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It’s hard to decide what’s weaker: Stephen Milne’s behaviour for the past 10 years, or the supposed punishment it received.
In being sentenced for indecent assault, Milne received no criminal conviction, just a monetary fine. You know, like a big parking ticket, except that instead of parking it involved sexual assault.
Any of us can be subject to assault, or have it happen to our loved ones. Charges are notoriously difficult to prove. When they are upheld in court, weak judgements let us all down.
Milne apologists online, usually with St Kilda colours in their profile pictures, clung to their insistence yesterday that he hadn’t specifically faced a rape charge.
No, he hadn’t – he pleaded guilty to forcing sexual acts on a woman who had explicitly said she didn’t want him to. An entirely distinct concept.
Perhaps even more rotten than the offence is that Milne tried to hide from culpability for 10 years. Stupid impulsive decisions, like the one he has been fined for, are one thing; sustained and deliberate ones are another.
For a decade he was happy to let the woman he’d assaulted live with her feeling of invasion and injustice. He was comfortable denying her a resolution that only he could have provided. He never had the decency or spine to face up to the situation, and finally did so only when forced.
At that point, he conceded that the victim’s allegations were substantively true, and that his long-held denials were not.
His reward was a plea bargain: both parties avoiding the length and expense of a trial in exchange for a lesser charge. This codification is most often about efficiency and tactics rather than perceived morality. Even so, the prosecutors were sorely let down.
“I find you guilty… of being a good bloke!” Judge Bourke might as well have said.
Liable for up to 10 years’ jail, Milne received a fine that might have bought a secondhand car. Somehow the story, the focus and the court’s concern became more about the offender than the victim.
And so we heard how the poor feller had lived for so long with this case hanging over his head – a case that had proved to be true. We heard about how people had yelled mean names at him – names prompted by what he had done.
We heard how his football career had been damaged – damaged by an offence that he had committed. We heard that times had been unpleasant for his family, which is probably not so unusual among the families of sex offenders.
We heard that he’d perpetrated “a non-violent but physical attempt to persuade” a person to have sex with him, raising the curious concept of persuasion as a physical act. Milne’s condition of consensual dyslexia is yet to be diagnosed.
We had the judge “accept defence submissions that the offending was unplanned and spontaneous.”
“The evidence is highly persuasive that this offending was out of character,” said Judge Bourke, without apparently considering that perhaps it had remained out of character precisely because of the fierce public scrutiny that he so lamented.
We heard all about Milne’s glowing character references, how he’d grown into goodness and decency. “You present 10 years later as a different, more mature and in my view a rehabilitated man,” said the judge.
Now, I don’t believe in lynching people. I don’t believe in throwing them all in jail. It doesn’t achieve a whole lot. We all do shitty things and make bad decisions, and most of us are probably capable of worse. You can’t damn people forever. Even Charles Manson just got married, which simultaneously proves both of my last two points.
Except… you can’t be rehabilitated until you’ve admitted doing wrong. It’s a fundamental part of the condition. Salvation from atonement from confession. Forgiveness from penance. That game ain’t pre-emptive. Penance needn’t be public, but it needs to be made to those you’ve hurt. And through all the years of good blokeing that Milne apparently racked up, he continued to deny having hurt a person when he knew full well that he had.
St Kilda legend Lenny Hayes supported Milne at trial. Had Hayes got a different bounce on a tumbling kick forward in 2010, Milne would have kicked the winning goal in St Kilda’s first premiership since 1966.
He would have been immortalised, celebrated, pictured on the front page of every paper with his fist pumping and his mouthguard escaping and his arms raising up a giant cup. He would have been able to enjoy all that without having been held to account for what he’d done, as so many others have before him.
And the woman he’d assaulted would have had to live with it. Just as she must have lived with him popping up on television sets at pubs or at friends’ houses. How distressing it would have been, unable to escape someone you’d been wronged by, nor the knowledge that he was being lauded.
Milne let that happen. He dragged her and those around her through 10 years of investigations, frustration, injustice and bad memories, instead of letting them put it behind them.
Even if he’d truly believed it was an honest mistake, the right thing would have been to attempt mediation and make some gesture at responsibility. Instead his club allegedly tried to sink the investigation, evidence disappeared, and only the uncovering of poor police work years later revived the case.
Through all that Milne sat blamelessly. And when he finally had to admit to what he’d done, all to avoid trial on stronger charges where there was a fair chance of conviction, he wasn’t faulted for it.
He got a financial wrist-slap, along with the full weight of the court’s concern for his career, his wellbeing, and his family’s happiness.
That’s a damn sight more consideration than he ever mustered himself.