Don Burke denies sexual harassment allegations in Channel Nine interview
In an extraordinary hour of television, the man who was once Channel Nine’s biggest star, Don Burke, appeared on Nine to deny allegations of sexual harassment made against him by three women who had told their stories to the ABC.
A Current Affair’s host, Tracy Grimshaw, put the hard questions to the now 70-year-old, who admitted he had been stupid and a bully and had engaged in multiple extramarital affairs – but said he had not said or done any of the serious things he was accused of.
“I’m not that man at all,” Burke said in his only TV interview. “I’ve got a lot of failings … Some of these things are despicable.”
Immediately afterwards on the ABC’s 7.30, Leigh Sales introduced an investigation of Burke’s behaviour during his 17 years as a prime-time star on Nine, including interviews with the three women who accused him of abusive behaviour and indecent assault.
“Dealing with Don Burke was an endurance test in terms of his persistence in commentary about anything sexual,” a former researcher, Louise Langdon, told the ABC.
“It started very early on when I worked with him at the radio station 2UE and the comment was, ‘Did you get your rocks off last night?’ Meaning, ‘Did you have sex last night?’”
Burke told Grimshaw he had a lot of enemies because he was a perfectionist and a tough task master.
“It’s a witch hunt,” Burke said. “I might have terrified a few people, or whatever, and I shouldn’t have done that, but these sort of things bear no relation to me and what I am about.
“There are plenty of people who were there at the time and are furious, because these things didn’t happen. Some people don’t like me. I was tough, I had to be tough.
“I am sorry and I might have gone a bit far.”
Burke also claimed for the first time that he has Asperger syndrome, before admitting it was a self-diagnosis.
“I missed the body language and the subtle signs that people give you,” he said. “I don’t see that. I suffer from a terrible problem with that.
“Not seeing. No one can understand how you can’t see it but you don’t.”
Asked if he had ever told a TV journalist that he liked seeing a young relative’s “cunt” rubbing against the back of her horse, Burke vehemently denied it.
“I never said anything like that,” he said. “This is what is driving me nuts. You wonder why they go to that extreme. I don’t know why they would say that.”
He opened his interview with Grimshaw by backtracking on his original statement given to the ABC in which he said he was entirely innocent.
“I think I’ve got a bit to apologise for to my family and also to the people who supported Burke’s Backyard,” he said. “There are things I’ve done that I’m not at all proud.
“Prior to [his wife] Marea’s ill health, I had a number of affairs which I shouldn’t ever have done and I think I let everybody down with that.
“And I’m a perfectionist that drove people very hard and, although I felt we did have a happy office, this clearly, when you look at the people who are complaining now, there’s a lot of people that don’t like me.
“It’s the social media, it’s the Twittersphere.”
These sort of things bear no relation to me and what I am about.