In early 2008, Sue and four other female football club directors wrote a letter of complaint to television station Channel Nine about the treatment of a prominent female football journalist on an episode of The Footy Show. A regular on the show, Sam Newman, had brought a lingerie-clad manikin on stage and stapled to its face a photo of The Age newspaper’s chief football writer, Caroline Wilson, before groping the figure. In response to the written complaint, on the next episode of the long-running program, Newman claimed the five women had done nothing for the game and called them ‘liars and hypocrites’.
As a matter of principle, and despite the advice of many people around her, Sue decided not to let the insult go and instead sued the network and Newman, as well as his co-host Garry Lyon, for defamation. This, after all, is the woman who, as a seven-year-old, waved floggers behind the goals with the cheer squad. It is the woman who continues to watch at least two football matches every week throughout the AFL season and then replays the Bulldogs game at home—whether they’ve won or lost. Her father and her brother were both footy umpires, and she herself is a committed sponsor of the umpiring academy. As a director of the Western Bulldogs since 2004 and with a background of almost sixty years in the game, Sue knows her football, and more importantly, she’s a stickler for respect.
Sue describes her attitude towards Newman at the time: ‘No-one is going to say that about me! If someone wants to be a misogynist, they can do it on their own time. He’d put down women for so long and I thought, “Damn you!” I tried for an apology but it didn’t work’.
Until Sue challenged the manikin incident on the show, such behaviour, and the outdated attitudes it represented, had been tacitly accepted. In keeping with what was described in an Age article as the ‘bucks-night ethos of The Footy Show’, the general feeling was that those who didn’t like it could opt to tune out. And the fact that more than half the fan base was female didn’t seem to matter. No-one had been prepared to publicly challenge the program’s regular sexism and stereotyping. This was in part because the manikin skit was claimed to have been performed ‘in jest’, but undoubtedly it was also because those involved in the show wielded enormous power in the Melbourne business scene.
Needless to say, taking on Newman, a high-profile name in the industry in which she served as one of the earliest female board members, took an enormous amount of courage. As a result, it attracted the attention of the national news media. But it also drew the ire of many fans of the TV show. Nor was Sue’s litigation universally popular among those close to her. Kevin Andrews, who was then, as now, the Member for Menzies in the House of Representatives, articulates what many other friends quite likely thought: ‘I don’t criticise her for doing it, but whether you achieve much out of that sort of thing, I’m not sure—other than give him [Newman] more notoriety’.
In taking such a definite stand against a powerful figure in a male-dominated sphere, a strong show of support was never a certainty. Because of various direct and indirect connections to Channel Nine or the periphery of the television industry, as Colin notes, ‘it was not surprising in those circumstances that people who should have been supportive suddenly go to water. And Sue was ultimately left standing out there on her own’. Sue laughs when she says, ‘The so-called experts warned me not to do it’. But she felt compelled to put her foot down about the disrespect, the personal ridicule. Taking it to court wasn’t for her own personal gain—it was about making a point.
Sue’s sister-in-law, Lyn, believes there was actually a lot of support from the general public for Sue’s stance: ‘The guys that I was working with at the time were all horrified by what had been said about Sue and the other women. I was a little nervous about her taking them on in court because I know how hard it is to prove defamation cases. But I tell you what, you’ve got to admire Sue for doing it! And yes, you have to acknowledge she was fortunate to be in the financial position to be able to do it. But she had the strength. It took enormous courage’.
George Pappas also applauds the decision to act: ‘I think Sue likes order rather than chaos. You can see that in the way she lives, she dresses, she works—she likes to be briefed, prepared and informed. I think that’s why the Sam Newman comment got her full wrath, because it came from left field, it was unexpected’. He says he noted Sue’s steely determination to right that wrong: ‘It was as though she said, “You’ve insulted me, here are the consequences. You’re a bully, take one back”’.
Sue, as the Plaintiff, was ready at the court on the day of the hearing to take up her fight with the behaviour of the co-Defendants. She was looking forward to taking on Newman and Nine, who she regarded as no better than schoolyard bullies. She was hoping that they would buckle when confronted, as so many bullies do.
The case ended for Sue before it began when, without a word of evidence being given, and at the door of the Court it reached a confidential settlement acceptable to Sue and her legal team. Newman himself never appeared nor did he apologise. Subsequently in November 2009 Channel Nine issued an apology.
Sue Le Fevre, who looks after the SAMRF accounts, is adamant that for Sue it was about justice: ‘Sue is very fair. If the situation was about something that was done to a man, or about something women were getting that men weren’t, Sue would be up there fighting for the men’.
Herald Sun sports journalist Michael Warner recalls seeing Sue immediately after the settlement: ‘I was in the general newsroom back then and I was asked to go and cover the story. Sue was in the office of a city law firm; she was there with her brother and some advisers. Sue was a bit rattled, like anyone is after a fight, managing that feeling of adrenalin. She seemed relieved, with a sense of “It’s all over”. Whenever you take on people like that in Melbourne, with that sort of platform, it’s pretty scary. But she’s tougher than people think. Generosity is in her DNA, but you don’t get to where she’s got without being tough’.
Sue didn’t celebrate her victory with any display or fuss. ‘She was relieved, but was just quiet’, reports Colin. He offers a typically tidy summation: ‘Court is a terrible place to resolve a principle’. And the money never touched Sue’s bank account. Instead, it went straight to medical research. But while that battle was over, unbeknownst to all but a very few, Sue had another fight on her hands—one that had begun more than three years earlier. Throughout the high-profile saga, Sue had been recovering from chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
It was April 2006, and Sue had just visited the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show. ‘I love gardens and I wanted to see what was new’, she says. Delighting in the stunning displays, and considering new ideas for her own personal haven, Sue bought a bag of tulip bulbs. That was on the Friday. The next morning, as she was getting ready to attend a lunch in her role as Bulldogs board member, Sue felt some lumps under her arm: ‘There were lumps upon lumps. I thought I’d pulled a muscle from carrying bags of tulip bulbs the day before. It irritated me for the rest of the day’. Sue eventually discussed with Melissa Chavulak the possibility that she’d had an allergic reaction to the bulbs, and she made an appointment to see her doctor on the following Monday.
‘He said he thought I had cancer’, says Sue. ‘I thought he was joking.’ Sue was promptly booked in for a biopsy that afternoon, and before the day was over she knew she had cancer. But that was not all. In an ironic twist, she was then diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. ‘In the morning it was cancer, by the afternoon it was type 1’, says Sue. ‘I had the call to say it was cancer and I was getting ready to go for the biopsy when I got a second phone call … and they said, “Did you know you had diabetes?”’
The biopsy was rescheduled for the following day and Sue went back to discuss how to manage her late-onset diabetes. It was an early sign of what were to become even more serious health complications in the future—from the time of her cancer diagnosis until the identification of heart disease some eight years later, Sue’s weight would gradually climb to around 120 kilograms.
Managing the cancer involved a year of chemotherapy, including thirty-four consecutive days of radiation, with the added complexity of type 1 diabetes. Sue says, ‘I had four doctors looking after me. Four of them were absolutely devoted to me and I love them all’. Thinking back to before the cancer diagnosis, Sue says, ‘The back of my head had been quite sore for about six months. I thought it was just that I’d slept the wrong way, but it was all part of the lymphoma’. It was typical that Sue would play down a nagging pain and then, once diagnosed, become completely focused on fixing the problem.
Sue had married Colin only a year before her diagnosis, and she remembers saying to her husband that he could leave: ‘At that point in my life I was used to looking after myself. I know it sounds ridiculous but I didn’t want anyone looking after me. Of course, Colin was horrified. As it turned out, I couldn’t have got through it without him’.
Sue’s intensely private nature meant very few people were witness to her battle during that year of treatment. Colin points out that anyone who has gone through the process of addressing a major illness like cancer would appreciate that every other aspect of life essentially stops: ‘It was a year of both of us putting our lives on hold and concentrating on Sue just coping’.
Sue shudders a little as she recalls, ‘I spent the best part of a year fighting the cancer. Gosh I was sick’. Sue’s weight increased with the chemotherapy and the daily insulin injections, exacerbated by a reduced capacity to exercise—the chemo had damaged the nerves in her feet so it was too painful for her to walk. She says she spent a lot of time in bed or on the couch, resting and reflecting: ‘I looked out at the garden a lot. I know every plant there—I could tell Colin anything that’s new and not new. I don’t know the Latin terms of them all, but I can still tell you what is there and if anything has changed’.
With her disciplined approach and the support of her close family and friends, Sue saw the cancer into remission and kept her latent diabetes under close management. But what she didn’t know was that her heart and kidneys were suffering quietly in the background.
Little did he realise it, but Sam Newman had inadvertently done Sue Alberti and female sport an enormous favour. Marked out as someone not to be messed with, as a person who would stand up on matters of principle, Sue found that her public profile escalated after the public court battle. When she was able to return to her commitments in a full-time capacity, she emerged with her dignity—and her health—intact.
While there was certainly discomfort among the traditionalists, coverage of the legal stoush highlighted the issue of misogyny in Australian sport, and the need for change became more evident. But most importantly, the whole thing was an inspiration to women, as a marginalised majority, to fight for what they believed in. For Sue, that meant turning her attention to making a difference for women in sport.