Wayne Carey makes brutal admission after North Melbourne centenary video snub

Controversial AFL legend Wayne Carey has opened up on his inner-pain after he was left out of a recent video celebrating North Melbourne’s 100-year history.

Carey is North Melbourne’s best ever player and a premiership captain, but when the club released its centenary video he was nowhere to be seen (the club says he does appear albeit in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment).

Carey has now joined Sam Newman (another former AFL footballer who attracts controversy for his extreme views) on Newman’s You Cannot be Serious podcast.

And he broke his silence on the issue, revealing he spoke to North Melbourne Sonja Hood about his omission, while also saying “enough is enough”.

“I spoke to Sonja Hood and I said ‘Sonja, I just want you to know this (video) has caused a kerfuffle and people are talking about it,’’ he said.

“I don’t sit there saying why didn’t you include me, but I just have to address this constant talk about these things I’ve (supposedly) done in my life, that I haven’t’.”

Carey said he was living in “toxic shame” and he had suffered enough for his past deeds.

“I don’t know what you get for murder, but you don’t get this,’’ Carey said.

Carey’s past relationship with women continues to haunt him, and this year he was uninvited at the last minute to the inaugural NSW Australian Football Hall of Fame as the event was held on the same weekend the AFL industry took a stand against gender-based violence.

“This is me finally saying, ‘come on, enough is enough’,’’ Carey said on the podcast.

“Surely I don’t have to live … I’ve probably only got nine good summers left, Sam. Surely I don’t have to live the last years of my life living things that occurred 30-plus, 20-plus years ago.

“Surely I’m not that interesting to keep bringing up things that happened that long ago. It’s astounding.

“They’re driving my kids, their friends … the talk about violence. They are driving the mothers of my children into their graves, that’s what they’re doing.

“The vindictive nature of what continues to happen is just wrong.”

Newman went to his go-to words and called the treatment of Carey a “sham” and a “disgrace”.

Carey is expecting his second child with partner Jessica Paulke.

He revealed when the video — which includes highlights of past champions, with cutaways of current youngster Zane Duursma who is wearing a special jumper that the players will wear next year to celebrate 100 years in the competition — was launched he felt hurt.

“I guess it’s for my health to get it off my chest, to actually say how I’m feeling and to be a voice for others and say how they’re feeling. If that’s what makes me feel a bit better then I’m going to do it,” he said.

“I’ve got to a point in my life where I can live with myself and don’t feel guilt about these things anymore.

“I decided through help and it’s only through help … that I’m not going to live with that toxic shame and that guilt anymore about these things that are written and are untrue.

“I guess the constant storytelling and the constant headlines that get brought up after something as simple about a few people tweeting about me not being in a video and my whole history of things that haven’t happened, that continually get written about that is no fault of my own … it’s just got too far.

“You look at what Alastair Clarkson has gone through over the last few years. Chris Fagan. Guilty before any presumption of innocence is afforded to them. It’s wrong.

“I’ve got to a point where I’ve learnt to forgive myself.”

In 1996 (the year North Melbourne won the premiership) Carey was accused of grabbing a woman’s breast on Melbourne’s then nightclub-strip on King St. He said he pleaded guilty to the incident because the club wanted him to.

“I don’t have and never have been charged with domestic violence,’’ Carey said.

“There have been two major incidents in my life, one was over 30 years ago. It was in King St and I got the advice 30-odd years ago from the North Melbourne footy club.

“I don’t remember what happened that night. It was in the middle of the street, it wasn’t cloak-and-dagger stuff.

“I pleaded guilty on the advice of North Melbourne because we were halfway through a year where we thought we were a premiership chance.

“The charge was that I had … grabbed a girl on the boob and said ‘get a bigger set of tits’. I pleaded guilty on the advice of the North Melbourne Football Club.

“I categorically don’t remember what happened that night. If I’d known that I had to live with that for the rest of my life, which I have had to do, I would be fighting that today.”

Carey is accused of glassing his former partner Kate Neilson in 2007.

“An incident with a girl that I was seeing on and off, I wouldn’t call her a girlfriend … we were overseas in a restaurant and everyone says you glassed someone,’’ he said.

“You literally glassed your girlfriend. That is ludicrous, that is not accurate. Yes the glass did touch her because I was trying to throw wine, I’ve said this before publicly, I was trying to throw a mouthful of wine on her in a packed restaurant. I leant over and touched her lip. I then threw the glass on the ground and it smashed.

“There was one incident in Port Melbourne that I have got a criminal record for … I called the police to my apartment. When they got there I answered the door and said you’re no longer required. The police pushed their way into my apartment and then I defended myself inside my own apartment.

“I then didn’t fight those charges either. They came in and they grabbed me in my apartment. So I resisted arrest, that is my conviction. I didn’t even throw a punch. These are factual things that have occurred.”

Carey has received support from former players, including Hawthorn champion Dermott Brereton and his old teammate Corey McKernan.

Brereton, a champion in his own right and a goalkicking rival to Carey in the 1990s, said he too was surprised that the captain of the club’s team of the century was left out.

“If you are trying to get your very best players that were representative of your team as players, Wayne Carey sits top of the list and I would have thought there would be a place for him in that video,” Brereton said on SEN.

“But the club has a decision to make: do we put that piece of footage of Wayne in there and we know we will have to defend our actions in doing so?

“And that’s the battle that they have moving forward and they’ve made a stance that: no, they don’t want to defend their actions of putting his profile there in that commercial.”

Brereton said Carey was “a good guy” despite his past.

“He’s made some really bad decisions in the past and he has confessed and copped up to some of them,” Brereton said.

“He’s a good guy and he makes so many people around him happy... He’s fantastic, he’s a pretty good citizen who has made some bad errors.”