Former AFL WAG Abby Gilmore reveals truth behind her split from Western Bulldogs star Jake Stringer
FORMER WAG Abby Gilmore has revealed how her picture-perfect life was shattered when a 17-year-old schoolgirl said she was having an affair with her Western Bulldogs fiance Jake Stringer.
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ABBY Gilmore has had enough.
She’s not going to stay silent any longer to protect the football reputation of her estranged fiance, Jake Stringer, or the boys’ club that is still part of the AFL.
It’s taken a year of heartbreak and pain, but this week she found her voice.
“Women can speak. We are allowed to have a voice,” Gilmore told the Herald Sun’s Page 13 at her Altona North home this week, “I couldn’t suffer in silence anymore.”
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Her seemingly picture-perfect life was finally shattered when the footy WAG received a message from a 17-year-old schoolgirl saying she was having sex with Gilmore’s Western Bulldogs fiance.
Gilmore knows she will cop flak for speaking out.
Blowing the whistle on the WAG lifestyle and toxic culture of sex, lies and gambling at football clubs is regarded as out of bounds.
“Everyone seems to know what was going on, but no one was saying or doing anything about it,” Gilmore says.
With a six-week-old baby, the couple’s second child, Gilmore, 24, felt ashamed and humiliated as a seemingly endless parade of girls left messages with in-your-face taunts about their sex sessions with Stringer, 23, some sending nude photographs of the premiership player.
“When it all blew up I was turned away from the club. I couldn’t believe it, the senior people just didn’t want to hear me out,” she says.
“But the Bulldogs players showed they cared. I’m proud of them for that. They were disgusted by his behaviour, doing that to me when I was pregnant. They let him know it.”
After months of depression and emotional upheaval, Gilmore has decided that breaking her silence is the only way she can regain her self respect.
It is the first real insight into what was happening with Stringer at the Western Bulldogs this year.
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Stringer’s gambling addiction had reached fever pitch, Gilmore says. He had blown six-figure sums of the young family’s savings.
Gilmore felt lost.
With two daughters — Milla, 3, and baby Arlo — to look after, she pretended she still had the picket fence and luxury WAG lifestyle, keeping up the pretence in front of her friends and family and her 100,000-plus social media following.
She put on a forced smile when Stringer and the Bulldogs won the Grand Final last year, even though she knew his ego and the hero worship in which he would revel would become unbearable.
But a year on, Gilmore says she “is done pretending”. She is no longer ashamed.
The young mother is selling the furniture she bought with Jake so she can start afresh.
Gilmore is prepared to take some heat. She says speaking out to help other women in similar circumstances is the only way to regain her pride.
She is sick of all the lies and innuendo.
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Gambling started as a teen
Gilmore and Jake met in Bendigo when she was just 13 and the two were barely in high school.
Jake became like a son to her parents.
“We created this life together. But what was happening at the football club was out of my control,” she says.
Abby had long been living with Stringer’s gambling addiction. She said the gambling started when Jake was a 16-year-old with stars in his eyes about a career in footy.
“The environment at a football club is concerning. Everything around footy is dictated on betting. How do you stop something when all you are surrounded by is gambling?”
Gilmore controlled all the finances with his manager Paul Connors.
But when Jake wanted cash his manager would dole it out.
“The clubs organise counselling and do all that, but the thing with Jake is that he needed more,” Gilmore says. “Whatever he got it wasn’t enough.
“They had a duty of care to look after Jake and I think if they had listened to me they would have been able to help him a lot more.
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“He wasn’t helped in the right way, but in saying that you need to want help. You can’t when you are lying about it and pushing it under the carpet like Jake was.”
Gilmore says living with Jake’s addiction was a rollercoaster ride of epic highs and lows.
“I am sensitive to it, because it is a real problem, it’s an addiction.
“In hindsight I realised I played a role in his gambling. I should have spoken out more to get him help rather than passively enabling his actions.”
She wishes there could be more openness inside the locker rooms. While Gilmore says there is some light, a lot of footballers like Jake are still floundering in the dark.
“It’s still such a man’s world. I wish he could have walked in and said, ‘Guys, I have a massive gambling addiction, can you help me?’. But he would never do that, no way, he would say it was too embarrassing.”
Gilmore lived with the gambling. She managed without the squandered savings.
The message that saw a perfect life crumble
But her life truly fell apart the day after a sit-down interview in which Jake gushed about how in love he was with Abby, waxing lyrical about his kids and the importance of family to him.
Gilmore woke up the next day feeling happy and normal for the first time since giving birth six weeks earlier.
She went to a boxing lesson and was hanging on the couch with Stringer’s teammate Jason “JJ” Johannisen, who was so close to the couple that he was in the birthing suite when Abby was in labour.
“Jake had gone out to get lunch and I was just chilling with JJ when I got this message and just went pale. I showed Jason,” Gilmore says.
“We both had no idea.”
The text from the schoolgirl said she was having sex with Stringer, who is dubbed “The Package”.
Gilmore later called her only to discover he had been visiting her family home, sometimes three times a week, for more than four months to have sex.
“Her parents were diehard Bulldogs supporters, they gave their blessing to this homewrecker,” Gilmore says.
“I immediately thought I must be doing something wrong. I think that is what so many women first feel, I’m not good enough.
“When I confronted him, Jake said, ‘I’m so sorry I love you’, I said ‘Fine, I have a six-week-old what can I do?’. I was embarrassed.
“We all constantly scroll through other people’s perfect lives on social media. I thought I had that perfect life and so was ashamed when it all came crumbling down.”
But the schoolgirl’s tawdry confession was just the beginning.
Gilmore says a long line of predatory and sometimes gleeful girls have since contacted her and sent her nude photographs of Stringer in all his naked glory.
“It was the full package all right,” Gilmore says, still managing to find some of her trademark larrikin humour in the greatest of adversities.
“Everyone was getting a look at The Package. It just kept going on and on.”
‘I woke up one day with a new path’
Abby said she got so depressed she couldn’t leave the house. Even looking at baby Arlo made her think of all the other women Stringer had been sleeping with.
“I had social anxiety,” she says.
“I had just done an article on how beautiful my family was and the very next day I got this message and my life crumpled to pieces.
“The worst part for me was all these girls knew I existed, they knew I was pregnant with a child and it’s just wrong.”
She wishes more could be done to educate footballers on sex and coping with the hero worship and predatory females desperate for five minutes in the spotlight on the arm of a player.
“Because I was a WAG we get put under this umbrella that you deserve it, because you signed up for it,” she says.
“But I didn’t. I met Jake when I was 13. I didn’t know what being a WAG would entail, or maybe I would have thought twice about it.”
She wishes Jake the best in his endeavours at a new club, with Geelong and Essendon sniffing around after he was given his marching orders by the Bulldogs last month.
She says alleged cover-ups of infighting at the Bulldogs did not surprise her.
Or that the club and coach Luke Beveridge had finally had enough.
“The cheating and stuff with me, they weren’t happy about that and it changed the dynamics at the club,” she says.
“Nothing is enough for Jake. He had the football club and now he is leaving that. He had his family and left that. I’m sad for him. He obviously isn’t doing it just for fun. He has an addictive personality.”
Gilmore says she is not speaking out to flog an endorsement or push an ambassador role. She is just fed up and she knows she is not alone.
“I’ve had so many WAGs contact me saying it has happened to them too and they are too scared to speak out,” she says.
“I realised I was lowering my self worth by being in this relationship. I was showing my girls that you put up with whatever to have a roof over your head and nice things. But I want my girls to know I would rather struggle and be happy than be in a toxic relationship.
“No one talks about it, but so many women go through it. I just want to have a voice for that.”
Gilmore says she finds strength and healing in sharing her story so other women can feel empowered and shrugging off the stigma of what has happened to her.
“When I finally said ‘I’m done, I’m not doing this anymore’, packed the kids up I found it empowering. That’s where I found my path.”
Gilmore is now in a new relationship with a “good bloke who doesn’t play football”.
She has started training as a counsellor and set up female-only workshops Love Yo’Self to help women feel confident and feel safe and protected to open up about their life hurdles.
“I want to send my message, not my mess,” she says
“I woke up one day with a new path. It’s not something I chose. It’s been handed to me and that was a really hard pill to swallow.”
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