Secret Dons tape: Crisis meeting recording emerges
EXCLUSIVE: A SECRET tape recording has emerged of an explosive crisis meeting held at the height of Essendon’s drugs war with the AFL. Click here to listen to the extraordinary recording every footy fan must hear.
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- Secret tape exposes rage over AFL ‘betrayal’
- Read the explosive meeting transcript
- Federal Labor MP backs Senate inquiry into Essendon drugs saga
A SECRET tape recording has emerged of a crisis meeting held at the height of Essendon’s drugs war with the AFL.
The extraordinary 2013 recording of Bombers chairman Paul Little, coach James Hird, senior assistant Mark Thompson and football manager Danny Corcoran lays bare their fury as they come to the view they have been betrayed by the AFL and its deputy chief, Gillon McLachlan.
In the recording an angry Little says: “I rang him (McLachlan) last night and I said, ‘You know, you’ve really upset me here, because you’ve gone back on your word, Gil’.
“He said, ‘No no, I haven’t, I haven’t’. I said, ‘You have. You told me one thing, and now you’re doing something else’.”
A clearly desperate Hird says: “They’re a pack of f---ing lying pr---s — and they have done from the start … ”
Little also says McLachlan told him the previous night, “there is a 99 per cent chance that the players won’t be charged” for doping.
The August 8 meeting at Windy Hill was called just hours after lawyers for the AFL told Essendon that charges would be laid against the club and officials over the 2012 drug injections program.
The tape, until now a secret, exposes how the Bombers felt the AFL was threatening them to either accept sanctions or be “stood down” as a club. Little says: “That’s the gun at our head.”
After reading excerpts of the recording, Labor federal MP Kimberley Kitching has now joined a push for a Senate inquiry into the conduct of the AFL and ASADA.
READ THE EXPLOSIVE MEETING TRANSCRIPT
Senator Kitching said on Thursday night: “It is clear mistakes were made by regulators and others, and those mistakes must never again be repeated.”
The league has always maintained that the AFL Commission “hearing” to decide the fate of Essendon and its officials — held two weeks after the recorded crisis meeting — was not compromised by backroom deals and negotiations.
The leaked tape throws serious doubt on those claims.
Campaigners for an inquiry have questioned whether it was appropriate for the AFL to attempt to strike a deal with Essendon and to provide assurances over whether the players would be charged.
Corcoran, Thompson, Hird and Little can all be heard on the tape, and have given approval for it to be released to the public.
At the start of the recording, a clearly stunned Little tells the group: “So, I think what they’re saying is ... if we don’t co-operate they have the power to stand down.”
He continues: “And we don’t know if that refers to individuals or the club. But they have used that as a veiled threat.”
Little further laments: “Every single issue that I agreed on with Gil McLachlan, and I met with him the other night, has pretty much been reversed now in this note here.”
Detailing another conversation with McLachlan about the clearing of the Essendon 34 from doping charges, Little says: “He’s now saying to me, ‘Oh, I was referring to (AOD)-9604’, and I said, ‘That is f---ing crap’.
“I said, ‘We parked 9604, we all agreed that that was going nowhere’, and then we spoke about getting the players cleared, ‘unconditionally’ was the word I used ...
“And he said ‘What do you want from me?’. And I said — no, he then said to me, ‘There is a 99 per cent chance that the players won’t be charged’.
“And I said ‘Well, I’d like to believe you, but are you happy for me to use that language in front of the players?’
“And he said ‘Oh no, you can’t do that’. And I said ‘Well, f--k, you’re telling me one thing and over here we can’t say anything to the players’.
“And he said ‘Let me work on it. I will try and give you some language that will give you the comfort that the players so desperately need’.”
Referring to the interim report of the ASADA investigation, handed to the league just six days earlier, Hird says: “Every bit of advice we’ve been given by everyone we know is that that is not a legal document. It cannot be used. It is in breach of ASADA Act.’’
Little responds: “And it’s questionable whether ASADA should have even handed it over to the AFL …
“You know, to give someone an interim report where 20 per cent of it is blacked out and you can’t even read it is a f---ing joke, and then make a decision based on that …
“And Gil McLachlan says, ‘Oh, by the way, the redacted parts, we’ll give them to you in a day or two.’ Oh, f--k, I haven’t seem them, they haven’t come. You know, so, mate, that story can be told and the fact that (Andrew) Demetriou has put himself up as being not able to talk to us because he’s conflicted.
“Well, f---ing what’s happened to his confliction for the last six months?”
The meeting was five days before the AFL charged Essendon, Hird, Thompson, Corcoran and club doctor Bruce Reid with bringing the game into disrepute. Two weeks later, the club agreed to penalties including a $2 million fine, banishment from the finals, and being stripped of prized draft picks; Hird and Corcoran accepted suspensions.
The Herald Sun was not involved in recording the meeting and did not pay for the tape.
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