A note before we start: this post is about sexual assault and the way we treat women who report it. If that’s not what you’ve got the stomach for today, I understand completely. Go and look at pictures of my chickens instead. I won’t be offended.
Eight hours.
That’s about how long it took. Victoria Police were called to a hotel in East Melbourne in the early hours of Monday morning, where the Sydney Swans were staying after a win that locked in a home final. By the time most of us had finished our first coffee, the story had already turned. Not into a question of what happened to a woman. Into a question of what kind of woman she is.
The photo was circulating. The innuendo was circulating. The words sex worker were being deployed the way people deploy them — not as a job description but as a verdict. Somebody had decided the salient fact wasn’t that a woman had walked into a police station and said the hardest sentence there is to say. The salient fact was that she was the wrong sort of woman to be saying it.
Eight hours. From complainant to punchline.
I’d like to tell you I was shocked. I wasn’t. I don’t think a single woman I know was shocked. That’s the part I keep chewing on, actually — not the outrage but the complete absence of surprise. We watched it happen with the resigned expertise of people who’ve seen the film before and know exactly which scene is coming next. Here’s the photo. Here come the theories about what she was after. Here comes the bloke in the comments explaining that women lie about this all the time, a thing he has never once bothered to check but feels in his bones. Here comes the concerned discussion about these young men and their careers, their futures, their tragic proximity to consequences.
And here — right on cue — comes the line that made me want to put my boot through the screen.
Men in a position of power should be given the benefit of the doubt.
Let’s take that one apart, because it deserves it.
The presumption of innocence is a real thing and a good thing and I’ll defend it until I’m hoarse. It belongs in a courtroom. It means the state has to prove its case against you before it can take your liberty. It is a shield held up between a citizen and the enormous crushing weight of the government, and it exists precisely because that weight is enormous and crushing.
It has never meant she is presumed to be lying. Those are not the same statement. They are not even in the same postcode. You can hold the position that these men have not been charged with anything and are entitled to due process — which is true, and which I hold — without also circulating a photograph of a woman and inviting the internet to appraise her. One of those is a legal principle. The other is a sport.
And the power part. The benefit of the doubt is supposed to run toward the person with less protection, not more. These are men with a football club, a league, a media department, a players’ association, lawyers on retainer and a nation of supporters who have loved them since they were teenagers. She has none of that. She has whatever’s left of her privacy and a phone that won’t stop going off. To look at that arrangement and conclude that the men are the ones in need of a bit of extra grace is not a moral position. It’s a fan reflex wearing a suit.
Meanwhile the actual institutional emergency, as far as I can tell, was that the All-Australian squad announcement had to be pushed back a week.
Here’s the bit I’ve been avoiding saying, so I’ll just say it.
If it were me, I don’t know that I’d come forward.
I’ve turned that over for two days and I can’t make it come out any other way. Knowing what I know, having watched this exact thing happen to this exact kind of woman over and over since I was young enough to think it would surely be different by the time I was old — no. I don’t think I’d pick up the phone. I think I’d go home, and have a shower I’d remember for the rest of my life, and tell nobody, and carry it.
That is what all of this is for. That’s the function. It isn’t a side effect of the noise, it’s the point of the noise. Every woman watching this week has been handed a very clear piece of instruction about what happens to women who speak, and she’s been handed it for free, in eight hours, without anyone having to say a word to her directly.
And I keep coming back to the count.
Sherele Moody keeps a ledger of Australian women and children killed by violence, because no government in this country has decided that’s their job. Thirty-seven women this year, and we were only in July when I last looked. Seventy-nine last year. More than thirteen hundred since 2000. She is one woman with a spreadsheet doing the work a nation won’t do, and she was also one of the voices this week saying plainly that what’s being done to this woman online is victim blaming and it is malicious.
We are told this is a crisis. It got called a national emergency from a podium in 2024. And then a woman reports an assault and within a working day the country’s instinct is to work out what she was wearing, what she does for a living, and what she stood to gain.
Now, someone will pop up here and tell me I’m conflating two different things. Domestic violence over there. Sexual assault over here. Different crimes, different causes, different fixes, stop muddying the water, love.
And they’re not entirely wrong. They are different, and the difference matters.
Domestic violence is a siege. It’s slow. It’s conducted by a man who knows your mother’s birthday and where you keep the spare key and exactly which sentence will land hardest, because he’s been taking notes for years. It doesn’t announce itself with a single terrible night; it arrives by degrees, in the shape of a rule, then another rule, until one day you realise you’ve redesigned your entire personality around not setting him off and you can’t remember when you started. Sexual assault can be one night. One person. Sometimes a stranger, more often not. A single act that reaches back and rewrites everything behind it and forward and rewrites everything ahead.
Different mechanisms. Different escape routes, if there are any. Different lies told, to others and to yourself.
They’re also exactly the same thing, and I’ll die on that hill.
Both of them come down to a man deciding that a woman’s no is a formality. A negotiating position. Something to be worked around, waited out, or simply ignored, because in that moment he has decided that what he wants is more real than what she wants. And both of them do it in the most personal place there is. Not your car. Not your wallet. Not a punch thrown in a pub car park in front of witnesses who’ll back you up. Your body. Your bed. Your own house, or a hotel room you can never un-know. The place you can’t lock the door on, ever, because you have to live in it for the rest of your life.
And then — this is the bit that seals it — the aftermath is word for word identical. Why didn’t she leave. Why did she go up to the room. Those are the same sentence in different outfits. What did she think was going to happen. What was she after. She’s got a history, you know. She’s not exactly a saint. Same script, same lighting, same audience nodding along. You could run the DV comments and the assault comments through a machine and it couldn’t tell you which was which.
That’s why the death toll belongs in a post about a hotel room. It’s not a digression. It’s the same road, further along.
You cannot fix the killing while the culture is still like this. They’re the same thing at different volumes. The bloke who thinks she’s probably lying and the bloke who thinks she’s probably his are drinking in the same pub. Every joke, every photo passed around, every well, we don’t know the full story deployed as a shrug rather than as genuine caution — it all goes into the same account, and women pay the interest.
Which brings me to the thing I’ve never worked out.
How do women still trust men at all?
Not rhetorically. I actually don’t understand it. We know the numbers. We watched this week happen. And yet we get into taxis and we go on second dates and we fall in love and we marry them and we have sons and we hand over our whole soft undefended lives on the assumption that this one, at least, is safe. Every day, millions of us, on credit, with no collateral and a truly appalling claims history.
I think it might be the bravest thing people routinely do and nobody’s ever called it courage. It gets called normal. It gets called love, or being sensible, or don’t be so dramatic.
There are good men. There are wonderful men — I know some, I’m related to some, I write entire books about the imaginary ones. That’s not the point and it never was. The point is that the trust is a gift, extended constantly, at enormous risk, and the very least the recipients could do is spend a week not demonstrating exactly why it’s a bad bet.
So how many? That’s my honest question and I don’t have a clever ending for it. How many have to die before shit actually changes. Thirteen hundred wasn’t enough. Seventy-nine in a year wasn’t enough. A national emergency declared on television wasn’t enough to stop a woman being turned into content before breakfast.
I don’t know what happened in that hotel. Neither do you. Neither does anyone with a keyboard and an opinion, and it’s not our job to know — it’s the police’s job, and then a court’s, and both of those should be allowed to do it properly.
But I know exactly what happened afterwards. We all watched that part live.
If any of this has landed close to home for you: 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) is there, all day, every day.
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