Australia’s rugby league players were warned yesterday to stop abusing women or get out of the game after group sex scandals were exposed on national TV.
National Rugby League (NRL) chief executive David Gallop apologized publicly for what he called the “harrowing” treatment of women described in the ABC’s Four Corners investigative program on Monday night.
“I repeat my apology on behalf of the game for the pain those women experienced. Violence against women is abhorrent and sexual assault and the degradation of women is just that,” he said in a statement.
“So much of what we saw last night was fundamentally indefensible and if anyone in the game today is ignoring the importance of that message then frankly they will need to find another career. It is a time to either accept the changes that we are putting in place or to quite simply get out,” Gallop said.
A New Zealand woman at the center of one of the sex allegations against players from the Cronulla club said her life had been destroyed by a group sex ordeal.
Six men had sex with her in a Christchurch hotel seven years ago while another six looked on, she said, her face and voice disguised. Psychiatrists reported that the woman, who was 19 years old at the time, had become suicidal.
“I was so angry and I wanted their lives destroyed like mine was,” she said on the program. “If I had a gun I’d shoot them right now.”
“I hate them. They disgust me. For all that they did, I hate them so much,” she said. “Every time I looked up, there would be more and more people in the room and there’s lots of guys in the room watching, maybe two or three that were on the bed that were doing stuff to me.”
Ex-Cronulla star Matthew Johns has admitted involvement in the incident, but he and other players involved said the sex was consensual and no charges were laid against them.
Johns, now a presenter on Channel Nine’s The Footy Show and as an NRL commentator, told Four Corners that after it was over, he went up to the woman in the parking lot and apologized.
He said he always knew that the incident would catch up with him.
Speaking on last week’s Footy Show, he apologized to his family.
Former rugby league coach Roy Masters said in his 2006 book Bad Boys that group sex had been used as a means of “team bonding” but told the program he believed those days were over.
“I don’t think it plays any role at all now,” he said. “But in the past there could be little doubt that a girl might’ve accommodated three or four players. It was all part of players becoming a closer-knit unit, for want of a better word.”
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