By Samantha Lane
Carlton star Darcy Vescio's four-goal debut in her team's unforgettable AFL Women's league opener against Collingwood has been soured by a cyber attack on Twitter that plastered graphic pornography on her account.
Well before Vescio broached the topic publicly on Tuesday, Carlton was aware its prize 23-year-old marquee signing had been victim to a crude invasion of privacy.
Even as Vescio was announcing herself as a skilled talent for a huge, new audience to women's football on Friday night, a photo of female genitalia was on her Twitter page.
The photo caption made a suggestive reference to the image and, to anyone who didn't know or guess the account had been invaded, the posting could have appeared to have been published by Vescio.
As Darcy Vescio played a blinder on Friday night, her Twitter account was under cyber attack.Credit: Getty Images
No Carlton player is believed to have experienced a hacking incident like it, and the club is still investigating how it could have occurred.
A spokesman for Carlton said staff had been shocked to see the post early on Friday morning and had immediately contacted Vescio, who is also employed at Carlton as a graphic designer.
Unable to remove the post herself, Twitter Australia was contacted to delete the offensive material.
By the start of play on Friday night the post was invisible to new viewers of Vescio's page, but could still be seen by anyone who had already viewed it. The AFL had been made aware of the situation, Carlton said.
It is unclear if it was a targeted or random incident. The image remained pinned to Vescio's verified account for more than 24 hours.
Vescio said she was jolted by the breach, though she seemed unaffected by the episode on-field and cheerfully completed media commitments the night after Carlton's round-one win, including a television appearance at the Western Bulldogs-Fremantle match.
She told radio station 3AW she tried not to give the hack too much thought.
"It wasn't ideal to wake up game day and find out that someone's done that to your account," she said. "I wasn't too fazed by it and I knew it was something that I couldn't really control at the time. I just pretended I didn't have an account for the day to be honest.
"It wasn't too much of a distraction. The club managed it really well and they made sure I wasn't affected by it. Obviously I was disappointed. There are lots of different people who are on Twitter and even some young kids – I didn't want them to see that.
"But these things are out on the internet and there's always going to be someone trying to do the wrong thing, so you just have to not let it affect you."
On her @darcyvee Instagram account, a photograph of a Vescio and a young supporter was something more joyful to look at.
It was posted with a message she wrote to promote the upcoming AFLW season opener:
It has received more than 2400 "likes".
On Tuesday afternoon Vescio posted a tweet thanking friends and fans for good wishes.
The roughly 200-strong player corps of the AFL's new semi-professional women's league have received advice about social media as part of their inductions.
But at the official AFL launch of the league last week the majority of the eight club captains told Fairfax Media they hadn't spoken much with teammates about the potential perils of social media, ranging from merely being distracted by it to becoming a target of trolls.
The Vescio account hacking was a cruel, early example of an online problem male AFL players have been contending with for years.
After the hacking of several prominent male player's accounts in 2013, including Lance Franklin, Dustin Martin and Dale Thomas, the AFL Players Association advised footballers to regularly update the passwords to their social media accounts.