Belatedly, North Melbourne and Tarryn Thomas reached the point they should have started with and had him step away from the club.
Had North insisted earlier, the message would have been clearer to Thomas, to any male or female player at the club, and then to broader community of the seriousness with which they took the allegations. Beyond that, it would have said that behaviour comes first, football ability comes second.
If this is encouraging grandstanding, fine. Grandstand away, for it is in the grandstands, on the TV screens and to the players on the ground that the message needs to be hammered home: behaviour the like of which Thomas is accused of, whether it is sufficient to be criminal or not, is unacceptable.
The final straw for North to change their mind in agreeing that Thomas should step away from the club was that the complaints kept coming.
On Wednesday yet another woman came forward. She outlined a similar complaint about behaviour which, as alleged, was abusive and menacing and fitted the picture painted by other women before her.
The women said they spoke to the media because they were fearful and were frustrated that nothing had happened to the man they alleged treated them so badly – with claims of abusive text messages, threats, throwing a lamp at one of them in a hotel room.
Tarryn Thomas has stepped away from North Melbourne for an undefined time.Credit:AFL Photos
In the first instance North passed the matter to the AFL to investigate while they tried to ensure Thomas was educated about changing his behaviour. The AFL had, correctly, referred the matter to the police for possible charges.
If the allegations were substantiated, the plan seems to have been for the AFL to punish Thomas and North to throw their arms around him and give him the support he needed to change, borrowing from the aphorism ascribed to St Augustine: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”
At some point, you have to be the one to deal with the sin and the sinner.
There is an unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from the belated decision to stand Thomas down which is that the club only acted once the publicity around his alleged behaviour became too great and not because of the alleged behaviour itself.
Putting aside possible criminality, the allegations against Thomas and the treatment of women are at odds with everything espoused by the club and league. But it was only when it reached a tipping point of women coming out with allegations that publicly embarrass the club and the league that Thomas was withdrawn.
The laying of a criminal charge for allegedly threatening to release an intimate image of a woman was already public but had not drawn a club or league sanction. The airing of details to News Corp of allegedly abusive behaviour that have to date not drawn police charges, has now drawn action.
This is not new in the AFL. Bailey Smith was punished last year not for taking drugs but for being filmed taking drugs.
Jordan De Goey was filmed in Bali last year reaching out to grab a female friend’s breast and was fined heavily. This seems wildly at odds with the lack of action on the allegations against Thomas, though De Goey’s fine had more to do with his priors than his behaviour in the Bali film.
This choice to act on the being seen to bring the game into disrepute, rather than the allegations involved, is partly an unsurprising and inevitable consequence of working in a high-profile industry where image matters.
Standing Thomas down now at least conveys the message publicly of the seriousness with which the club takes the matter regardless of what the police and courts might do.
Thomas should not be stood down until all matters are dealt with by police and the courts. Those mandatory stand-down policies are fraught. A previous Jordan De Goey issue is salient here. De Goey faced a criminal charge that took more than a year to get to court only for it to be withdrawn on the day of the court hearing.
But Thomas was right to be stood down and removed for an indefinite period. How long that period is now I don’t know, but it should be long enough to reflect the seriousness of the charge and not so short as to say football talent counts for more.
Football prides itself on being an agent of social change. How they handle matters such as this involving Thomas do more to prosecute that change than any well-meant words and campaigns.
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