The most stunning television I’ve seen for a very long time was on Channel Nine last week. You can’t handle the truth? Mate, I can’t handle the truth.
If you haven’t watched Tracy Grimshaw’s interview with‘rugby-league superstar’ and ‘television personality’ Matthew Johns, don’t walk but run to watch it online. Grimshaw should win a Walkley or possibly the Nobel Prize for Calling a Spade a Sex-Pest. This interview should be on the school syllabus.
Seven years ago Johns and a bunch of his team-mates had pack sex with a nineteen-year-old girl. Four Corners did a story on the epidemic of group sex involving football teams and interviewed the girl, who named Johns. A Current Affair followed up withone of the most harrowing interviews I’ve ever experienced. I sobbed. For the victim, for the state of football and the mess many of our menfolk are in, and for the fact that the rest of us have enabled them with‘boys will be boys,’ ‘she should have known better,’ et cetera.
Johns repeated the terms ‘willing participant,’ ‘the hurt and embarrassment caused to my wife and family’ and used the word ‘unsavoury’ to describe something that was clearly sickening and impossible to digest, without seeming to show a skerrick of real compassion for the victim.
Grimshaw dismantled the familiar rhetoric withprecision that left me breathless. After explaining that he’d left the room at one point and then returned to check ‘everything was OK,’ Grimshaw replied: ‘You see, Matthew, most right-thinking people would be thinking, how could you look at that scenario and see anything was OK? She was nineteen years old. She was naked. And she was outnumbered … Isn’t there something in your mind that said this is wrong, on every level? This is a vulnerable woman. She wants more from this situation than we’ll ever be able to give her.’
It was this that unravelled me:
‘Let’s say she offered herself. If I suggested to you the women who do that are looking to feel special for a while. They see you all as sports gods and they want a little bit of your fame and adulation and your specialness to rub off on them … Did it occur to you that that girl laying on the bed was somebody’s sister, someone’s daughter, a girl withhopes and dreams and aspirations of her own?’
Johns’ wife Trish’s presence was crucial to the interview. Her take was: ‘His crime is infidelity to me as his wife and I am the only person who can judge him on that.’ When asked, ‘How do you view this girl?,’ there was a pause and then she said, ‘I certainly wouldn’t like it to be my daughter.’ It was at that point I was reminded that 70 per cent of communication is non-verbal. The look on Trish’s face seemed to me to say, ‘She’s a slut who’s stuffed up our lives.’ Her response appeared to me to be a reaction to her family’s loss of face; it failed to adequately acknowledge the damage caused to a star-struck girl.
I didn’t think Grimshaw had it in her to go one of the most alpha of the alpha males on Australia’s biggest embarrassment, Channel Nine. But she did. Take a bow, Tracy Grimshaw.