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http://www.sbs.com.au:80/sport/blog...fairness-and-the-restoration-of-Matthew-Johns
The fight for truth, fairness and the restoration of Matthew Johns
15 May 2009 | 12:00 - By Jesse Fink
Amid recent arguments about consent and morality, has Australia become a vigilante state?
So now come the revelations that "Clare", the eye of the storm in the Four Corners program "The Code of Silence", allegedly "bragged" to her workmates about having sex with Cronulla Sharks players, including Matthew Johns, the day after that infamous incident in the Racecourse Hotel in Christchurch in 2002.
Tania Boyd, a cash controller at the hotel, last night told Channel Nine: "She was absolutely excited about the fact: she was bragging about it to the staff and quite willing, openly saying how she had sex with several players. We were quite disgusted about it there was no trauma whatsoever.
"I'm disgusted that a woman can all of a sudden change her story from having a great time to then turning it into a terrible crime.
"We all just thought it was hilarious until five days later the police came to work and were horrified she had now changed her story to say she was now a victim of crime."
In a separate interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, she went further, claiming Clare boasted, "I was with the boys from Cronulla Sharks last night, I don't even know how many" and that she "told police I thought it was all made up, and I believe many of the other staff told them the same thing."
If Boyd's account is correct, and which seems to square up with Johns's own version of what happened that night, I'm disgusted too.
How can such an important piece of information fail to be included in the Four Corners story?
If I was disgusted at the treatment of Johns, and I have been apoplectic, I'm now even more disgusted at what our country has become.
What the Matthew Johns story has proved this week is that there are two Australias: one that values fairness, due process and justice; another that runs by the freewheeling rules of a vigilante state.
I sincerely hope the guttersnipes that were so quick to condemn Matthew Johns in particular Sam de Brito, Miranda Devine, and Jill Singer feel a little sheepish this morning. They bloody well should. All three, and many others, rushed to the judgement of Johns with the restraint of a pack of hyenas before all the facts of the story were on the table.
I'm sorry, Richard Ackland, but Sarah Ferguson's story was not an "absolute cracker", it was shameful. A nadir for Australian journalism. And it stands to be another Phuong Ngo disaster for the ABCs flagship current-affairs program.
"Four Corners managed to achieve something rare in journalism a change of attitudes, a rejection of complacent acceptance of rottenness," Ackland wrote in today's SMH.
"You'll notice the legal eggshells over which Four Corners gingerly tiptoed on Monday night. I don't think [Ferguson] directly asked the New Zealand woman identified as 'Clare' whether she consented to one, two or five sexual encounters.
"If she had answered 'no', then the recognised rugby league players may well have been able to bring defamation proceedings against the ABC because an imputation of sexual assault had been raised.
"As in the criminal jurisdiction, such a civil case would have been heavily stacked in their favour because on a factual basis it is her word against the insistent chorus of male voices that the whole thing was consensual. One against eight."
The modus operandi of Four Corners, then, seems to be this: if we can't nail anyone for sexual assault for lack of evidence and corroboration, and we can't say what one or more of them did was sexual assault because we'll get our arses sued, we'll just put it on TV and smear the lot of them anyway.
Let's turn it around and make a story that is fundamentally an issue of consent suddenly one about the "degradation of women", misogyny and the ethicality of group sex (an issue I'm not even going to touch on here, for want of space). If Johns and his mates get cleaned up in the process, so be it!
Disgusting. That's a real "complacent acceptance of rottenness", Mr Ackland.
But there was a far worse example of intellectual vigilantism.
Pru Goward, the shadow federal community services minister and former sex discrimination commissioner, appeared on Nine's Today Show and declared the unnamed men in the room of the Racecourse Hotel that night were variously "facing possible jail sentences", "we are now talking about criminal charges", "we are talking now about a crime" and "we are that close to seeing charges of rape".
Excuse me? On what evidence?
Who does Goward think she is telling the New Zealand authorities how to do their business? What jurisdictive power does she have across the ditch? The police in Christchurch have closed their case, stating categorically "that no evidence was established that would support criminal charges being laid against any person. The female complainant was fully advised at the time of the outcome of the inquiry and accepted this."
Perhaps try commenting on things you know about next time, Miss Goward.
By far the most heartening media coverage I saw all week was last night on the NRL Footy Show on Nine.
It was touching to see Paul "Fatty" Vautin, or "Paddy", as Broncos chief executive Bruno Cullen mistakenly called him, read out a prepared statement at the beginning of the program explaining his infamous "pat" on Johns's back the week before.
"Both Matt and I were not aware of the intensity of the story to come on the following Monday night," he said.
"He went on air to apologise to his wife, for the second time in seven years, mind you, and I noticed as he was sitting here, how hard he was doing it. At the end, and merely as a friend, I gave Matt a 'well said' and a pat on the back, as I think any Australian mate would do. It was nothing more and nothing less."
It was the right thing to do, Mr Vautin, and you should never have felt the need to explain yourself. I would have done the same thing and I haven't met, heard from or spoken to a man or woman this week who would do any differently.
Then there was the sight of a tearful Phil Gould, the eminence grise of rugby league and a good friend of Johns, who gave viewers an insight into how his mate had been effectively ambushed by Four Corners before "The Code of Silence" went to air.
"From the time Matt got the call from [Ferguson], she never intimated to him at any time what was coming his way, what the girl had said or how explosive she was going to be about it. Matt Johns, quite honestly, gave her all the details that he knew about the incident as he had given the police seven years ago.
"The program was aired by Wednesday, I was really worried about [Johns]. I got some calls from him that gave me great concern for him. I urged him to come home. When he arrived [at Channel Nine studios] yesterday with his wife, I've never seen two more shattered people.
"They were struggling with the rage. They hadn't seen the report and in their minds, the true facts hadn't come out. [Ferguson] hadn't reported the incident as it was, and that Matt somehow had been purported as the instigator of a very unsavoury act. They wanted the facts out there."
And while Four Corners and its reporter, Ferguson, were happy to put together their hatchet job on Johns and give him only a few days' warning of what was about to come and not even the full details of that report, if we are to believe Gould she did not even do The Footy Show the courtesy of appearing on the program after being expressly invited to field questions about the veracity of her story.
Again, disgusting.
A friend of mine, a 28-year-old woman called Cat who has been, like many of my friends and colleagues from around the world, penning virtual essays on the Johns story on my Facebook page, put it this way to me this week: "["Clare"] made a mistake, as did [Johns]. They all did. They have all already paid for it... in their own way. But is it Johns's responsibility to safeguard her as an innocent teen? Or is it realistic to expect people to live within the legal and moral boundaries that we all, as a collective whole, see fit and agree on?
"What are those rules? The law? No law was broken. So what are we talking about... a different level of deceit? He should have known better.
"But the truth is they all f***** up. They made a mistake. It wasn't Johns being a predator or her being a victim. We all make mistakes at some point and we all have to take responsibility for those mistakes eventually. And sometimes that really, really hurts. Sometimes those mistakes lead to post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes to divorce, sometimes just to a headache... but responsibility must be taken for the choices we make, regrets or not."
Amid the maelstrom of bluster, condemnation, innuendo, rumour and misinformation, it was the most sensible thing I'd heard all week.
The Matthew Johns scandal should not leave rugby league in crisis. It should be leaving Four Corners in crisis.
