By Oliver Brown
Privilege. It is a concept all too often weaponised at the intersection of sport and identity politics, where even abysmal behaviour by an athlete can be framed as a noble stand against ancient power structures. Take one illustration from 2018, when Serena Williams jabbed her finger at umpire Carlos Ramos during the US Open final and called him a “thief” for docking her a point.
A prima facie case of superstar entitlement, right? A dreadful overreaction to being justly penalised for breaking her racquet and receiving signals from her coach? Well, Williams did not take long to advance a different explanation. “It’s because I’m a woman,” she tearfully told the match referee on court, “that you’re going to take this away from me.”
You hardly needed to be a scholar in the dynamics of power and influence to predict how this would play out. Within hours, Williams was being held up as a case study for “misogynoir”, a trendy academic portmanteau for describing how sexism and racism could combine and wound. “A blatantly racist and sexist move,” thundered the United States’ National Organisation for Women. “An abhorrent display of male dominance and discrimination.”
Rather than calling out the grotesque absurdity of this school of thought – that an umpire correctly applying the rules could not only have his integrity impugned but his good name forever stained by a baseless racism allegation – the Women’s Tennis Association sided with Williams. She would go on to play another 12 grand slam tournaments. Ramos seldom officiated at the highest level again.
Williams clashes with the chair umpire at the 2018 US Open.Credit: AP
I was reminded of this episode, and what it said about the ability of certain sporting celebrities to claim victimhood despite inexcusable conduct, by the trial of Sam Kerr. Until last week’s verdict at Kingston Crown Court, where she was found not guilty of racially aggravated harassment, Kerr was relatively little known outside of Australia, where 69 international goals had helped elevate her to the status of a minor deity.
But to an audience less attuned to the fortunes of the Matildas, the striker is now defined more by 34 minutes of deeply unflattering body-cam footage from Twickenham Police Station, where she is seen labelling the interrogating officer as “stupid and white”.
It was on the night of January 30, 2023 that Kerr and her girlfriend, the American midfielder Kristie Mewis, found themselves in this unfamiliar environment, taken there in a highly inebriated state by a taxi driver in whose car they had leant out of to vomit and whose rear window they had smashed. To study the full video is not, to put it kindly, to see Kerr in the best light. “I will have the best lawyers, don’t f—— worry,” she raged at the two officers in the room. “If these two white men…”
The driver, for whose damage she initially refused to pay and whom she accused of driving the couple to the station against their will, was somebody she describes as a “f—— liar” and a “dodgy c—“. “Why are you listening to a cab driver over us two women? This is a f—— racial f—— thing.”
Kerr’s demeanour in these exchanges was that of an obnoxious drunk. She belittled and condescended to PC Stephen Lovell, repeatedly threatening to engage “the Chelsea lawyers” (good luck with that at 3.15am). The post-hoc rationalisation, though, was that she was merely reacting to the two policemen’s perceived privilege over her.
“I was trying to express that due to the power and privilege they had, they would never have to understand what we had just gone through and the fear we were having for our lives.” But would they not have held the same privilege over anybody they were questioning in the early hours, irrespective of the detainees’ sex or race? Surely it is intrinsic to the very job of policing that it involves power: the power to stop, to search, to detain, to arrest. As such, most law-abiding folk implicitly understand to be deferential to an officer and never, under any circumstances, to head down the “stupid and white” route.
And yet Kerr’s camp milked this idea that she was the persecuted party. “The truth is tragic,” her barrister, Grace Forbes, told the court. “A woman sitting there feeling desperately scared on the inside, fronting it up on the outside.”
There are many words you could use to describe Kerr’s carry-on that night but “tragic” is not one of them. On the contrary, the video strongly indicated that she was the person wielding the privilege.
She was the one loudly boasting about having the finest lawyers at her disposal. She was the one slumping back in her chair, contemptuously shooting down everything said to her like a truculent teenager. And she, as a Chelsea footballer whose $800,000 salary was more than 10 times her interrogator’s, was the one allegedly telling PC Lovell about the contents of her bank account, so he knew how frivolous the cost of repairing the taxi would be to her.
Kerr the victim of privilege? Pull the other one. It is the same cynical trick we saw with Williams: just when you think you have seen an athlete do something indefensible, you are informed that it was all a justified reaction to the patriarchy, to the white establishment, to a system of entrenched injustice.
In 2018, enough people swallowed this hokum for Williams to emerge as the martyr. But you wonder if, in 2025, the general appetite for the politics of grievance is quite the same.
Australian footballer Sam Kerr arrives at Kingston Upon Thames Crown Court.Credit: Getty Images
A telling moment in the conclusion to Kerr’s trial came when Forbes announced an intention to apply for her client’s legal costs to be covered by the Metropolitan Police. Judge Peter Lodder, KC, while accepting the jury’s verdict, appeared less than impressed by the suggestion. “I take the view that her own behaviour contributed significantly to the bringing of this allegation,” he said. “I don’t go beyond the jury’s verdict but that has a significant bearing on the question of costs.” In a statement, Kerr subsequently clarified she would no longer be pursuing costs.
Now that she has been cleared, she is broadly celebrated in Australia as an avenging angel, a woman whose dogged spirit has brought humiliation on those delicate-flower Poms.
“Let’s be clear,” ran one cri de coeur from Down Under this week, “this case is the biggest attack on an Australian sports star from the mother country since Bodyline.” If this thesis were not overwrought enough, it then segued into a skit entitled “The Ballad of Samantha Kerr”. To quote one couplet: “The cops go again – this time with the race card / When you get lippy with Scotland Yard, we’ll go twice as hard.” It is fair to say Bob Dylan does not have much to worry about.
The same polemic blithely asserted that no white person could ever feel insulted by a racial slur. Really? Try telling that to Tom Curry, the England flanker who insisted that Bongi Mbonambi, South Africa’s hooker, had called him a “white c—” at the 2023 Rugby World Cup. While Mbonambi denied using discriminatory language, Curry was visibly shaken after the match by what he said he had heard.
Different standards seem to apply with Kerr. Such is the reverence she attracts in her homeland, you sense the wagons would have circled around her regardless of the outcome. The level of prejudging was astonishing: even 11 months ago, when it was confirmed the case would go to trial, an Australian cartoon depicted a policeman writhing on a courtroom floor, as if he had just dived for a foul. Kerr was shown in her Matildas jersey in the witness stand, waving her arms in protest, as though blameless and beyond reproach.
The rush to exonerate continued even during the middle of the trial, with sports minister Anika Wells saying: “It has been a rocky road for Sam and her partner. Sam certainly has Australia behind her.” Wells used to work as a lawyer, but here she was offering a sympathetic commentary on a live court case. She allowed overheated emotions around a single player to impair her observance of the most basic legal principle.
There is a saying in business that you can be too big to fail. It is the same in sport, with Kerr commanding such a degree of adoration that her acolytes will simply not allow her story to turn sour.
She is the poster girl, the unimpeachable darling whose heroics for the Matildas at the last World Cup caused Brisbane’s Courier-Mail to rebrand as the “Kerrier-Mail”. As such, there is reluctance at all official levels to address the crucial question of what happens to her now, of whether her position as a role model has been fatally compromised by those unedifying scenes in south-west London.
Could you imagine Pat Cummins carrying on as Australia’s cricket captain if he had been filmed calling a taxi driver a “dodgy c—” and a police officer “stupid and white”? His feet would not touch the ground. Except Football Australia have yet to block Kerr’s path back to leading the Matildas, saying only that they would “reflect” with her. Her sponsors are so far holding firm. The Football Association will not take any action regarding her future at Chelsea, and neither will the club.
It is as if Kerr’s place as the alpha female of a growing sport is guarded so ferociously that any threat becomes intolerable. For how long can this hold? Ultimately, the court of public opinion can prove a harsher crucible than a court of law.
If there is one abiding lesson from this trial, it is that the deployment of the “white privilege” card should no longer be a free pass to absolution, or a convenient defence for footballers behaving reprehensibly. Privilege, as Kerr has shown all too vividly through her actions, can cut both ways.
The Telegraph, London
