Pet
er Munro. ‘I would just sit up on my laptop reading article after article about myself. I was just so obsessed with wanting to know what the world was saying about me and trying to defend myself at the same time.’
When she posted the photos, Duthie was holidaying with her parents in a Gold Coast motel room. By the time her parents settled in front of the television for the night, their daughter was on the evening news, bizarrely in a room that looked exactly like the room they were in. Scores of Australians watched as Duthie spoke to her laptop, manically tossing her long brown hair and answering her mobile phone to torrents of abuse.
‘Okay,’ she said feverishly, leaning into the video camera on her computer, ‘so everyone wants to know what I’m fucking really feeling like. I can’t even explain it. Do you know how fucking angry I am with everyone? Oh my god, I could fucking SCREAM.’
When Duthie flew into Melbourne airport, a media scrum was waiting. It was the same year that Kerri-Anne Kennerley warned footballers that they ‘put themselves in harm’s way by picking up strays.’ As Duthie approached the waiting media – dressed in shiny black heels, a black blazer over a short dress, a tattoo on the inside of her wrist like an entry stamp into a nightclub – it was as if the ‘stray’ had been conjured. Her parents – the teenager told reporters – had taken the bus home and she was not welcome to join them. The media hung on her every word, dutifully blurring her face, which just brought her young body in its skimpy clothing to the fore.
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The teenager’s Twitter feed grew to over 20,000 followers. Her blog, The Small Girl, With a Big Voice, became an online ‘go-to.’ On radio, men fought over whether she was a child or not, and whether it was illegal to sleep with her.