This post started its life as a written post, but in the end I couldn’t work out the order of events to follow. So when in Doubt, podcast it! I had the chase to ramble on, as on tend to do, hopefully getting out my feelings on some of the issues the “Dickileaks” episode.
Topics touched on (in no particular order and off the top of my head):
The Photos- The School clinic and my thoughts on the idea that the players got her number there or could remember her from there
- Respect
- Being careful to not confuse the AFL, AFLPA, Saints and players in this issue.
- People make mistakes
- Who has the power? Players or the Girl? Maybe both in different ways. Social media/web effect
- Derryn Hinch and his mud flinging
- Should the AFL be to blame?
- Players lawyers going to hard, threating to sue and chase money for 15 years
- Lies on both sides
- We all need to live more carefully
- Men aren’t excused but don’t put yourself in a dangerous situation
- In the end, the main issue is that two people hooked up and it went south! It happens.
Anyway, this is a tough issue and anyone that says its as simple as …., don’t understand the situation or have a barrow to push!
Have listen. Comment below. As I say in the show, as long as your comments won’t get me sued (or is spam), I respect everyones opinion and welcome the debate, even (especially) if you didn’t agree with me.
Enjoy
Hey Molly, have listened to the podcast and as usual you’ve provided an amazingly thoughtful take on the #dikileaks saga. It’s really a sad situation for all concerned, but I don’t see it going anyway anytime soon. Nice job!
Hey Molly,
Listened to your podcast last night. Great to hear your take…”could an AFL player be so dumb as to try to pick up a school girl (or at least phone number) at a school function”.
Your take was balanced and insightful.
Now if she was in a bar, with a fake ID the burden is on her. I’ve been following the story long distance courtesy of Heraldsun.com.au. I’m seeing an amount of backlash from the readers concerning fooling around with an “underage girl” and the heavy-handed approach of the AFL legal teams. However, how did she present herself? 20 yr old swinger???
Did the boys “pucker” upon the realizations and say, “Oh, S*&%…..call out the heavy artillary….get me out of this jamb.”
Did Nick Rewolt lie when he said the photo was taken in Miami???
The worst part of a mistake is the cover-up. Look at our history, Nixon…if so, maybe they should have said, “Well this is what she said, and I didn’t have my RX 3200 lie-detector with me at the time or my radar-receptor-age-ID-Validator AND I’m sorry, I WOULDN’T do such a thing under KNOWN circumstances.”
Unfortunately all things are “political”, hindsight is 20-20 but the truth goes away so much quicker than a cover-up or a half-assed attempt to save face.
Have a wonderful New Years!
Mitch (from Virginia)
A popular AFL blogger and podcaster, whose name I won’t mention at the risk of “feeding the
troll” by rewarding his desire for attention with inflated traffic stats. I will refer to him hereafter as simply ‘Balone’. What follows is an excerpt from an article responding to a podcast compiled by a famous blogger, one segment at a time, in a series of articles which will be published at http://www.pacelegal.com.au. Out of respect for copyright and a careful analysis of this podcast, I propose to dissect the commentary in terms of the legal and other arguments advanced by Balone.
Balone has produced a podcast which I wish to comment upon segment by segment in terms of a range of legal and other arguments in ‘Dickileaks and Balone’s Smell TestTest”….pacelegal.com.au
Prior to drawing your attention to the first portion of the podcast I would point out to Balone that any reasonable person from the late twentieth century would have to have some inkling that sexual exploitation and/or rape is related to power and not necessarily a function of the attractiveness of the target or victim.
I think we can all agree that this message never be muddied in any way as there is far too much at stake. All men have to be very consistently kept clear on this.
There have been very attractive people people who have lots of very desirable and attractive people throwing themselves at them who choose to ignore these people and rape a person who may be considered unattractive.
There are also well documented cases of elderly women being raped by young men unattractive and there have been many elderly women who have been raped by young men. The reason for this is that rape has much more to do with power than pure physical attraction.
It is well established that it is not all about sex drive being triggered by someone who is stunning. about a sex drive being triggered by someone who is extremely stunning. Although in all fairness to Balone, while this view is very uncommon today, it may have been common prior to the 1970s.
Another point is is Balone’s understanding of attractiveness seems fairly well one dimensional, as I am sure he would realise, whilst he may not be in the eyes of many to be a great stud, I am sure his wife would find him to be very attractive. Attraction is a very subjective thing.
Balone’s personal views as to whether this teenage girl is either “pretty” or “pretty enough” is not on point. The players views are the important ones. Secondly attractiveness has a lot to do with personality. Having a pretty young vivacious women pursuing you aggressively, something maybe Balone has not directly experienced, may be very appealing and tempting to many men. It isn’t always easy to say no but this is what people in positions of responsibility have to be cautious of every day. She would have to be described as one of the girls who stands out in a crowd and is the one who has after all stepped forward.
Thirdly lets not forget the fact that she has one thing that Balone may not have, namely a modelling contract. This may not fit into his idea of an “extraordinary specimen”. In any event a still image just doesn’t capture most of these factors. Balone has made many points which warrant a response. Balone states it just wouldn’t be rational for the players to take a phone number off a girl in a school clinic.
Furthermore, a very small proportion of what a teenage boy would be prepared to do to obtain access to teenage girls could be construed as rational by a reasonable person. In fact even men Balone’s age have been known to do silly things like throw away their political careers by either engaging in all manner of inappropriate sexual activity.
I suspect Balone, whilst understanding his heroes have hormones, may be attributing a lot more willpower to his sporting heroes that would be realistic to expect of them.
With that I shall quote from Balone’s podcast for yout to evaluate his musings regarding the implausibility that the players got the girl’s number from the school clinic because they are not Elle McPherson.
Maybe somebody should point out to Balone that Elle McPherson is also old enough to be these players’ grandmother.
Balone seems to be overlooking that any evidence that is admissible, relevant and probative to a elements of a crime, such as that the accused knew her to be between 16 or 18, had sexual relations with her, were in a position of trust or loco parentis to her, and commenced their relationship through meeting her in a school clinic are ALL elements which may go to constitute a crime. Therefore any evidence which would tend to shed light on these things and is legally admissible in proceedings would constitute evidence. Therefore even the fact that she was in the clinic and the players were running it is evidence. This is called circumstantial evidence, certainly not enough to convict them of anything in isolation, but still nonetheless evidence even if not sufficient. It would be accurately ridiculous to say that there is no evidence, particularly with respect to the critical element of them being engaged in sexual penetration of a minor as the law describes it.
So whilst it is certainly for the Police to assess whether they think there is sufficient evidence to lay charges, there could very well be disagreement over this, and a fair amount of evidence that the players may have committed a crime. I don’t think there is any question in anyone’s mind that in retrospect this was a very legally dangerous situation for the players and the girl, and there should be more care taken with regard to preventing potentially dangerous situations occurring.
I would question both Balone’s sense of smell and think that his understanding of sexual deviance is outdated. Reasonable people stopped believing balone like that before Balone was born. In our culture that kind of thinking went out with ‘oh she had it coming’.
Balone says it just make any sense, it’s beyond belief that the players would take a phone number form a girl at a school clinic. Her story sounds plausible to me. After all it was conveyed to him somehow that she was over 16. Is it Balone’s contention that a normal young man would consult a lawyer about what sounds like pretty sound and mostly correct legal advice. On that evidence, what he was doing was certainly no worse and hardly bizarre or inconceivable by most young mens’ standards. In fact he was being perhaps more prudent than average in pausing to consider the legality of his position. We can and probably should be somewhat sympathetic to his postion because of the complexity of the law in that situation.
The fact is that before this controversy, very few people were fully aware of the complexities of these rules. This is one positive aspect of what is otherwise a very unhappy course of events. Looking at it from his point of view however looking at it from the other side of the fence, caring parents would want to know that sending their child to a school event wouldn’t be the starting point of a relationship with someone entrusted with the welfare of their child. Regardless of what we think of the law morally Balone, this is the way the law stands.
BALONE’S SMELL TEST – “IT JUST DOESN’T MAKE SENSE”
“…and ..er..the investigation found that there was no evidence that the players had done anything wrong including contacting her after the school clinic. (sigh) Now to me this makes a lot of sense because as..as we go through some of the issues moving on we find a lot of people have the attitude that …un…a lot of these AFL players …ahh..have groupies, that they …er…just go to nightclubs and pick up girls and the likes..now…this would not surprise me in the least if this is true, that a lot of these girls throw themselves at these AFL players. Now that wouldn’t surprise me. Now what the AFL players do afterwards..you know..hopefully we’ll touch on as What the AFL players do or did afterwards, we will touch on as this podcaset moves along, or at least my opinions and thoughts and things to put forward. But to me this sort of debunks the idea that ..ah these players would in fact take a girl’s phone number at a school clinic…at a high school clinic. Why would they do such a thing? Now…err..the girl in question is ..eh..pretty..definitely, but she isn’t ..you know..extraordinarily…an extraordinary ah…specimen that you’d …you’d just be feeling like you’d just missed out of one of life’s opportunities, one of life’s great moments if you’d..if you didn’t take an opportunity to ah…date or more with her. So I don’t see that there is logic behind the idea that these footballers who know they are under the spotlight at a school clinic where you know lets face it there’s probably hundreds of kids or… you know.. hundreds of teenagers that they would pick this one girl take their…ah her phone number….um…or you know take the phone number and do anything about it. Perhaps they did you know accept a piece of paper that was handed to them by the girl or something like that. And..you know it’s just beyond belief the old smell test, the test that says if it doesn’t smell right …oh you know this doesn’t make a lot of sense. To me the smell test on this just doesn’t smell right, to suggest that they took the number and then acted on it from this school clinic. I mean if you work out of the theory that these players have women sort of jumping out of trees ..out at night clubs and the like, you know that they are beating them off with a stick, that they could go out anytime they would ..you know ..and score a girl who’d want to come home with them to their bedroom, why would they do something that risky as you know take a number or what not from a school clinic. I mean you know it just doesn’t make any sense. I mean somebody would say you know I just don’t buy that. I don’t think that they’d be that arrogant and stupid enough to do that and …I …ah..you know for someone that was Elle McPherson like or something. You know I just don’t believe that to be the case. You know I mean it just doesn’t make any sense to me, so as far as I’m concerned anything that happens from hereon in I am assuming that they did not recognise her from the school clinic and they didn’t get the phone number from the school clinic”
@luke. It is amazing, but amazingly stupid.
QUOTE FROM BALONEY MALONEY PODCAST
“…..The investigation found no evidence players did anything wrong including contacting her after the school clinic . Now this makes a lot of sense because a lot of people have the attitude that the AFL players are groupies who just go to nightclubs and pick up girls. This would not surprise me in the least that these girls throw themselves at the players. What the AFL players do afterwards is .. we will touch on at least my opinion. This debunks the idea that these players would take this girl’s phone number from the school clinic. The girl is indeed pretty but is not an extraordinary specimen that you’d just feeling like, you’d just feel like you’d just like missed on one of life’s great moments if you didn’t take an opportunity to date or more with her. So i don’t see that there is logic behind the idea that these footballers who know they are under the spotlight at a school clinic where. lets face it there are probably hundreds of kids or teenagers, that they would pick this one girl and take her phone number um…or take it and do anything about it. Perhaps they did you know take or the piece of paper . But its beyond belief the old smell test
Lets suppose you have absolute faith in VPOL’s investigation why does the AFL ignore their own Child Protection Policy enshrined in the AFL Membership rules? (see s5.1)
“Sexual abuse by adults or other children where a child is encouraged or forced to watch or engage in sexual activity or where a child is subject to any other inappropriate conduct of a sexual
nature (e.g. sexual intercourse, masturbation, oral sex, pornography including child pornography or inappropriate touching or
conversations).
That same policy which you speak has not only “rules” (for want of a better term about the quote you have above) but “actions” (again, for want of a better/maybe more correct term) if someone is considered to have breached those “rules”. They are stated (well in the 2006 version of the policy, I can’t find the one that has 5.1 as the clause/section for this policy) as follows:
“All allegations of child abuse will be dealt with by the AFL promptly, seriously, sensitively and
confidentially by reporting any allegation of child abuse to the police or relevant government
agency. The AFL will not attempt to mediate or conduct any hearing any allegation of child abuse
– the AFL will report any allegation of child abuse to the police or relevant government agency. A
person will not be victimised for reporting an allegation of child abuse and the privacy of all
persons concerned will be respected.”
(http://www.afl.com.au/Portals/0/afl_docs/afl_hq/Policies/MemberProtectionPolicy_2006.pdf Section 7.1)
So as you can see, the AFL should have and (whether they did or it just did end up with the police) it was looked into by the police and no crime was seen to have happened. So I not sure under this policy what the AFL have done against it? It does sound like a nice way to get the AFL on this, but it seems that in fact the policy was followed to its very letter (unless I am missing something).
I have to admit to not having read all the many pieces you have written on this subject, but as a lawyer, would love to here your legal investigation/thoughts on what course of action the players could have against the AFL if the AFL took action with out any hard evidence of any wrong doings. Could the players sue and expect to win if the AFL suspended them with them doing nothing wrong (I don’t want you to say they have done something wrong, but assume like you are defending them and you can prove or disprove they did nothing illegal or against the AFL rules). I think it would be an interesting piece and I dare say it might show why the AFL has to be careful with the course of actions they take in these type of incidents.
If you don’t understand what the POLICY SAYS read it again.
The AFL didn’t enforce it.
Simple.
Now tell me how the AFL actually handled it properly?
I have, and if you can’t get a hit on your site, commenting on old stories isn’t the way to do it. #winning #derrrr