D-Day for disgraced football legend Barry Cable
The former champion football player, who is fighting multiple historical child sexual abuse charges at the hearing, is preparing to learn his fate.
Barry Cable has pleaded not guilty in a judge-only criminal trial alleging that he molested an eight- or nine-year-old girl at his family’s home in the late 1960s.
The 82-year-old former Australian rules player will return to the District Court of Western Australia in Perth on Friday for Judge Michael Bowden’s decision.
Prosecutors alleged Cable abused the girl at her parents’ home while she and his wife, Helen, stayed with him for about a month.
The alleged victim told the hearing that Cable was nice to her at first.
“He loved me like an uncle… then things changed,” he said while testifying in March.
“He started touching my body.”
The abuse allegedly involved penetrative sex on multiple occasions while the former North Melbourne player’s wife slept.
The woman reported the alleged abuse to police when she saw Cable on television in 2023 and told the court during the hearing that it “brought back memories of what he did to me”.
Ultimately, Cable denied five counts of improper intercourse with a girl under 13 and two counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under 13 between December 31, 1966 and December 31, 1969.
A 2023 civil lawsuit in the same court found that Cable had molested a girl for five years in 1968, when she was 12 years old. The victim was awarded $818,700 in damages.
The civil trial judge said there was compelling evidence that the former football player had violated other children.
Cable, who made repeated attempts to have the civil lawsuit proceedings permanently annulled and did not attend the hearing, denied the abuses.
He was later stripped of his Australian Football Hall of Fame honors after a stellar playing career with Perth and East Perth in the WAFL and North Melbourne in the VFL in the 1960s and 70s, and went on to coach in both leagues.
He was expelled from the Sport Australia Hall of Fame and the Western Australian Football Commission revoked the former champion’s Hall of Fame membership, including his Legend status.
