It was awful: a girl's own misadventure
Peter Munro
December 26, 2010
"In a way I feel a victim . . . but now I feel like, in a way, they're being portrayed as victims as well because I've released photos of them and breached their privacy."
"In a way I feel a victim . . . but now I feel like, in a way, they're being portrayed as victims as well because I've released photos of them and breached their privacy." Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones
She has a small love heart tattooed on her inner left wrist, with the words: “Sucess [sic] is the best revenge” – deliberately misspelt, she reckons, because everyone has imperfections.
The marks on her right wrist tell a different tale: five horizontal scars from cuts she gave herself during a drunken night in August, she says, after being spurned by the St Kilda AFL football player she still loves. Look here and she seems the vulnerable 17-year-old victim of men with money and fame. Her tattoo instead points to a woman scorned. Who she is depends on which side you take.
Landing at Melbourne Airport on Thursday – into the firestorm she sparked by making public nude photographs of two Saints players, Nick Riewoldt and Nick Dal Santo – she is a little of both. She courts the media scrum in a short black dress after crying in the car park alone, facing the cameras with her makeup – blue eyeshadow, red lips – still neat. Does she feel like a victim?
“Um, I did, but since I released these photos I feel it's a sort of 50-50 situation.
“In a way I still feel a victim to what they've done to me but now I feel like in a way they're being portrayed as victims as well because I've released photos of them and breached their privacy in a sense.”
The next day she is ordered by the Federal Court to hand over the nude photos and destroy any copies in her possession. Justice Shane Marshall orders her name be suppressed: “If the court can't protect the children, what can it do?”
In person, she has a child's charms and faults writ large. She is contrary, naive, vain, full of bluster but vulnerable, a lone teen on the wrong side of the biggest game in town. It's hard to know how much of what she says is true. Late night at the airport, the media pack dispersed, she stands alone smoking. We share a taxi into the city, where she will stay the night with a friend.
Between answering prank calls on her mobile phone, she says she is scared by what's ahead of her. “I don't really think about the future . . . because obviously it is not looking very good.”
In a local newspaper article last year she spoke of her success in athletics and her dream of winning a sports scholarship to study in the United States. This year, she says, she went “off the rails” and has been arrested several times for shoplifting, drug use, assault and trespass. She escaped each charge, and feels invincible. “I don't even know what happened. It's just like I woke up one day and decided to be like that. It would start off with getting a fake ID or smoking or going out to nightclubs . . . I was doing sort of glamour modelling as well and I liked that life because for about seven years all I was doing was running. I had never been out before, I didn't really have that many friends and I was sort of, in a way, sheltered from the real world – it was basically eat, sleep and train.
“So then I had a taste of that lifestyle and even more when I met the AFL players . . . It gives you that sort of buzz being around them as well, and then I just couldn't step it down from being up that high.”
But, she says, “I think they treat girls pathetically. It's not right at all.”
She was 16 in February when several Saints players visited her high school in Melbourne's south-east for a community camp event. A month later she was at an athletics competition in Sydney when the Saints beat the Swans. She waited with a friend near the change rooms.
“They didn't even question my age from the start because they recognised me from the school clinic. When we went back to the hotel room, [they asked] how old I was and I said, 'I'll be 17 in a few months,' and they were like, 'Oh yeah, OK, that's legal.' ”
Two St Kilda players were later cleared by police and the AFL of any wrongdoing.
Later, she says, she started seeing defender Sam Gilbert. “It made me feel like I was this really special girl who had sort of just been in the right place at the right time. I felt really, I don't know, kind of cool in front of my friends and everything but after a while, after everything had happened, I realised I never want to be in that world again. It's awful.”
In April, she says, she became pregnant with twins but lost both. When the news broke, Gilbert would not return her texts or calls, she says.
“To anyone who has been in love, you can hate them so much but then, at the end of the day, you realise you still love them. The doctors blamed the first miscarriage on stress. I was going through such a hard time with being called a s**t and everyone making out I had slept with half of the AFL . . . I got to the point where I was having to take antidepressants and sleeping tablets at night.
“I was not sleeping for days on end. 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.”
She carries around newspaper cuttings on herself in her handbag and posts regular updates to her 12,000 Twitter followers.
Carolyn Worth, convener of Victorian Centres Against Sexual Assault, says the teenager does not fit the typical profile of a sexual assault victim. “I think she perceives herself as a victim of the AFL. It looks as though she feels she has come up against a large corporate entity that basically worked her over and treated her with disrespect.
“I think she's more working as a woman scorned . . . It's a bit like 'fight or flight' – she's fighting. From my perspective she's still a teenager, she's been pregnant allegedly to one of the players, she's had group sex with them and she doesn't look that old – so I wonder what the players were thinking.”
The teenager says she wants to be a spokeswoman for women who feel used and abused by football players.
On Thursday night she and her parents returned to Melbourne from a holiday on the Gold Coast. Her parents left on the bus, leaving her at the airport to face the media. She said they had stopped talking to her since she released the photos online last Monday.
“I guess they knew this was going to happen. Just being an immature 17-year-old, I guess that's how I would describe myself.”
She plans to start a journalism degree in February. But after Friday's court appearance she sat on a park bench, playing with her mobile. “I don't know where to go from here."
By midnight she had found her way, tweeting that she was “so juiced up” on a “big nite out”. Then at 6.30am yesterday she tweeted: “chrissy with da parents todaii xxx.”
Later she explained: "mum invited me over for christmas, only because dad wont be there (main conflict)."
