My behaviour had been up and down throughout my twenties, even before I went to play for Shabtai, and I think I could quite easily have taken that route into depression much earlier. When I’d started going through all my mental health issues in Russia, I’d just wanted to be home in Australia—I knew I could help myself by removing myself from the situation, but I also wanted to play basketball for a living. I loved playing, those two hours on court were the best part of my day, but I wanted to earn the big money. I couldn’t make a living like that from basketball back in Australia.
We were playing nearly every weekend in the Russian league, as well as competing in a different country every week as part of the European league. We were flying all over Europe, and given the mental state I was in, my anxiety about planes was worse than ever. I just took more medication. I don’t know if it was helping me as it should have, but I managed to get to games and play. My teammates didn’t know, I didn’t talk about it, so I isolated myself even more. I drank a lot, too, I probably shouldn’t have been drinking as much as I was. We’d play, we’d go out, I drank, it all got too much for me.
Mum and I were talking only a couple of years ago about some players constantly bitching and complaining about things, and she said, ‘I don’t know if you remember, but when you were in Russia, you were on the phone upset about things every day’, and I don’t even recall that. I was so miserable, and I just couldn’t get out of it. It got to the stage that whenever I had free time I went to bed. I stopped going out with the girls and just stayed home. Shabtai wanted us to have fun and enjoy our time there, but I didn’t anymore, the shine had gone.
I knew Shabtai had enrolled me in university in Moscow, but I never attended. I’m not sure what I was supposed to have studied, but I went into Shabtai’s office one day and he surprised me by handing over an official-looking certificate written in Russian and said, ‘Congratulations, you’ve finished a year of university’. I was like, ‘What?’. I didn’t do a day of study, I don’t think I would have been up to it anyway.
It was a different kind of time for me. I was blinded by everything Shabtai gave me, which included diamonds when we won tournaments. He treated his imports really well—but in our team there were young Russian women from all over the country playing basketball for Shabtai, and I don’t think they were looked after the same way we were. Women were treated differently in that part of the world, in all of eastern Europe. I wasn’t really thinking about it at the time, I was seeing it but not acknowledging it. I was just playing and getting through each day.
I hadn’t really seen or caught up with Paulie—who’d always been my compass for dealing with issues—since I’d gone to Russia and America. During that time I’d grown up, and everything she’d taught me about equality and power play had gone by the wayside, I didn’t really think about it, I just played basketball, it was my heyday. I’d been partying a lot, especially in America and South Korea, socialising with my teammates. I wasn’t in the nest anymore, I was out in the world, just being young and not overly analytical about anything. When I went to Russia and things got out of control, a lot of these issues around power started coming back up for me—but as for acknowledging it and trying to understand it, that didn’t quite happen. Shabtai was a dominant male, I felt a complete loss of control, but I didn’t want to think about it.
Shabtai decided to send me on a holiday to Israel with another one of my teammates as a congratulation for winning an important game. He’d taken us on little holidays and trips and adventures before. Sue and Diana had gone to Israel previously with Shabtai, and they’d told me about being with him there, how they would walk with him down the street and how well known he was. Some people hated him, some loved him, but I didn’t know what that was about.
He sent us to Tel Aviv, a beautiful sunny city, where both his daughters live, he had a lot of family there. Shabtai organised a car and driver for us so we could visit the other special places that Israel is renowned for. We were in the country for three days or so, and it ended up being a pretty full-on experience.
In Jerusalem, we took a couple of tours, did the walk taken by Jesus with his cross before his crucifixion, saw the place where it’s claimed he was resurrected, visited churches, did our best to see everything. Our driver took us up to the mountain overlooking Jerusalem as part of a day trip, and as we drove past a university there were dumpsters on the road on fire, and kids started throwing rocks at our car. I’d never had that feeling of being in a danger zone before, and to compound things, on the way back to Tel Aviv we had a small car accident. I was on so much medication at that point that I just wasn’t myself—sleeping pills, antidepressants, Valium, were all numbing my feelings. But even though I was heavily medicated, I was still aware of being in a hostile environment.
Travel is supposed to open up your mind, but I think the history of the countries I’d experienced from my travels playing basketball had added a weight on my shoulders that I’d never felt in Australia. I was born and raised here, and am comfortable here, but eastern Europe, Israel, Lithuania, Germany, all those countries with so much history that we’ve read about and studied in school, they felt melancholy to me. I should be so thankful that I had the opportunity to go there and experience all those things that I would otherwise never have seen, but I was definitely affected by the weight of past events that were so beyond my comprehension at the time. The other thing was that I had been playing in Europe and Asia in winter, the trees had no leaves on them, everything was literally grey and gloomy—and that was exactly how I felt, too, I couldn’t lift myself out of it.
That season there was also something going on with Shabtai that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, he just started talking differently to us. His father had died in Israel and he went over for the funeral, and when he returned he told us he had bought the burial plot next to his dad’s. I thought that was fair enough, but he was saying stuff that made me think things weren’t quite right.
Towards the end of that second season, something happened that made me even more uneasy. Following a match, our driver took Sue, Diana and myself to a shopping mall where the three of us often used to go and have a meal after games, we had our favourite spots. Our driver thought there was a car behind us that was following us. As there’d been a fan infatuated with Diana at the time, we were wary. When we got to the shopping mall we noticed this guy dressed all in black following us everywhere, and it was really unnerving. We decided to walk around the shops, and whenever we looked back he’d always be there. We went to dinner, and he was wandering around out the front of the restaurant, so we called Shabtai and he said, ‘Don’t worry, he’s security’. That shocked us, and we were all thinking ‘Why do we need security?’. It was just one of those moments where things felt really bizarre—he’d organised for us to have security and wouldn’t explain why. What the hell was going on? You don’t put security on people for no reason. There were a few times like that, and it took a further toll on my mental state. We might not have been in immediate danger, but that season it felt like there was something else going on. I certainly wasn’t flourishing as a human being, I don’t think I was a good person to be around at all.
I came back to Australia and was contracted to go back to Russia for the following season. It had reached the point where I felt really controlled and powerless. Shabtai still wouldn’t deal with my agents, I couldn’t play anywhere else, he was paying me so much money that it was almost impossible to take up other options. Money is such a compelling factor when you’re playing a professional sport, especially being a woman, as we’re often paid much less than men. I was there for the money, even though I was uncomfortable, and I had a fairly serious internal battle going on.