A Hawthorn coach has claimed Alastair Clarkson and Chris Fagan ran the team’s football department ‘like the Russian mafia’ as part of evidence given to the club’s review into its relationships with Indigenous players.
The review has reportedly heard harrowing accusations from First Nations footballers, including one who alleges Clarkson and Fagan urged him to tell his partner to abort their child and break up with her.
That same player, named only as ‘Ian’, alleges he was ‘manipulated and convinced to remove my SIM card from my phone so there was no further contact between my family and me’.
Another player told the review that his time with the team left him so traumatised he had ‘multiple suicide attempts’ and ‘multiple stays in the mental health unit at the hospital’, according to a report in the Herald Sun.
Clarkson (left) and Fagan (pictured together while with Hawthorn in 2016) are among senior Hawks officials accused of running the club’s football department ‘like the Russian mafia’
It’s claimed Hawthorn’s review into the treatment of Indigenous players during Clarkson and Fagan’s time with the team found the club’s actions ‘amount to human rights abuses’
Other Indigenous players have accused senior Hawks coaches of involvement in separating them from friends and family in a pattern of what they allege to be racist behaviour.
Clarkson and Fagan have both categorically denied all the allegations and said they look forward to clearing their names in the AFL’s independent investigation into the matter, with the former insisting he was blindsided by the accusations and was not afforded due process.
The unnamed Hawks coach told the review that Clarkson, Fagan, general manager Mark Evans and former player development manager Jason Burt ‘operated the football department like the Russian mafia’ and ostracised anyone who questioned their methods, according to the report.
The report also claims the coach said ‘I knew this day would come’ when he was contacted by the authors of the review.
It’s claimed the club’s probe found that Clarkson, Fagan and Burt bullied and intimidated Indigenous players, who were treated so badly the incidents ‘amount to human rights abuses’.
The report states that the review was told that two partners of players lost their unborn children
MORE TO COME…