Kelleher exposed in a true grime story

PLUS: Stead makes a surprising move and more bad news for NZ sports journalism.

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There’s so much griminess in this story that the mere act of clipping a few excerpts from it was a thoroughly unpleasant exercise. The headline leaves no room for interpretation as to what you’re about to read - “Former All Black Byron Kelleher’s decade of repeated drunken violence against women” - though I question the use of the word “drunken”, which should be redundant but could instead be falsely interpreted as mitigation.

 There’s this:

Police authorities in three different countries were called after episodes of violence, including a “terrifying” incident in a Barcelona hotel room in July 2019, in which [Yuliana] Desta alleges Kelleher punched her, strangled her and tried to suffocate her with a pillow. 

“I thought I was going to die. It was so scary, I was praying ‘please God, let me see my son again’,” Desta says.

And this:

Desta returned home with a friend to confront Kelleher and found him locked in their bedroom with another woman.

“He came out with the girl, and I was trying to record him. He tried to grab my phone, and he was punching me in the side of the face as well,” Desta recalls, pointing to her temple.

“I tried to get outside and he chased me and pushed me into the rice field in front of the villa. He punched me as I was on the ground.”

Amid the chaos, Desta’s friend called the police, but by time authorities arrived Kelleher had fled the scene, and later, the country.

There’s more. There are holes in walls, there are headlocks in public, there are court appearances, there is so much booze, there are pleas for forgiveness. There is also a bizarre passage where Kelleher, a 57-test All Black, uses his experiences working on an orchard to message one of his victims to explain that he’s learnt that if he is more gentle with her, like he is with fruit, then she would treat him better.

If his sober thoughts are geared to his expectations of how women should treat him, heaven help when he’s drunk.

It wasn’t just Radio New Zealand that reported on this awful relationship either, with this Stuff article appearing earlier.

Kelleher’s case should be acutely uncomfortable for many because it holds up a mirror to institutions like New Zealand Rugby, the Chiefs and the Highlanders, and the wider sports media.

To people like myself.