by Anna Krien
‘This kid is seventeen, and she’s talking about drugs, alcohol and sex,’ said a holier-than-thou Neil Mitchell.
Each time the AFL urged the media not to feed on the teenager, the governing football body was accused of trying to sweep her under the carpet. The Herald Sun ran a story headlined ‘Tortured Teen in a Bloke’s World’ accompanied by a photo of Duthie, her back to the camera, leaning against a graffitied wall.
‘Jane, now 17, is articulate, intelligent and beautiful. She is tough, but to adults she likes, polite,’ read the text beneath the photo.
Proclaiming to be speaking on behalf of all women mistreated by footballers, Duthie attended St Kilda’s first training session and threw flimsy placards on the ground that read ‘St Scandal,’ ‘HU$H,’ ‘AFL (All Fucking Lies.)’ and ‘Respect: Can you spell that for me AFL?’ Female columnists wrote about her ‘chutzpah,’ while older journalists reported wide-eyed on her ability to text, tweet, film and take photos on her assortment of mobile phones.
Journalists just couldn’t help it. They were addicted to her, and she to them. On his blog, the broadcaster Derryn Hinch related for his readers a meeting he had had with Ricky Nixon, the manager of the footballers caught up in the drama. Nixon had ‘repeatedly, and piously, expressed his concerns for the girl’s wellbeing’ before handing Hinch an editorial he had drafted for him to read out on 3AW, imploring the media to cease covering the story in the interests of Duthie’s welfare. It had even been signed off with ‘I’m Derryn Hinch,’ the renowned radio host’s signature tagline. But it was how Nixon wound up the meeting that Hinch says shocked him. ‘Any man would want to eff her,’ Nixon said.
‘About ten days later, she says he did,’ wrote Hinch.
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For all the new measures the AFL had put in place – its Respect & Responsibility policy and protocols for players and clubs – the league hadn’t factored in a sixteen-year-old being ridiculed by a bunch of well-paid young men, their older colleagues, support staff and fans, let alone her childish revenge.
They most certainly hadn’t factored in the ‘honey trap’ the teenager set, with the help of a Herald Sun journalist, for Ricky Nixon. In the months before, Nixon had made a complaint about Duthie to police, saying she had turned up at his office with a water bottle filled with vodka, demanding money for the Riewoldt photos (Nixon was his manager), and that she had tried to strip in his office. Nixon said he took photos of her on his mobile phone to protect himself. Obviously treasuring the photos well beyond his police complaint, Nixon had shown these photos to Derryn Hinch.
A week later, Duthie released footage of Nixon’s alleged coke-snorting habits and their affair – Nixon himself appearing in his undies in her hotel room, accommodation paid for by St Kilda Football Club – to the media. She was applauded. ‘You’re amazing,’ gushed radio host Kate Langbroek. ‘We salute you.’ Miranda Devine, now at the Daily Telegraph, called her ‘an Avenging Angel.’ Meanwhile, Nixon, protesting his innocence, in a voice quivering with self-pity, said on radio, ‘This is the thanks I get,’ claiming he had been helping Duthie with her ‘life plan’ after talking to her parents to offer his help in counselling her.
He did eventually admit to visiting the teenager at her hotel room on at least three occasions – including Valentine’s Day – although he denied they had sex. It was football at its trashiest, and it dirtied everyone – from players, to agents, to coaches, to league head honchos – Nixon was, after all, a friend of the AFL’s chief executive, Andrew Demetriou – to fans and, finally, to the media, which had built the game up to be larger than life, only to drag it down. And so when, amid the headiness of the Nixon saga, Duthie appeared on 60 Minutes (the Channel 9 show is believed to have paid her a five-figure sum) and told the reporter Liz Hayes that she had never been pregnant, it was as if a spell had been lifted and everyone was naked, muddied and a little bit ashamed.
‘I don’t know why I did it,’ she said. ‘I was a stupid immature little teenager.’ The convincing photos she had put on the internet of her holding her pregnant belly were fake. In one photo Duthie’s eyes are wide and she has her hand over her mouth in mock-horror. She is wearing a bra and St Kilda footy shorts. Oops, her expression says, look who got me pregnant! It now appears that she made herself look pregnant by sucking air into her very elastic abdomen.
To make matters worse, Andrew Demetriou subtly chastised journalists when he revealed on air that he had been aware that something wasn’t quite right about the girl’s claim. ‘I was led to believe through some of our other investigations that that may have been the case [she was not pregnant] but as you know … there has been a number of occasions whereby this young girl has said things that have proven to be incorrect and that’s why we’ve chosen all along … to act responsibly and not play this out through the media,’ he told 3AW. The media lapsed into an uneasy silence, and the clamour to write the definitive piece on the St Kilda Schoolgirl was over.
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Kimberley Duthie was never going to be a heroine for women’s rights, for taking on the big boys at the AFL. In fact, she turned out to be the opposite, reinforcing the archaic stereotype of a lying female. But what was interesting was how much the public wanted her to be. And in this sense, Duthie became the weapon for other people’s misgivings about football.
‘This is not a story about Ricky Nixon per se,’ Andrew Demetriou said at a press conference. ‘This is a story about a girl – a child – and we are concerned about her welfare.’
When asked if Nixon’s behaviour had tarnished the league, Demetriou shook his head. ‘I repeat, Ricky Nixon doesn’t speak for the AFL,’ he said. ‘The AFL is an organisation that everyone knows, full well, knows through me, on numerous occasions what our view is on our Respect & Responsibility program and how we dearly, dearly, treasure shifting the attitude of people towards women in our industry.’
And indeed the league itself had tried its hardest with Duthie, offering her and her family support as well as being in contact with the Education Department, the Department of Human Services, welfare support services and Victoria Police about her welfare. But the problem was that while the AFL may well have done the right thing by Duthie, it was too late. The St Kilda players, their club and their manager had already done the damage.
At the very inception of her pregnancy lie, a manipulative ploy turned placebo test for the boys, Duthie said Sam Gilbert stopped returning her calls. The team’s skipper told her to ‘Fuck off, you slag’ and another player sent her a text message urging her to kill herself. The club’s management had brought her in and coached her on what to say to police investigating whether the players had acted inappropriately at her school. After she released the photos, the club threatened a lawsuit, while Ricky Nixon extended the bullying arm, making threatening remarks to Duthie’s school principal and showing the photos of the semi-undressed Duthie in his office to anyone who’d look.
Nixon, before checking himself into rehab, continued to deny having an affair with the teenager, saying only that he’d had ‘inappropriate dealings’ with her. He told the Australian that he was ‘struggling with the shock of being set up. I feel sick how it’s all being discussed, but I’ll try to hang in.’
The AFL Players Association, responsible for accrediting managers, ran an investigation into Nixon, headed up by none other than David Galbally, while Nixon’s agency teetered on collapse as players began a mass exodus. The association’s report, which was leaked to the press, quoted Nick Riewoldt saying he would like to ‘punch his lights out’ if the accounts of his manager’s relationship with Duthie proved to be true.
Nixon’s accreditation was suspended for two years and his marriage ended. In March 2013 he was found guilty of charges unrelated to the Duthie episode, including holding his (now ex-) fiancé against her will, threatening her with a kitchen knife and resisting arrest.
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&n
bsp; What Kimberley Duthie now aspires to is a mystery. When she was fifteen, she was the youngest mountain runner selected to represent Australia in Italy and became the Under 18 national champion. An interstate competitor for hurdles, long jump, high jump and running, she was a naïve schoolgirl who ate, trained, studied and slept. Then suddenly she was living in hotels paid for by St Kilda Football Club as part of a deal struck on the condition that she make a public apology and delete the photos she posted on the internet. She was also to issue a statement that the players involved with her met her socially after a match and not at her school.
In eighteen months, she had tested and stretched the plastic tape of child protection around her, like a hatchling just out of its shell – and predators were quick to detect her nubile vulnerability.
A 34-year-old police constable who arrested the teenager for shoplifting was suspended and charged with twelve offences, including sexual penetration of a seventeen-year-old under his care. The prosecution claimed the constable rang the girl’s father and said he would introduce her to programs for troubled teens. Ricky Nixon, too, had offered to ‘help’ her.
And yet, Kimberley Duthie had caught football’s dark side off-guard.
This is what the club repeatedly failed to understand in its dealings with her. She was a top athlete when she first met the St Kilda players, and while she was flattered by their attentions, she wanted more than to be their sexual plaything. Duthie wanted to be one of them. When she was cut off from the team, this highly competitive teenager had her first inkling of the limitations of her sex – and so she broke the rule that bonds all football players. What happens on the footy trip stays on the footy trip.
CHAPTER 20
I bought a watery hot chocolate from the red-brick cafeteria and wandered down the steps onto the Box Hill oval where people, mostly women and girls rugged up in beanies and coats, were mucking around, kicking footballs to one another while two teams were warming up near the goal posts. The teams had jogged out of the change rooms and through a line of cheering supporters before dissolving into lunges and squats.
It was the Victorian Women’s Football League’s grand final and the ground was filling up with spectators. It had taken me half an hour to find a park for my car, all the while stopping for groups of girls as they crossed the highway. I’d caught the tail end of the reserves’ grand final and winced as the two teams scrambled clumsily for the ball. Their kicks were messy and the tackles slow. I wondered if I should avoid writing about women’s footy if it turned out not to be that great. The siren sounded.
I watched as volunteers in the box behind the scoreboard manually removed the numbers and replaced them with zeroes. It was time for the top teams in the premier league, the Darebin Falcons and Diamond Creek, to clash. I drained the dregs of my drink in its Styrofoam cup as the players faced off, the ball held aloft in the centre square by the umpire. On the bounce the girls sprang forward, fingers outstretched.
They were good. Long-limbed and athletic, when they stormed past the railing, the sound was like a thunder of hooves at the races. The tackles were fast, players hitting the ground with a thwack as the crowd flinched and then roared with approval. And the kicks – the odd tongue poking out of the side of the mouth in concentration, a neat drop on the foot – were clean.
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‘When we played our first game, the senior male football players at the club made a real day of it,’ said Debbie Lee, president of the Victorian Women’s Football League. ‘They hired a portable spa and set it up at the railings where they drank and laughed at us.’ It was 1991 and Lee had started up a female football team in Sunshine, in Melbourne’s west. She was nineteen. ‘People thought that I wanted to prove something, that I wanted to beat men, but I loved footy. I wanted to play.’
Lee wasn’t the only woman who wanted to play Aussie Rules, or the first. She showed me a photograph from 1918 of a female football team, wearing striped jumpers and caps, baggy shorts, long socks and leather boots, their arms folded. ‘There is actually a history of women’s footy,’ she said – and I suddenly thought about all those female spectators in their long dresses and umbrellas secretly yearning to run onto the oval, to throw their bodies around freely and take a mark. Indeed, in 1876, according to a magazine published by a Melbourne private school, one girl was ‘bold enough to suggest’ that a football club be formed for girls because she saw how much ‘fun, enjoyment and excitement’ the boys got out of the game.
But for the most part, these early games of footy were a piss-take. Males wore dresses to umpire while footage of a fundraising game between the Newport Aircraft Girls and the Railway Girls during World War II was accompanied by comments such as ‘Goody goody!’, ‘Oh, Grace forgot her lipstick!’ and, lastly, ‘This game is to prove that a women’s place is in the home.’
Even so, girls and women persisted.
In 2003, three schoolgirls took Football Victoria to court for the right to keep playing football as they had reached the cut-off age for females to compete in their local competition. Their action forced the hand of the league, which then set up a competition for female teenagers. Participation has grown across the league from 20,000 females in 2005 to almost 95,000 in 2012. The AFL’s tagline is: ‘You kick like a girl. Good for you!’
But of course, to many in the game, females playing footy is a joke. In the early nineties, Debbie Lee and a few other female players were invited on The Footy Show. Naïvely, they accepted. ‘But the panellists just wanted to take the piss,’ recalled Lee. ‘They asked about our breasts and about the “blood rule.” I just had to play along.’
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‘Do you think the standard of female footy could reach that of men’s, at least at a VFL level?’
‘No.’
‘Not even in fifty years?’
‘No.’
‘One hundred years?’
‘No.’
Ian Aitken shook his head at me. He was amused. ‘What does it matter?’ he asked. ‘I’m not being sexist, it’s the reality of it, but that’s not to take away from the fact that participation is growing.’ A former VFL football player, he was most famous for playing in the ‘Battle of Britain,’ a showcase Aussie Rules game in England in 1987 that turned into a bloodbath. (‘The spectators thought it was hilarious,’ he recalled. ‘At half-time, they were allowed on the oval to have a go and they just jumped on whoever had the ball and punched them. That’s how they figured the game was played.’) Now Aitken coaches footy teams, among them both an Under 16 and Under 12 girls.
I tried one more time. ‘Are you sure? I mean, it’s not just about a single generation of females, is it?’ Aitken looked even more bemused, but I kept going. ‘We’ve only been truly free to play sport, to be physical, for about fifty years, so females have got a lot of catching up in terms of strength and muscle to do, don’t you think? We probably haven’t even reached our potential yet.’
I described a series of photos I’d seen showing how girls started out throwing a ball just like boys, but over time they started to use less space and shrink their movement, while the boys continued to use their entire bodies and take up all the space they needed. Sure, there were biological differences between us, I said, but many were also cultural.
Aitken shook his head. ‘What does it matter?’ he asked again. ‘The girls are having fun, who cares if they’ll ever be as good as the guys?’
I slumped. He was right – they’re having fun, what does anything else matter? And I knew it was unrealistic to contemplate women playing football at AFL level in the near future, but I kept thinking about the Nicky Winmar moment – that defiant and proud act of pulling up his football jersey and pointing to his black skin. His presence, his agency – it was purely physical and yet he demanded respect. Could there ever be a Winmar moment for females in football?
‘It’s an intoxicating feeling,’ Ton
y Wilson had said to me. ‘To execute a play, to control the ball and your opponent. It’s a feeling that will not be repeated in any other area of my life. Everything else is nuanced, but football was simple and it was something I did really well.’
I felt a surge of anger when he said this, and said, somewhat stupidly, ‘We get that feeling too.’ He looked confused. ‘Women do,’ I said. ‘Women get that feeling too when they play sport. That sixth sense of knowing where everything is.’
Wilson shrugged. ‘Great,’ he said, his brow creased. ‘So what sport did you play?’
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Both football leagues, the AFL and NRL, are trying to change their cultures, to instil a respect for women in their players and the broader community – but can they? Is it possible for women to have a Nicky Winmar moment in football if they remain on the sidelines? Surely this is an issue much bigger than football, an issue that saw the Australian women’s basketball team flying to the 2012 London Olympics in economy while the men’s team flew business class (it had been hoped that 2012 would be the first Games in which women athletes would be fielded by all participating countries, but such hopes were dashed).
But even if women’s sport is often trivialised, is the liberating power of playing sport really diminished? Would getting equal pay, equal crowds, equal media coverage make the world a better place?
And what if the likes of Kimberley Duthie were respected by footballers for their athleticism? Would they change jock culture, or become a part of it?
And a final question, one that perhaps underlies all of this – if women get stronger, do men get weaker? In Women and Sports, the American writer Janice Kaplan wrote about the 1978 cliff-diving championships, a competition held annually in Mexico. That year, however, a Texan woman had qualified for the finals and the male participants threatened to withdraw if she did not. She was subsequently disqualified.