After several years of silence, Phoebe Burgess is finally ready to tell her side of the story. In a recent interview with The Australian, Phoebe called out the culture of cover-ups within Australian NRL, and the misogynistic beliefs that allow it to continue.
“I want to challenge some very powerful people to look at their own behaviour, to look at the way they handled the situation, the role they played in all of this. Silence is the refuge of abusers, the refuge of perpetrators. It gives them the perfect cover,” she told the publication. During the same interview, she reflected on the moment she found out that her then-husband, Sam Burgess, had been cheating on her. The pair had been on a rare date night, while their daughter Poppy stayed at home with a babysitter. Phoebe was pregnant with their second child.
“We were walking out of the cinema and I looked up. Sam was holding my hand and he just went white. It looked like he was going to vomit. And then he started crying in the middle of the centre,” she told The Australian. “And we got to the car and he said: ‘Get in, get in.’ He was looking around. He was paranoid. And he just looked at me. He said, ‘Darling, I’ve f**ked up. I’m so sorry.’ Then he told me.”
Now, not long after breaking her silence, Phoebe has spoken out again. This time, she joined Mia Freedman on the No Filter podcast and laid her raw emotions on the table.
“I was the ultimate defender of my husband. I believed that he’d been made a victim. And then came the night where the next woman had decided she was going to tell the next story as well, that my husband had had an affair while he was captaining England in 2017, while I was travelling around the country with our daughter to watch his games,” she recalled.
“And that night, that night broke me.”
As for the exact moment that broke her marriage with Sam, Phoebe says there isn’t one. Instead, she explains the situation through the analogy of a frog in boiling water.
“I couldn’t give you an exact moment. All I can say … is that analogy of the frog. You throw a frog in boiling water it’s going to scream. If you turn the heat up slowly, it stays there and it just cooks alive and that’s – little things started adding up,” she told Mia Freedman.
“And I wish, I wish I’d listened to what my body was telling me. I became extremely anxious after having my daughter, after having back surgery, to the point where I couldn’t drive. I was just afraid of driving. And that’s something that was never part of my personality. I couldn’t drive on a highway without feeling as though I wasn’t in control. And I think those were symptoms of what I was starting to go through emotionally and mentally. I was starting to – I felt – lose myself.”
Sam Burgess has kept fairly quiet on the details of his marriage breakdown, but his recent appearance on SAS Australia proved quite telling, as he admitted to his affair for the first time publicly.
”I don’t think I was the greatest husband at times. I embarrassed my wife. I had an affair with a girl – a woman in Melbourne. Yeah. It’s true. I was away on tour. Regretful that it happened.”
“Would have been a tough place for Phoebe to be,” he continued.
After taking the time to process the situation, Phoebe made the decision to contact the woman at the centre of the 2018 sexting scandal.
“I’m a journalist by trade. I did my own digging,” Phoebe told Mamamia. “I wanted to get to the bottom of what was actually going on here. [The conversation] was hard for me. But she was a lovely girl.”
In doing so, she was able to take a step back and see clearly for the first time in a long time. According to The Australian, these sporting clubs have become experts in mitigating any and all PR crises involving their players. In hindsight, Phoebe now realises that she had been sucked into the honey trap, blindly swallowing the story that she’d been fed — Sam was the real victim here. Now, she can see that the woman in the eye of the storm was the real victim.
“She didn’t go to the police first, she didn’t go to the media [first]; she went to the club because she loved the game. And she hoped that there would be something in place to reprimand that player and to make sure the wife knows,” Phoebe said.
“She was being painted as somebody who wrecked my family. And I wanted to tell her that was not the case, and that it wasn’t her fault.”
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
