Shame on the ABC and Nine for their wrecking of Matthew Johns
13 May 2009 | 14:00 - By Jesse Fink
One man has been made a scapegoat for the wrongs of rugby league, writes The Finktank.
Matthew Johns should not have been stood down by Channel Nine. He should not have been publicly humiliated by the ABC. He should not be called to account by self-appointed guardians of the greater good like Tracy Grimshaw and Rebecca Wilson.
He should not have had his name dragged through the proverbial mud by what, for me, was one of the flimsiest stories ever to appear on Four Corners.
I don't need to recrudesce the contents of Monday night's "The Code of Silence", a story by Sarah Ferguson. The tabloids, airwaves and worldwide web are abuzz with the fallout. Everyone's having a field day while the life of a popular and good man, Johns, is on the ropes. His reputation is destroyed. His family is in newfound grief.
His career in the media and in coaching, so we were informed Wednesday afternoon, is down the toilet.
He is a human being in crisis and for what?
The woman at the centre of the story regarding Johns has never claimed he did not gain her consent. Nor has she made a claim against Brett Firman, the other man she went with to Room 21 of the Racecourse Hotel in Christchurch in 2002. Yet they were the only two players Four Corners saw fit to name and publicly shame in its pernicious story.
Why not name the other players who entered the room?
If anyone was crossing a legal line, it was them, because we do not know what consent they were given to participate in the sexual acts that took place. For the record, it is clearly stated in the program: "Four Corners doesn't say that what took place... was sexual assault."
Johns's only failing was a moral one and how many of us have made those?
He stayed in the room and did not leave until it was over. It presumably did not even occur to him that the woman was in distress.
From my viewing of the story and from reading the transcript, at no stage was "Clare" asked by Four Corners if she said "no" or "stop" or attempted to leave or asked Johns or Firman to stop other players entering the room.
Yet Johns, a man who made a simple, significant but private moral mistake seven years ago, is being made a very public scapegoat for the illicit/debased sex culture of a whole sport and our own society.
Obviously "Clare" has been greatly affected by what happened that night in Christchurch. That is upsetting to see and no one enjoys seeing anyone in such distress. But she is not alone. Her story is not unusual.
Group sex is often regretted by those that participate in it. Clinical depression can sometimes be the result. Mental anguish and trauma is common, as are relationship break-ups.
Many make a decision at the time that they subsequently regret. Yet typically they take personal responsibility for their actions.
Why did Four Corners not ask "Clare" if she took any responsibility for hers? And while Four Corners showed admirable sympathy for her clear distress, why then compound the distress of others?
Much was made of a comment made by a young man in a filmed sequence of a group of under-20 players at a lecture on consent. What he said was ill considered, naïve and worrying. But why choose to put his name and face on the screen so he can be humiliated for the rest of life for something he said he didnt really think through properly? The boy is not even 20.
In my view it was malicious. Just as it was malicious to dredge up the sorry tale of Dane Tilse, another naïve young man, who never went to court for his alleged indiscretion in Bathurst in 2005 but who paid a hefty personal and professional price and is trying, so we heard from the program, to get on with his life and football in Canberra and has "never had a problem since".
(The woman involved, identified in the story as "Caroline", appears, from what was revealed in her interview with Ferguson, to have a legitimate complaint against Tilse but she had her own reasons, stated in the program, for not pursuing it with police. Who are we to definitively judge what happened? That is the business of the courts, not current affairs shows.)
And why give so much airtime, again unchallenged, to Sarah Durazza, the woman at the centre of the Anthony Watmough affair, who can come up with such a preposterous assertion that "males talking over females, and you know, doing that in public it's violence against women".
I'm sure there are a lot of females out there who would disagree with Durazza and who have no problem handling themselves with boorish yobs in pubs.
But the main target in this shoddy story all along was Matthew Johns.
Ferguson, Four Corners, the ABC, the NRL and his own employer Nine have done a fine "job" on him. If anyone needs to take a good long hard look at themselves this afternoon, it's them, not him.
They all have blood on their hands.
