How Stephanie Gilmore fell to Earth and surfed back to the top
Eight years ago a vicious random assault derailed her career and her life. How did surfer Stephanie Gilmore find her feet again?
Blue jeans. White T-shirt. Big hair. Ocean-coloured eyes with small brown specks that resemble grains of sand she does not wish to rinse away. She taps her right foot on the stool when she talks about the incident. Throughout our hour-long conversation, Stephanie Gilmore declines to call it what it is. A bashing. An assault. An attack that could have killed her. She furrows her brow and squints as if she’s still trying to make sense of it all. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “There was the incident.”
It was early evening, just getting dark, when Gilmore pulled into her Tweed Heads unit block. “And I see this guy. Strange guy. He’s not wearing any shoes. He’s pottering around in the garage area, right at the front of my apartment,” she remembers. “He’s tinkering with a piece of wood, something like that. I remember thinking, ‘That’s a bit weird.’ Human intuition is an incredible thing, eh? I know it’s bad as soon as I see him. I can feel it.”
She talked to herself as she edged towards the stairwell to her second-floor apartment. Look straight ahead. Don’t make eye contact. Keep moving to the door. “I walk about 15 to 20 metres in front of him. I look up the stairs and I’m thinking, ‘How fast can I run up there?’ You have a split-second to make decisions, I guess. But it still feels like there’s all this time to ask yourself questions.” Do I have time to get my key in the door? Will I be able to get inside? “I know he’s going to come after me before he even does it. I feel sick. It’s so bad. It took me years to be able to talk about all this without wanting to cry. I can see my front door. It’s right there and I just keep staring at it. He’s following me. He’s coming up behind me.”
Don’t turn around. “I can’t help it. I turn around,” she says. “A glance back, to see where he is. And he’s sprinting. He has a crowbar in his hand and he’s running at me. I can’t run up the stairs. I definitely don’t have time to unlock the door. I can’t get away — there’s nowhere to go. He’ll chase me and catch me, whatever I do. He has that look in his eyes. It’s terrifying. I know I can’t talk to him. He’s going to get me. I freeze, and he starts hitting me over the head with a crowbar. I remember exactly what I was thinking: Why are you doing this to me?”
He hit her four times. He didn’t rob her. Didn’t sexually assault her. “He just keeps hitting me with a crowbar.” There was blood everywhere. He ran to a BMX bike in the corner of the garage and took off, leaving Gilmore on the ground screaming. “I have my handbag. I have my phone in my hand. It’s bent in half. Caved in. It’s protected me a bit. When I’ve put my hands over my head to protect myself, he’s hit the phone a couple of times. He rides off really fast and I’m thinking, ‘Well, I’m still alive. There’s a good thing.’ More than anything, I want to know why it’s happened. Do I know him? Have I done something to him that I’ve forgotten about? Have I looked at him the wrong way? Have I deserved this? Is it my fault?”
Stephanie Louise Gilmore took a day off school to contest her first event on the professional World Surf League tour. She was 17 and it was the 2005 Roxy Pro on the Gold Coast. The venue was her home break of Snapper Rocks where, since the age of 13, she’d watched the contest and thought, I can win this. Now. Let me at ’em. And so she did. She lifted the trophy and went back to school the next day. “A dream,” she says now.
Two years later she joined the world championship tour full-time. I can win this. She clinched the world title at her first attempt. And her second. Third. And fourth. And then? The incident.
Gilmore has evolved from a glowing teenager into a deeply soulful 30-year-old woman. She plays electric guitar. She takes stunning photographs. She’s become an adventure-seeking, globetrotting soul who wrestles the contrasting personalities created by her dual lifestyles. The wanderer within one of the greatest female surfers of all time. The wide-eyed hippie versus the competitive machine. I’ve covered her career since her debut at the Roxy Pro in 2005. I can imagine her in the film clip of Janis Joplin’s Take Another Piece of My Heart as easily as I can picture her winning another world title in Hawaii this week. If she finishes No.1 she is on her way to becoming the most successful woman surfer in history, joining Layne Beachley as a seven-time world champion.
The world title years of 2007-10 were pure dominance. “I just loved the feeling of winning,” she says. “It was so simple. I’d surf for 30 minutes in a heat. I’d catch two good waves. Win the heat. Win a contest. Become world champion. It just kept happening. It was so uncomplicated. I had a very real thought at the end of 2010: ‘I could go through my whole career and never lose.’ But I also thought, ‘How’s it ever going to get any better than this?’
“It was almost like I predicted the drama that was to come. I think I wished the incident into happening. I didn’t want it to happen, of course. But I was sitting there at the end of 2010 and going, ‘Well, can my life really keep planing upwards? When does it plateau? When am I going to crash back down to Earth? Isn’t that what is meant to happen in life? Why isn’t it happening in my life?’ And then it happened. Be careful what you wish for — it happened and I was like, ‘Oh, damn, here it is’… it was like I was preparing for something to happen.”
She’s tapping her foot again. Her toenails are painted electric blue. “He gets on his pushbike,” she says, thinking back to that night of December 27, 2010. “He rides away. I’m sure I’ve never seen him before.” There was an old abandoned house across the street occupied by some homeless guys but she knew her attacker wasn’t one of them. Her aunt and uncle lived in the apartment below hers and they’d arrived home earlier and seen him too. That’s suss, they said to each other. Need to keep an eye on him. “They’re the first ones to come out to me. Word gets out, and my friends and a whole bunch of people go looking for him.”
A message was posted on Facebook. “The police aren’t happy about that,” Gilmore recalls. “It’s too vigilante-style. My friends all live super close to me. They go running off down the hill. I’ve described him to them. A ginger type of hair. He’s on a black BMX. Down the back of Duranbah, there’s an area that’s all scrub. The homeless guys always hang out there. I’m in hospital when they find him. I’ve been swapping messages with my friends and they tell me, ‘We’ve got him.’ The local guys probably take out a little revenge before they hand him in.”
Gilmore had six stitches in her scalp. A seriously broken wrist. Staring at the scar, she says: “I’m pretty shaken for the next year and a half. Don’t want to be in dark areas. Home almost feels like the most unsafe place to be. I feel more comfortable out on the street at 3am in New York than I do at home. I start travelling a lot, more than ever, just to get away. The most demoralising thing is that I can’t surf. I can’t get up on my board because of my wrist. That’s heartbreaking. Surfing could have helped me recover but it’s like, ‘Oh man, I can’t even do this anymore. This relationship I have with the ocean, I need it now. But it’s gone.’”
Sleepless nights. Flashbacks. She dreamt about the incident, questioned her response, what she could have done differently. “In one of the dreams, I’m hitting him back. Standing up for myself. Cop this! I wake up and think, ‘Why didn’t I actually do that? Why didn’t I fight back?’ I’m frightened when I go to places that are dark. If I pull into a public car park and there isn’t much lighting, that really starts to scare me. I think he’s there. Or someone like him. Walking to and from my car, by myself, makes me edgy. I start triple-checking everything. I keep looking behind me. I jump at the slightest noise. I stop parking anywhere that isn’t in a really bright light. It’s not much of a way to live, but it goes on for a long time. Too long.”
Six weeks after the incident, Gilmore was due to start her world-title defence at Snapper Rocks. She was all at sea. I remember this event. I was shocked by the sight and sound of her. Her personality had dimmed. She was hesitant. Anxious. An impatient shadow of herself. She tried to compete with the plaster cast still on her wrist. “It’s not a great time to look back on,” she says. “I’m telling myself, ‘I’ve got to keep winning. That will prove everything is OK.’ I’m still thinking that I can win the world title every year. I can be the first athlete to have the perfect career. But my heart isn’t in it. There’s no way I’m ready, and I surf really badly. It’s too soon. I suck, and then the whole year goes from bad to worse.”
Gilmore finished third in the 2011 world title event. “There’s a lot of media saying, ‘Poor Steph, she’s probably done now,’” she says. “They’re saying all these young guns are taking over. Steph’s had this trauma that has really affected her. There’s been the incident and now she’s never going to be the same. She’s getting older. It’s time for the new breed. I was 22! I could just feel a really bad vibe coming from a lot of people.”
Her first taste of failure. It was the best thing that ever happened to her. “All those thoughts about being perfect, I could let them go. The perfect career was finished. I could stop holding on so tight. Surfing was my first true love — but I started falling in love with travel and adventures that had nothing to do with surfing.”
Despite her on-again, off-again commitment to competing, she won the 2012 world title, which meant a helluva lot to her. The boogie man and his crowbar were buried. “Once I’d learnt to deal with the trauma, and once I’d won another comp, and once I’d won another world title, that was extremely satisfying,” she says. “But I was kind of drifting in and out of it by then. The gotta-win thing? Gone. One day I was like, ‘I want this so bad!’ The next day I’d be like, ‘No I don’t! I don’t even care!’”
Gilmore won another world title in 2014, but nothing since then. The new breed really has arrived: Australia’s 24-year-old Tyler Wright has won the last two world crowns while thanking Gilmore for being “such a queen, such a lord”.
Out of nowhere, however, Gilmore — at 30, one of the oldest surfers on the tour — has just peeled off such a high-spirited and committed season that she leads the rankings ahead of the season-ending contest opening tomorrow at Maui’s Honolua Bay.
Two events from her cannonball run through this year’s tour will tell you everything you need to know about Gilmore. The first came when she won the prestigious Bells Beach contest in April while displaying all the stateliness, grace and charisma of a Hollywood actress in a wetsuit. Forced, as always, to choose between the wide-eyed hippie and the glaring competitor, she chose the latter for a change.
She was inspired by Mick Fanning’s farewell contest. If he was going out with a bang and a trophy, she wanted to be on the podium with him. They’d surfed together for years. Fanning came second. He poured beer on Gilmore by way of congratulations, gave her a heartfelt hug. “Steph, wow,” he told her. “That was incredible to watch.” Fanning’s retirement was proof that none of this would last forever. She discovered a new-found itch for more world titles.
“I literally felt like the happiest human on Earth after Bells,” she says. “It reminded me how good it feels to set out a goal. To have a plan. To stick to the routine and be the best pro athlete you can be. The result goes your way and it’s an incredible feeling. You’ve been dedicated when you’ve needed to be. You’ve made decisions that have sacrificed some fun in the short term but in the long run, you’ve been strong enough to do what you’ve really wanted to do. And there you are, on the podium, hugging a trophy. That’s a beautiful, powerful feeling.”
She loves to perform. “The ocean’s your stage. The sun’s your spotlight. You have an audience and it becomes more of a dance. It’s a time when you can express yourself without needing to use any words. We surf in important events and there’s a lot on the line and it’s going to feel so bad if you lose. I think that’s my safety mechanism, to think of it as a performance instead of a contest. Just go out there and be myself like a musician or any artist does.”
She hears other athletes say their sport doesn’t define who they are but she’s not like that. It’s a big part of who she is. “It brings me so much happiness to ride a wave. I don’t want to be offended if the judges don’t like what I do. I don’t want to surf to please them. It’s as cheesy as hell but when I’m paddling onto a wave, it feels like that’s exactly where I’m meant to be in that moment in time. I am truly doing what I love.”
I think this is the real Gilmore — the Gilmore we saw in the final at Jeffreys Bay in South Africa this July. It was a crucial heat for the world title race against the woman second in the rankings, America’s Lakey Peterson. A wave came Gilmore’s way. The Bells-style competitor would have let it pass because of its limited scoring potential. But the free-spirited Gilmore paddled onto the wave because eight dolphins were already on it. “It’s probably not a great thing to admit,” she says. “But there’s definitely times when the whole concept of competition goes out the window. There had been so many dolphins in the water that day. I watched a heat of Lakey’s earlier. Dolphins everywhere. I was thinking, ‘Let that be me! Let me do that! Let me surf with the dolphins!’ I was pretending I could talk to them. ‘Please come back when I’m surfing!’ The final started, and you can see the sets coming from so far away at J-Bay. A wave was coming. I could see the dolphins in the face of it. I thought, ‘What the hell, I’m going.’”
She paddled, got to her feet. “They dived back under,” she says. “They came back up. I was pointing at them. ‘There you are! Hello! You came back! Thank you so much!’ They were huge. It was incredible. One of the best things I’ve ever done. I was like, ‘Yay! You’re here!’ I did one turn and fell off. I was thinking, ‘Well, that was a bit silly!’ But to ride with dolphins, you’re never going to forget a wave like that.”
She won J-Bay. Once more, she was the sun‑kissed face of the sport. Annual earnings of $1.5 million that are sure to rise next year when the World Surf League implements equal prize money for men and women.
When WSL boss Sophie Goldschmidt finalised the deal, she wanted to tell Gilmore in person. Why? “Because she’s a very special individual,” Goldschmidt says. She sent Gilmore a text. It read, “I have something important to tell you.” They met for lunch the following day at Malibu, California. “I think I’m in trouble!” Gilmore says. “Why does Sophie want to see me? Why can’t she tell me on the phone? It’s like being told you have to see the headmaster. When she tells me what’s happened, it actually makes me really emotional,” Gilmore says. “It’s the message behind it. The respect. It’s what it means for female surfers in the future. It confirms how far we’ve come. I’m about to lose it with Sophie but then I think, ‘Stuff that. I want to be strong in a moment like this. I don’t need to be weeping with thanks. We deserve this.’”
Julius Fox, 27, was jailed for four years for the attack on Gilmore. He pleaded guilty. The judge called it an unprovoked and “extremely alarming” assault. The court heard that Gilmore screamed, No! No! No! when she was being struck. Fox was revealed to be suffering paranoid schizophrenia; his mental state was worsened by homelessness and drug abuse. He wasn’t taking his anti-psychotic medication. He had a history of attacking strangers with scissors and knives. Judge James Black said, “It’s difficult to think of a more frightening form of attack.”
Gilmore says, “I can’t go back and change what happened. I was going to waste a lot of time and energy if I kept thinking about it and analysing it and reliving it and wishing it didn’t happen. The facts are that he did it. He was arrested. He pleaded guilty and went to jail. I didn’t even have to testify at court. I just gave my statement and he stayed in jail for four years. He didn’t even apply for bail — he was a homeless guy but in jail he had a bed, he had food, he had clean clothes. I felt sorry for him. He’d rather be in jail because that was a better life than he had in the real world.”
Fox’s lawyer, Cameron Bell, said at the time: “It tells us a story of what he came from. He had nowhere to go on bail, effectively… it’s very sad that somebody would actually not even seek to be returned to the community.”
Fox was released in 2014. “There was a bit of an elephant in the room when he got out,” Gilmore says. “Around home, people were sort of whispering to me, ‘You know he’s out, right? Are you OK with that?’ I was thinking, ‘Am I? Is he going to come after me again?’ It flared up a bit of fear again. I was the one who’d put him in jail. Maybe he’d want some revenge. I travelled a lot. I spent a lot of time overseas.
“Mental health issues, drugs, whatever the case, it wasn’t a personal thing towards me or the other people he attacked,” she says. “The more I think about how it happened, when I think about the moment I turned around and we made eye contact for that split second, it was like he was in another world. I was a threat to him because I’d stepped into that world. Time goes on. You heal. You start being able to talk about it without wanting to cry.”