Blue Sombrero wrote:
He actually brought it up where it might have stayed in-house but somebody who was there has obviously gone to the press to get it back in the public eye.
Jack was highlighting the fact that in the seventies and eighties, there were about 20 accredited AFL journos and nobody had the time to spend digging around in players' private lives like they do now, and gave this as an example of the difference between then and now. If anything it just proves his point, that there are so many journos now, they have to bring up this sort of stuff to get paid every week.
I was there so I am not quoting a third party.
If you have not met him or don't know what he does for charity, please don't make grandiose statements about who or what he is in your opinion. And don't be so quick to jump on a bandwagon that has been set rolling by something blown out of proportion and without knowing the context. And for those in the know, without him, Richard Pratt was no certainty to come back to the club. We can thank him at least in part for that. It wasn't just Sticks.
This story is years old and was all over the papers at the time. No need for the now generation to get hysterical because they didn't read about it the first time around. It was accepted practice in those days for clubs to have internal investigations into alleged off-field indiscretions and resolve them in-house. Almost all clubs had instances like this. There may well have been cases where women were paid off for real player indiscretions but it was pretty well-known that there were also some women looking for a few dollars who used the system to their advantage. They all had the opportunity to persue their cases though the legal system but didn't.
It's little wonder charities have so much difficulty getting people to help them out when there are so many people who are so happy to run to the media for their thirty pieces of silver with any snippet of controversy that might emanate from their lips. Fortunately, Jack helps when he can, even though he knows he is a soft target.
Say what you like about how he went as president of Carlton in your opinion but please don't defame him from behind the safety of anonymity when you don't know the details. It's just as bad as paying off an anonymous person to shut their trap.
Lame.
Interesting that you suggested that "He actually brought it up where it
might have stayed in-house" (emphasis added). Whether you chose that word carefully or not, it says it all. When everyone carries around tape recorders in the form of mobile phones and Twitter and internet forums offer easy outlets for those at these functions, it's hardly surprising if things said at such functions are published elsewhere. Talk to Michael Richards about that one. Elliott would know that all too well, and were he to be honest he wouldn't seek to make the excuse you do. As a publicity hound, he knows how the game works. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was over the moon when his comments were taken up in the media, coinciding as the reports did with the launch of his TV show. Whether that was good luck or good management is the real issue.
And don't excuse his efforts because he's done it before. You say it created a controversy before. That just means he was under no illusion about how dangerous that talk was. After allowing those comments to fade from memory (even I can't remember him saying them previously, and I'm like a seagull on chips when it comes to anything about Carlton), he thrusts them down our throats again. A new audience now has the opportunity to appreciate his brilliance. And he must be all too aware that he was playing with matches around a lake of petrol given that the issue of sexual abuse in the AFL and NRL has been a hot issue for the last few years. Matty Johns' fall from grace (again, for an incident which was years old) must have alerted him to the danger.
By all means, praise people who help out charities as speakers. But that gives them no immunity at all when it comes to breaching confidences in this manner. You wouldn't excuse a Priest or Lawyer who told others about things you had communicated in confidence, and we shouldn't excuse Elliott for causing harm to Carlton when he was duty-bound to keep his trap shut.
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