I’ll admit, when news broke about the Sydney Swans scandal, my mind immediately went in one direction.
Players invited lap dancers to their hotel room after a night of post-match celebrations. There were reports of lobby confrontations, secret recordings and eventually three women making police complaints.
Like many women, I had expected a swift announcement from police. Instead, we got silence.
When the story first broke, I knew exactly where I stood – along with plenty of other women. I believed the strippers had been wronged or disrespected in some way in that hotel room on the eighth floor.
My reaction was firmly ‘we ride at dawn,’ with a hint of ‘not today, Satan’.
Women recognised that typically Australian knee-jerk instinct to shield influential sportsmen caught in a scandal – and we weren’t having it. Not this time.
‘I’ll admit, when news broke about the Sydney Swans scandal, my mind immediately went in one direction,’ writes Daily Mail columnist Jana Hocking (pictured)
‘When the Swans stood down five players for the rest of the season, I took it as confirmation that my initial instinct was right,’ writes Jana. (Sydney Swans star Isaac Heeney is pictured with his fiancée Steffanie Walters)
To be fair, that anger didn’t come from nowhere. That same week, a woman was allegedly sexually assaulted while out walking in Brookfield, Queensland. Three 17-year-old boys were charged over the alleged sexual assault of a girl their age in Sydney’s south-west. Three younger Scots College boys faced charges after the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl in an eastern suburbs alley.
Women were exhausted, and the Swans case became a flashpoint. Despite my dislike of the word ‘triggered’, I have to admit it was justified here.
In the aftermath of the hotel story, I wasn’t simply a detached observer. I was furious, and I thought I knew exactly how it would play out.
But weeks later, I’ve had to admit something less satisfying: being clear about the respect all women deserve is not the same as knowing what happened in that hotel room.
When the Swans stood down five players for the rest of the season, I took it as confirmation that my initial instinct was right.
This wasn’t the case, of course. The club’s decision was unrelated to the dancers’ allegations of sexual assault and was instead in response to the players breaching its standards by staying out late, drinking and bringing women back to the hotel.
The police investigation was an entirely separate matter. I’d bundled the two together in my head. Guilty as charged, your honour.
And then, over the weekend, came another headline I wasn’t quite sure how to process.
One of the women at the centre of the allegations was apparently heard threatening to ‘call 60 Minutes’ outside a Chapel Street nightclub. (Stock image posed by model)
‘Reading that article, I felt that unsettling flicker of doubt – the discomfort of not knowing. I’d formed a picture of the complainants in my mind that this development jarred with. (Pictured: Electric Bar on Chapel Street, Melbourne)
One of the women at the hotel was reportedly filmed in a confrontation outside a Chapel Street nightclub. The report claimed she believed Hawthorn players had asked for her to be barred, and that she threatened to ‘call 60 Minutes’.
Both Hawthorn and the venue denied that players had tried to keep her out.
Reading it, I felt that unsettling flicker of doubt – the discomfort of not knowing. I’d formed a picture of the complainants in my mind that this development jarred with.
But then I stopped myself. What could a dispute outside a nightclub weeks later possibly reveal about what happened in that hotel room?
Nothing reliable. A woman can be angry and obnoxious outside a club and still have been wronged elsewhere. Likewise, a footballer can behave badly on a night out without committing anything remotely criminal. Yet having made up my mind about this story early on, I’ve found myself viewing each new detail through the same lens: evidence for the defence.
That’s the uncomfortable part to admit. I still believe the allegations deserve to be taken seriously, and I still have no patience for anyone using ‘boys will be boys’ to wave away the players’ admitted breach of club standards.
But I don’t know what happened in that room. For all the headlines since, the people investigating it haven’t publicly reached a conclusion either.
I thought this story had a clear villain and a clear victim. Right now, it doesn’t. There are serious allegations, conflicting accounts and too many unanswered questions for anyone to confidently declare they know exactly what happened.
I understand why so many of us chose sides – I did it myself, long before I knew what the evidence actually showed. When the Chapel Street story broke, I found myself searching for proof or a verdict there too.
I’m tired of women being expected to behave flawlessly just to be believed. Yet I’m also troubled by how I reacted to reading the Chapel Street story. Neither reaction has brought me any closer to knowing what really happened at the Pullman.
So, I’ll keep listening to what the women say. I’ll pay attention to what the investigation uncovers. And next time I think I’ve got a story figured out, I’ll wait for the facts before taking a side.
