Sam Newman’s Caroline Wilson blast on The Footy Show another ghastly attack: Susie O’Brien

CAROLINE Wilson has a long history of what she once called “sexist gang tackles” on The Footy Show. She got another ugly one last night, writes Susie O’Brien.

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FOOTBALL journalist Caroline Wilson has a long history of what she once called “sexist gang tackles” on The Footy Show.

She got one more last night from panellist Sam Newman who told her:

“The jig is up Caro, honestly and truly. You’ve become an embarrassment. Even if you were underwater, you’d still be talking”.

After the week we’ve had, it was one more ghastly attack from a powerful man to a woman he clearly doesn’t like.

The Footy Show line — delivered at 11pm — was that good men like McGuire made a mistake and had apologised, and everyone needed to move on.

They’re dreaming. This one has a long way to run yet.

Co-host Rebecca Maddern made a point of saying: “The men involved in this are all good men. I know how they feel about violence against women and it’s exactly how I feel. It’s abhorrent and perpetrators of violence against women are the lowest of the low”.

Well, Rebecca, it’s been pretty soundly accepted that McGuire and his cronies perpetrated violence against Wilson with their comments. So does this make them the “lowest of the low?” Not on The Footy Show, it seems, where they’re still seen as “good men”.

Sam Newman and Eddie McGuire at The Footy Show’s 21st birthday. Picture: Julie Kiriacoudis

Newman opened his diatribe by saying he wanted to be “fair and balanced” then proceeded to deliver a stinging character assassination of Wilson.

The whole episode, he said, was a “backwater of garbage” peddled by “cowardly excrement” in “second-tier media”.

Wilson had no right to “feign indignation five days after it happened” when she was given the same treatment on 3AW, Newman said.

I’ve argued all week why the reaction to what took place on 3AW and Triple M has been so different.

On Triple M McGuire kicked the whole thing off by saying he’d pay $50,000 to see Wilson stay under the water in an ice bath, then said he’d pay $10,000 extra to bomb her, then he egged his bully boy mates on to join in, and then he went on to call her a “black widow” who will “burn you like everyone else”.

Sam Newman and Eddie McGuire during The Footy Show’s 500th episode.

So Newman’s defence of McGuire on the basis that he didn’t actually say anything about holding her under isn’t worth all that much in my mind.

Newman suggested Wilson merely had a barrow to push: “If you search for a cause to fit a narrative which you are peddling eventually you will convince yourself you have stumbled on something,” he said.

“If you want to be treated equal, don’t complain when it’s too equal.”

But Wilson has never been treated like an equal. These men don’t like her because she doesn’t suck up to them like most people do, and because she doesn’t care what they think of her.

And it drives them wild, because popular, powerful men like this are used to people trying to please them and being scared of them.

Next co-host James Brayshaw admitted that it was “absolutely appropriate that offence was taken” because some of the language used was “off the pace”. It was better than Newman’s effort, but still pretty weak in the circumstances.

Then it was co-host Rebecca Maddern’s turn, who made the pretty important admission that if something like that was said about her she would have been pretty upset.

“When I heard this exchange it did make me feel uncomfortable as a woman, as a person,” she said.

Maddern then urged people to move on, saying “we can all work a little harder at being better”. She’s missing the point. It’s not everyone else who has to be better, it’s powerful sexist men who commit casual violence against an outspoken female in their industry who need to be better.

“These men made a mistake, they have acknowledged that they have made a mistake and they have apologised for that mistake and that apology has been accepted,” Maddern said.

The only problem is that in McGuire’s case it took three days and three apologies before he got it right.

Originally published as Sam Newman’s Caroline Wilson blast on The Footy Show another ghastly attack: Susie O’Brien