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When Football Enters the Courtroom

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Football and Sexual Crime, from the Courtroom to the Newsroom

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Abstract

Although jurors are routinely admonished to disregard the fact that the defendant and some witnesses are footballers, sport remains integral to courtroom and media narratives. As Chap. 5 shows, football is not a benign or neutral marker, as it grants a privileged status to footballers that works to protect the accused and marginalise the complainant. Focusing on Stephen Milne, Andrew Lovett, and Blake Ferguson, I show how football can be deployed as a marker of moral standing for a male footballer but conversely mobilise victim-blaming stereotypes like the ‘groupie’, maligning the complainant’s character and casting doubt on the claim. Foregrounding the impact of a conviction or charge on a footballer bestows victim status, which marginalises sexual violence and downplays the seriousness of its impact on victims.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Football slut’ was also a common epithet for Kim Duthie on social media in 2011 (Waterhouse-Watson 2014, 44). Duthie was involved in a series of sex-related ‘scandals’ with AFL footballers and a player manager.

  2. 2.

    A version of this paragraph published in ‘It’s More than a Job’ (Waterhouse-Watson 2016a).

  3. 3.

    A version of the following paragraphs was published in ‘Our Fans Deserve Better’ (Waterhouse-Watson 2018).

  4. 4.

    Bird was found guilty of assaulting his girlfriend Katie Milligan with a broken glass in 2009; the conviction was overturned on appeal later that year when both Bird and Milligan changed their stories.

  5. 5.

    A Herald Sun court reporter did include information about the delisting, prompting a ‘curt explanatory email’ from the office of public prosecutions to remind court reporters not to include information not before the jury (Adam Cooper ).

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  1. Independent scholar, Melbourne, Australia

    Deb Waterhouse-Watson

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  1. Deb Waterhouse-Watson
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Correspondence to Deb Waterhouse-Watson .

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Waterhouse-Watson, D. (2019). When Football Enters the Courtroom. In: Football and Sexual Crime, from the Courtroom to the Newsroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33705-6_5

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