Sam Burgess bombshell: Mum Julie’s late night rescue after hotel bender
NRL star Sam Burgess has stood down from South Sydney’s coaching squad after sensational allegations of a wild violent bender and substance abuse. Today we also reveal the inside story of the night Burgess’ mother Julie staged a late-night rescue of her son from the bender at an up-market city hotel.
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“I want to see my sons,” Julie Burgess demanded of the concierge at plush city hotel The Establishment in the early hours of the evening of November 5, 2018.
South Sydney league star Sam Burgess and his older brother Luke — a party boy with big brother influence over Sam and the men’s younger twin brothers George and Tom — had been on a 24-hour bender following a BBQ to farewell departing Souths player Jason Clark a day earlier.
After months of worrying and waiting for her husband to come home from a night out, Burgess’s eight-month pregnant wife Phoebe had lost sway and could no longer rein in her husband when he was in full party mode.
There was only one person who could — the tough streetwise North England-born single mother-of-four who had relocated to Australia with her four boys, Julie Burgess.
Known to football fans as Mrs B, she knew her family’s reputation, along with their careers, were at risk. The concierge at the Justin Hemmes’ Sydney CBD hotel was no match for the frantic, angry advancing 190cm-tall mother and coughed up the room number without too much persuasion.
It would take Mrs Burgess an hour to talk her sons into her car, a Hyundai Veloster, and head home. “Julie virtually had to drag Sam and Luke to her car by their ears, they were in a very heightened state, but somehow she got them out of that room and into her car,” an insider told The Saturday Telegraph.
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Establishment proprietor Justin Hemmes refused to comment when approached yesterday about the lost weekend at his hotel.
Back at Sam and Phoebe’s Lurline Ave, Maroubra home, Sam would become newly enraged when his wife’s parents, Mitchell and Sarah Hooke, arrived.
In a near psychotic state, it is alleged Burgess made a slurred threat in the direction of his father-in-law. He did not act on the threat.
The South Sydney star bellowed to a room of family and friends that also included Clark, who had rushed over following a frantic call from Phoebe to help manage his out-of-control mate.
The wild night at Maroubra came 11 months prior to the businessman seeking an AVO against Burgess in October 2019 following a heated exchange between the two men at the Hooke’s family home in Bowral.
Desperate to calm her screaming son, Julie Burgess summoned South Sydney doctor Andrew McDonald to the Maroubra house for a midnight housecall.
Fearing the scene would distress the couple’s toddler daughter, Burgess was wrestled into a downstairs room, a “man cave” that had formally housed the family nanny, and put to bed.
McDonald then gave Burgess three injections to calm him down.
According to an investigation by The Australian newspaper the doctor administered liquid valium or Diazepam AMP after Mr Hooke was dispatched to a Maroubra chemist to fill a hastily written script in Mr Hooke’s name. Administering it was no easy feat.
The enraged Burgess, at almost 120kg, wanted none of it and Clark and McDonald, along with family members, would have to hold him down on a bed.
Phoebe Burgess would later tell her mother-in-law the bed was so bloodied it would need to be thrown out.
In the report in yesterday’s The Australian, Mr Hooke alleged that during that incident he and his wife witnessed Burgess lay on Phoebe “aggressively … falling on her … and aggressively squeezing her heavily pregnant stomach.”
On November 7, Burgess underwent a secret drug test, under the false name “Ben Smith”, performed by another doctor, in the South Sydney Juniors club carpark in Kingsford. A statement attached to Mitch Hooke’s AVO case against the footballer, who has pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing over the October 2019 matter, also further alleged Ms Burgess had a txt exchange with a Souths official in February 2019 in which Ms Burgess expressed her concern about her husband’s heavy reliance on prescription drugs including Xanax, Kalma and Innovane.
The couple separated soon after the November incident. Burgess was living between the Maroubra house and high-profile accountant Anthony Bell’s house when their son Billy was born in December 2018.
According to her police statement, that same month the Souths star yelled at his wife when he found her crying while bathing their newborn son. “Get the f. k up, you piece of shit … Why are you f. king crying in front of my children, you weak c. t. Get the f. k out of my house. You’re pathetic” Ms Burgess alleged her husband said. Yesterday Burgess’s lawyer Mark O’Brien vigorously denied the new allegations concerning Burgess: “The allegations are false and constitute an indefensible defamation against my client.”
The sensational claims are the latest in a year of serious allegations concerning the lifestyle of South’s captain.
In late 2017 a Melbourne woman outed Burgess over an affair the then married father-of-one was having with her.
When she asked for an apology from Burgess after discovering he’d lied about being married, he allegedly threatened her to stop talking: “Shut your f. king mouth you pig. You are f. king dead.” Her call to the NRL Integrity Unit did not result in any action. Then in September 2018, he was caught up in a sexting scandal after it was alleged he’d sent a photo of his penis to another woman.
An investigation by Souths cleared the Rabbitohs star of misconduct.
Originally published as Sam Burgess bombshell: Mum Julie’s late night rescue after hotel bender