Veteran Aussie sports journalist Caroline Wilson has responded after Geelong Cats player Max Holmes dressed up as her during the team’s controversial Mad Monday celebrations.
ICYMI, the AFL team has been copping backlash after images of players’ costumes for their post-season celebrations were shared on social media by teammate Bailey Smith earlier this week.
Holmes was pictured in a dress and wig as part of a costume that reportedly replicated an outfit Wilson once wore to the Walkley Awards, with a bow and arrow seemingly to reference the journo’s ‘Caro’s Arrow’ segment from the Channel 9 show Footy Classified.
In the caption of a photo of Holmes’ costume, Smith said “Caro [Caroline Wilson] has never looked better” alongside a water drop emoji, which typically holds sexual connotations.
Now, Wilson has responded to the costume with an op-ed in The Age, addressing Holmes’ costume as well as Smith’s post and the AFL’s response to the controversy as a whole.
While Wilson did mention Holmes — saying she didn’t have “a major problem with Max Holmes dressing up as me” but would’ve appreciated being “given the heads-up” about his costume — much of her attention was paid to Smith’s post, which she described as “disgusting”, “insulting and sexist”.
“Smith behaved on Monday like a lawless selfish brat with no thought for the club nor those teammates who have defended and, on occasion, covered for him this season,” Wilson wrote.
“I did have a problem with Smith’s social media post and an emoji my daughter had to explain to me. Judging from comments which came my way from people across the industry – the majority being women – I wasn’t alone.
“How dare Smith get away with sending such an insulting and sexist message to aspiring females with strong opinions working in the media or elsewhere in the AFL,” she added.
Elsewhere in her message, Wilson lamented how Holmes “felt the need to apologise to me on Smith’s behalf” when he contacted her to discuss the costume, and accused Smith of “leaving others to pick up the mess when he does the wrong thing”.
Wilson also took umbrage with a separate Mad Monday post in which Smith, dressed in a cowboy hat and embraced by teammate Patrick Dangerfield, mentioned Brokeback Mountain and wrote “this is what losing a [grand final] does to ya”.
“Smith offended the gay community, briefly dragging down one of the game’s most respected leaders, the unwitting Dangerfield… [Smith] basically implied that losing a grand final turns you into a gay man – the implication being that’s a bad thing,” Wilson wrote.
More broadly, Wilson called out the Geelong Cats’ “pathetic” response to the controversy, saying the team’s apology was “generic” and “completely missed the point”.
It comes just days after Geelong Cats addressed the team’s Mad Monday celebrations, saying some costumes were “inappropriate and a significant error of judgement” and vowing to scrap costume parties from future post-season events.
The controversy kicked off when Mitch Brown, the AFL’s only openly queer player, asked Smith to “do better” in response to his Brokeback Mountain reference, with comedian Josh Thomas coming to Smith’s defence on social media on Friday.
Lead images: Getty Images, Instagram and The Age
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