If you’re only just catching up on what has been ~the story of the morning~ so far, last week Eddie McGuire continued his streak as top notch garbage human and joked about paying someone $50,000 to drown AFL writer Caroline Wilson.
And the whole thing might’ve been brushed over, if it weren’t for freelance sports journalist Erin Riley writing about the incident a full five days later, pointing out that shit like this actively contributes to a culture where one woman is violently killed every week.
“The image of a woman being held under water against her will while people jump on her body is a horrifying picture of violence. It is nothing less,” she wrote.“And make no mistake, the damage McGuire and co are doing by normalising attitudes of disrespect and violence toward a woman does more harm than a thousand themed matches and white ribbons on uniforms do good.”
In the wake of so much furore, McGuire was forced to apologised for the comment this morning, but managed to turn it into a spectacular ‘I’m sorry if you got offended’ piece of bullshit that was accepted by precisely no one, least of all Wilson herself.
Triple J‘s Alex Dyson went in on McGuire’s non-apology BS this morning, saying that this whole “It’s your fault for misconstruing it” type of defence is indicative of a broader culture of normalising very real abuse women have to deal with daily.
“It makes me sick,” he said on Matt and Alex this morning. “I’ve talked to so many girls that I care about over the years who, in the past, have been very upset about… what things guys have done to them. It makes me very, very angry.
“And then [you have a scenario where] that person’s just around at house parties and they have to sit there, and suddenly the burden of keeping the secret is on them. They don’t want to bring this guy into disrepute and ruin his reputation, like it’s your fault for bringing it up. That’s bullshit. That’s absolute crap, and by deflecting these sort of things it doesn’t’ work in our society.
“If you’re making little jokes, or doing things as crummy as actually assaulting people, you should just stop being so cowardly and own up to things and try and become a better person, because that’s the strongest thing of all.”
Channel 10‘s Jessica Rowe also slammed McGuire’s non-apology this morning, calling for him to donate the $50k he ‘jokingly’ offered for someone to drown Wilson to White Ribbon.
“Of course what Eddie was saying, he intended it as a joke,” she said. “But I’m sick of him saying oh, it’s just meant to be like this, when in fact he is a leader, people know who he is, he can do a whole lot better than that.
“You know what I’d like to see, if he really has guts, if he really says, I’m a good bloke here – Eddie, why don’t you donate $50,000 to White Ribbon.”
Rowe – who last year publicly called out McGuire for “making my life a living hell” when she worked at Channel Nine – also called McGuire a “protected species”, which is so on-the-nail it hurts.
“It is time that people call him out,” she said. “He is someone who is a protected species. Because he is a Melbourne identity, he can constantly say these sorts of inappropriate things and then say, ‘oh I was only joking’.”
Photo: Facebook / Matt and Alex; Getty / Michael Wilson.
