Scared and unheard – or privileged and profane? Sam Kerr’s character has been on trial

What we have seen during Sam Kerr’s trial is a woeful example of sporting privilege, a rich, drunk, angry woman who flung around expletives and insults at a police constable after a night out drinking. So should we feel sorry for her?

Every day, half an hour before 12 jurors were due at Kingston Crown Court for Sam Kerr’s trial for racially aggravated harassment of a police officer, a black van from Chelsea Football Club would pull up outside.

It became a game of sorts for the Matildas captain and her security team to frustrate the waiting camera operators: bringing Kerr into court one day from the left side, then from the right, then risking a AUD$260 fine each day by stopping on double yellow lines directly in front of the court.

For someone who was trying to win over the jury presiding over her case – and the court of public opinion – such a confrontational start was an intriguing position to take. Running up the slippery stairs with one of her two security heavies beside her may have shown Chelsea coach Sonia Bompastor that her star striker was rearing to get back onto the pitch after a year sidelined with an ACL injury. But Kerr also risked causing further reputational damage, all for trying to prevent a TV network from taking images of her entering the court.

But then the international footballer may have drunk her own Kool Aid. She is most definitely a household name in Australia, but in Britain, where women’s sport is an afterthought – not so much. Tell me, can you name the captain of the England women’s football team?

Kerr has been found not guilty of the charges against her, but regardless of the jury’s decision, what we have seen in the past six days is a woeful example of sporting privilege, a rich woman who flung around expletives and insults at a police constable for more than an hour in south-west London while she was very drunk and very angry after a night out drinking with her partner Kristie Mewis. She also maligned a taxi driver who drove her and Mewis to Twickenham police station, claiming the women had refused to pay clean-up costs after Kerr vomited in his cab.

Should we, then, feel sorry for her as her remarks in court suggest we should?

What is not disputed is that Kerr called PC Stephen Lovell “stupid and white” during the incident in the early hours of January 30 2023. She denies, however, that she racially harassed the police officer.

Kerr’s Australian supporters have dismissed the incident as a storm in a teacup. They say it’s ridiculous that such a “minor” offence has taken up so much court time, and that British police need to grow a thicker skin.

But here in England the legal definition of racial abuse is “colour blind;” it applies to calling someone white as much as calling someone black.

Culturally, the racial issues have a more sensitive barometer in the UK than Australia.

Here the recording of non-criminal hate crimes - which is the recording of instances of prejudice or hostility on the basis of race - have become a political issue. Joking with a colleague on WhatsApp about Black Month, among other offensive remarks, cost a British politician his career this week.

Crown Prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones, a highly experienced barrister, made the point to the jury that calling a white man “white” is not as loaded a remark as calling a black man “black” because racial insults to a white man don’t take in centuries of personal and collective experience of prejudice and discrimination.

However, he added: “The law doesn’t discriminate between different races.”

The same goes for International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) statutes which demand the abandonment of a game, and possible suspension of up to 10 games for any player making racist remarks on the pitch.

Kerr, who earns a reported AUD$3million a year in endorsements, hired a reputational consultant to attend court in an attempt to ensure her mega sponsorship deals weren’t harmed in any way once the highly embarrassing footage of her at Twickenham police station was released.

The reputational team wanted journalists to “reach out for guidance, background and comment’’ before publication.

Body worn video of Sam Kerr being interviewed in Twickenham police station.

It wasn’t just the profane insults aimed at PC Lovell, the police officer at the centre of the case that were potentially damaging. The clip of Kerr insisting she wasn’t going to pay the taxi driver, who she described as a “dodgy c**t”, for damage to his cab and her threat to call in Chelsea FC lawyers was particularly unattractive.

Her own lawyer Grace Forbes agreed it was poor behaviour, telling the jury as much. Ms Forbes also insisted the footballer’s earlier reference to PC Lovell being “f**king stupid and white” – the subject of the charge – was an attempt to convey complex issues of power and privilege which she couldn’t articulate clearly on the night.

It is unclear why Kerr didn’t resolve the case in Wimbledon Magistrate’s court last year, where she may have got a simple fine. Going to a jury in the Crown Court for a favourable outcome has added to the strains on the groaning British court system: rape victims are waiting up to five years to get their day in the crown court.

And what should have been a reasonably short trial kept getting extended, as Kerr’s legal team spent hours on establishing “context”. The costs for this case have been eye-watering: six days of evidence with KCs at up to $12,000 a day. Kerr has also paid for a couple of security people, her manager, and her reputational expert for each day.

But what on the surface appears to be a trivial case has quite significant ramifications in setting legal precedent.

Kerr had been quite aloof in the dock: her furious note taking of the initial days whittled down to an occasional doodle, and during glowing character references she sat head in hands, seemingly a little embarrassed at the attention.

The jury was told that Kerr had never been in trouble before; obviously the history of the Kerr family - her father Roger and another brother, Daniel, have both had convictions for assault - was not relevant and not mentioned.

Daniel, who has a long rap sheet, including arson and drugs, was also was convicted of disorderly conduct in a taxi in 2007.

On Monday this week, once the the jury had retired to consider the verdict Kerr walked through the court’s vestibule and agreed to a selfie with a woman called Chelsea, a flight attendant and football fan who had been inside the court house all week supporting her boyfriend who was convicted of grievous bodily harm.

Another three Chelsea fans began to turn up towards the end of the trial, one wearing his Chelsea scarf, another with socks of the club colours. Occasionally Kerr would sign an autograph and accept their good luck messages.

In the public gallery there would be murmurings from the club supporters at some of the evidence. After the jury failed to return a super quick verdict on the first day of deliberations one put his head in his hands, his distress akin to his team missing a penalty shot at goal.

Much of the case centred around the “context” and lead-up to Kerr’s outburst. The cab driver was a South Asian man who works the horror midnight to dawn shift on a Sunday night. The court was told it was quite possibly his second job to make ends meet.

Sam Kerr arrives with her partner Kristie Mewis at Kingston Crown Court. Picture: PA Images via Getty Images.

This driver had two drunk women standing in his taxi with no seat belts on. Kerr had vomited and the protective shield between the driver and the passenger area had been damaged.

The court heard he was so concerned at the ruckus going on in the back of his cab that he called the police at 2.11am.

Seven minutes later he again called, telling the control room he was now outside Twickenham police station. By this point Mewis had smashed the rear window by lying down and kicking it with both feet, and Kerr climbed out through the broken glass, claiming she feared for their lives, in the belief they were being kidnapped.

Kerr, who is paid by both Chelsea Football Club and the Matildas, and receives endorsements from Nike, EA Sports and Mastercard, said she was not going to pay for the smashed rear window and other damage inside the cab, as police attempted restorative justice. But she said she would have paid for the cab fare and a cleaning fee.

She also believed the driver could have kept working and got more fares later that night even after she had been sick in his taxi.

In the witness box, Kerr refused to put herself in the driver’s position.

“There is nothing to know about him,’’ she said dismissively.

She claimed the driver was “screaming” at herself and Mewis, yet claimed not to have seen what he looked like nor how he sounded.

She also recounted being “thrown around” the cab because of the cabbie’s dangerous driving and was scared because she couldn’t get out. Yet most people in the UK know that in all black cabs the doors are automatically locked when the vehicle is in motion.

When Kerr was informed by police that the cab driver had rung them twice, some ten minutes before she did the same when the taxi was near or outside the Twickenham police station, she refused to acknowledge she may have misinterpreted the whole scene.

The police told her she hadn’t been held hostage and the driver did what the police control room had told him to do: drive straight to a police station.

The two women waited through 15 minutes of “crazy and dangerous driving,” and being “scared for their lives” to ring the police, but even then Kerr didn’t initiate an immediate connection with the control room. Instead she waited for a loud “whoop whoop” siren of some ten seconds to be activated on her phone. Kerr admits she didn’t ring the police any earlier in the journey because she thought things could be “normalised”.

In the end none of that mattered for the jury’s decision except to create an impression of Kerr’s attitude.

Ms Forbes was at pains for nearly two days to ensure everyone knew of Kerr’s “feelings” on the night.

Kerr told the court on at least 28 occasions that she was “scared” and felt the police were not listening to her because of the colour of her skin.

Saying she had suffered discrimination since her school days in Western Australia – where she said teachers singled her out as a troublemaker – Kerr told the court she described the police as “stupid” and “white” because: “I felt like they were treating me differently and not believing me and treating me as a person who had done something wrong because they were the position of privilege and power and I believe they were treating me differently because of the colour of my skin.”

She refused to concede the police were trying to mediate a situation to avoid charging the two women with criminal damage. She believed the police were not listening to their concerns, ignoring the fact she and her partner had damaged a non-white taxi driver’s vehicle to the point it was unusable for the rest of the driver’s shift, and possibly for several days.

It wasn’t the police or the taxi driver swaggering about their bank account, the lawyers on speed dial, summoning Chelsea help and threatening the ultimate revenge: putting it all on Twitter.

But it was Kerr’s “truth” that mattered, said her partner Mewis, who also told the court she would again kick out and smash a taxi’s rear window if in a similar situation of fear.

If there was one point in the trial that was in particularly dubious taste it was Kerr’s reference on the police officers’ body cam video to the murder of Sarah Everard, who was raped and murdered by a police officer in south London in 2021.

For Kerr to somehow claim that in a police station she was in a dangerous situation similar to that of Everard was a particularly ill-judged attack on the memory of an innocent woman – who unlike Kerr and Mewis, wasn’t drunk, wasn’t angry, hadn’t done anything wrong and hadn’t been abusive. She had simply been walking home when she was murdered by someone who she should have been able to trust.

The police quite rightly told Kerr the Everard murder was irrelevant to her situation.

Kerr fired back: “It shows he (PC Lovell) has never experienced that or had to think about what could happen to you as a female’’.

Intriguingly, in court Kerr said she believed taking an Uber – where drivers only need a valid driver’s licence – was somehow safer than a black cab, which requires its vetted drivers to regularly pass background checks, police checks, English language checks and pass a difficult knowledge test of the best routes in and around London.

But then Kerr, a self confessed “safety-conscious person” also didn’t know the emergency number in the UK despite having lived in London for five years.

Thank God, then, she can play football.