‘I feel like an animal in a zoo’: Danielle Laidley on the humiliation of her arrest and former life as a football star

AFL great Danielle Laidley reached what she thought was her lowest point after a drug binge. But it got worse after she spoke to her lawyer.

WARNING: This article discusses confronting and potentially triggering topics.

AFL great Danielle Laidley has opened up about the night she was arrested after a drug binge, describing in searing detail the degrading humiliation of being treated by mocking police like “an animal in a zoo enclosure”.

She has also told of an attempt to take her own life, her introduction to drugs – “a pile of cocaine” on “a black dinner plate in front of me” – and how she grappled for decades with a deeply profound and life-altering secret.

Despite the gender she was assigned at birth – she was known to millions of Aussie sports fans as player and coach Dean Laidley – she understood she was female.

A life-changing secret ... Danielle Laidley knew she was female for decades. Now she is revealing just how she managed the clashing aspects of her life as a footy great, a father and a member of the transgender community.

The revelations are among scores in Laidley’s gripping and frank memoir Don’t Look Away: A Memoir of Identity & Acceptance, which comes out this week.

A series of powerful extracts published today by News Corp newspapers trace her journey from troubled childhood through sporting greatness to collapse and rehabilitation, beginning with the description of a desperate Laidley – part-way through transition, addicted to ice – trying to take her own life in 2020 after an eight-day drug binge.

“Things go mostly to plan. I blow out and begin choking at least. And yet my body revolts, rousing me ever so slightly back into consciousness, until I’m kicking and thrashing. My roommate and I are separated by a single wall and she hears me banging, gasping for air. I’ve locked my door but she forces it open,” Laidley writes.

Dramatic swings, from high to low and back again ... Don't Look Away is a rollercoaster read.

The attempt fails due to the dramatic intervention. But it sets the scene for Laidley’s account later of being arrested – a story that made headlines across Australia – and the shameful behaviour of police who leaked photos of her at the police station.

“It’s 8:30pm on a Saturday night. You would think the streets of St Kilda would be busy enough to keep the cops occupied, but there are more than a dozen plain-clothed and uniformed officers here, all taking a look at me, as if they had heard in advance I was coming. I feel like an animal in a zoo enclosure – an attraction in some strange circus,” Laidley writes.

The situation gets far worse.

Caught in a pincer ... Danielle in her Kangaroos coaching days, as she was known to millions of Australians, while feeling forced to hide her real identity.

Laidley describes weeping as she is strip-searched by both a female and a male officer: “Because I’m transgender, the rest of the search happens in two parts ... I feel as degraded as can be”. Then, chillingly, her lawyer tells her: “When you were being interviewed at St Kilda someone took a photo of you and it’s been circulated, then published …. It’s an absolute firestorm out there.”

DON’T LOOK AWAY: READ THE FULL EXTRACT

The extracts also cover how the relatively clean-living Laidley – whose own dad was an alcoholic – took to excessive drinking, gambling and eventually tried drugs after her careers as player and coach wound down and her marriage ended.

“But now, leaving football, winding up alone and a little embarrassed by where my life has led, I suddenly find myself in places and with people where it’s normal to enliven life with illicit fuel – or to numb your pain with a naughty sedative.

“One night I say Yes. It’s as simple as that … This is how my drug habit is born.”

“A desire that’s gone unmet for years” ... Danielle tells of the first time she tried going out in public dressed as herself. It almost ended in disaster.

But the story is about more than confronting moments, as Laidley revealed in a headline-making interview on Friday. Throughout runs the moving theme of Laidley’s realisation that she is different to the boys and men around her; and how she tries to manage that both by repressing it and secretly expressing it with clothes and makeup, while being wracked by guilt.

The extracts cover her first attempt at trying on nail polish, aged six, and feeling “only calm” – a rare sensation in the troubled Laidley household. Later, as a rising star in Perth in the early 1990s, Laidley shares her first attempt at going out in public as a woman, while her then-wife and kids are out of the house.

“I have a few precious hours to myself today, and I’m planning to use them well. I’m going to finally indulge a desire that’s gone unmet for years now,” she writes, then describes getting dressed and heading off in her car.

Back in the spotlight ... Danielle’s book features a moving rehabilitation into the AFL fold. Picture: Alex Coppel

“I go through traffic lights and reach a stop sign. This is when I feel most vulnerable, when I throw all my willpower at the passing traffic to clear – Hurry up! Hurry up! Hurry up! – in case someone pulls up beside me. I look up at the car sitting next to mine, and there in the driver’s seat, waiting to turn, is one of the directors of the West Perth Football Club. This is a man who knows me, and knows me well. He would know my car, too.”

The experience leaves Laidley rattled but the longing won’t go – and so begins a long personal journey to transition, dodging rumours, fear of discovery, domestic upheaval … and moments of sheer joy. The extract passage covering her meeting with AFL boss Gil McLachlan and her return to the sport after the lowest point of addiction and arrest is especially moving.

Changing face of sport ... Gil McLachlan told Danielle he wants to help her make a difference around issues of diversity. Picture: Jason Edwards

In a foreword to the memoir, acclaimed writer Craig Silvey – whose well-known novel Honeybee centres around the odyssey of a transgender teen – writes Laidley “is asking us to come and see. To come and see how she has hurt. To come and see how she has triumphed … how she has lost herself and found herself”.

Silvey adds: “She’s inviting cisgender readers to come and see a proud trans woman navigating the world with pride and purpose. To come and see the discrimination she has experienced, and how she has faced these obstacles with dignity and humility … raw and confronting as it may often be. Come and see. And don’t look away.”

When it comes to footy, Laidley tells how she was first bitten by the bug in childhood and developed a brutally aggressive playing style into her career, explaining the inner turmoil behind her nickname “The Junkyard Dog”.

‘The need to win, to dominate’ ... footy fans knew Danielle as ‘The Junkyard Dog’. But there was inner turmoil behind the on-field grit.

“It’s the need to win, to dominate, to control something or someone, since I have no control over the secret that dominates my inner life,” she writes of her early days playing with the Kangaroos, having just described “flattening” a Sydney Swan without a care. “On the field, I’m giving in to all my worst impulses, and it’s been building for a while.”

The extracts also cover her take on key chapters in AFL lore, including the infamous affair between Wayne Carey and Kelli Stevens, wife of Carey’s and Laidley’s comrade Anthony Stevens.

‘Heart ripped out’ ... Wayne Carey (L) and Anthony Stevens clash on the field after the revelation of the infamous affair.

“Long friendships – forged over a decade in blood and sweat and laughter and tears – are suddenly over. In one evening the heart is ripped out of the North Melbourne Football Club,” she writes.

“Of course Wayne is no stranger to that limelight. He’s been flirting with trouble his entire career, starting a fight here, pinching a breast there. He’s the best player in the competition, which is reason enough for an outsized ego, but in his case it’s also fed and watered, enabled by players and coaches and administrators … There were rules for us and there were rules for Wayne. He was too good to reprimand for the bad.”

Don’t Look Away: A Memoir of Identity & Acceptance by Danielle Laidley will be published by HarperCollins on August 30 and is available to pre-order now at Booktopia.

If you or somebody you know is in need of crisis or suicide prevention support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit lifeline.org.au