Author Nicole Hayes and her Outer Sanctum podcast colleagues played a central role in helping expose the misogyny that lingers in the AFL world
It wasn’t until my young daughter asked why Sam Newman was calling me and the rest of The Outer Sanctum’s podcasters “excrement” on national television that the full impact of our role in the Eddie McGuire–Caroline Wilson controversy struck me. This followed the drowning “joke” made by McGuire during the Triple M coverage of the MND Big Freeze.
As one sixth of the all-female podcast (comprising Kate Seear, Felicity Race, Lucy Race, Emma Race, and Alicia Sometimes and myself) that broke the story the weekend before The Footy Show aired, I’d been largely bemused by the furore that followed. There were six of us, for a start, and we’d become fast friends over the months that led to the formation of The Outer Sanctum, cemented more recently by the almost out-of-body experience of being part of a viral media storm. We had each other’s back. We checked in and supported each other throughout the ensuing chaos, sharing the media responsibilities and personal missives that flooded in – the interviews, the Twitter feed, the barrage of emails and Facebook messages – divvying them up according to whose work and family commitments at that moment were manageable, and whose were not. It had been a team effort from start to finish and reminded me, again, how resilient and rewarding this collaboration had been.
But seeing Sam Newman’s comments through the eyes of my 12-year-old daughter was confronting and unexpectedly upsetting. My daughter was horrified, but also confused. In her world, adults don’t speak like that about other people – but here was a man, a total stranger, calling her mother a piece of shit. On national television.
I quickly turned Sam Newman and his “perfumed excrement” monologue off. But it shook me. It shook us all …
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Nicole Hayes, Guardian
