Susie O’Neill reveals crude encounter with Don Burke

The Olympic champion says Don Burke made crude, belittling remarks during a visit to her home before the 2000 Games.

Swimmer Susie O’Neill says former Nine television host Don Burke made crude and belittling remarks during a visit to her Brisbane home ahead of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.

The eight-time Olympic medal winner told Fairfax Media Burke was looking at a painting of a flower by her husband when he made a sexual remark about her body. “It was crude and it was belittling,” O’Neill said.

The man who hosted Burke’s Backyard for almost 17 years until 2004 has this week been accused of sexually harassing and indecently assaulting at least three women who worked on his top rating TV gardening program in the 1980s and 1990s. Burke has rejected the allegations, saying he’s “deeply hurt and outraged” by the claims made by former employees who he believes hold a “grudge” against him.

“There is a lot of people that don’t like me and they can’t all be wrong. I guess this is the Harvey Weinstein thing and we’ve got a witch hunt,” he told Nine’s A Current Affair program on Monday night.

“I’m prepared to cop that I might have terrified a few people and that I shouldn’t have done that ... Towards the end of Burke’s Backyard I must have been a bear with a bloody sore head and I do apologise for it. “I have looked in the mirror and there’s a lot I don’t like.”

O’Neill told Fairfax she immediately reported the exchange with Burke to her then-manager Nick Cummins, who in turn called Nine management. “She was intimidated by the crude sexual innuendo,” Mr Cummins, now CEO of Cricket Tasmania, told Fairfax.

Olympic gold medallist Susie O'Neill has detailed her run-in with Don Burke. Picture: Tim Hunter.

ABC ‘just getting started’

The ABC is just getting started with its bid to expose accused sexual abusers in Australia’s media and entertainment industry, Leigh Sales has revealed.

Introducing Monday night’s 7.30 episode featuring interviews with four women accusing former television host Burke of bullying, harassment and indecent assault, Sales said it was “always a matter of time” before the likes of Harvey Weinstein were exposed locally.

Sales said the ABC — which aired the claims as part of a joint investigation with Fairfax Media — was “slowly and meticulously working through many accusations against well-known public figures”, with the complaints against Burke just the first of a series of revelations.

“The ABC will continue chasing stories similar to Don Burke’s,” Sales said, promising: “If they stack up to the same level of scrutiny, we’ll air them.”

Among the most disturbing accusations made on the program was Burke’s alleged propensity to make sexualised comments about females “regardless of age”, including in reference to a young relative. Burke denied making the comments.

While the former prime time star maintains that he has been misrepresented and his short temper and “ribald” sense of humour blown out of proportion, former researcher Louise Langdon told 7.30 of disturbing alleged incidents.

She claimed Burke had tried to remove her clothing and pull off her bra during a work trip, saying “in a joking way” that it was “too hot up here — you don’t need so many clothes on”.

But what continued to haunt her, Langdon said, was an incident in which Burke allegedly commented on a primary school girl while they were filming a documentary.

“Don was looking at the children in the playground and he joked to the crew, and I was there as well, and he noticed a particularly pretty young girl and said, ‘Look at her over there. You can tell she wants me. You can tell she wants me’,” Langdon alleged.

“And I remember being utterly disgusted.”

The girl, she said, was just eight or nine-years-old.

When Langdon complained to Nine, she said, “there was some empathy” — but senior executives told her there was nothing they could do.

“The reason given they couldn’t do anything about the behaviour was that my job was expendable and Don’s wasn’t,” she said.

“Don was a ratings juggernaut. He was a ratings success. He was bringing in a lot of money for the network. And if I wasn’t able to tolerate the behaviour, then they would find somebody who would.”

One of a handful of former staff to have spoken publicly in support of Burke, Michael Freedman, also appeared on 7.30, as did several other women whose accusations against him have been published by Fairfax Media.