CODE SILENCE OF
After a traumatic few years, Courtney Thorpe is ready to reveal what went on behind the scenes in her marriage and how she was treated by the NRL
When Courtney Thorpe considers whether she was happy in the last few years of her relationship with Jarrod Wallace, she concludes, “yes – happy enough”. The end of that thought plagued her for a long time. The truth is, she doesn’t remember a lot of it. Post-natal depression and anxiety robbed her of much of her memory during the first two years of her daughter’s life.
She is only now, through medication and counselling, emerging from the dark ocean she describes living in since Kennedy was born, the waves crashing down on her without reprieve.
But she was happy, wasn’t she? Happy enough. She was the beauty queen, former Miss World Australia, model and television presenter, and he was the star NRL forward, the Gold Coast Titan.
But behind closed doors her life was unravelling. She had endured a traumatic birth to a premature baby, isolated for six months to protect her, the 35kg she gained during pregnancy made her feel like an impostor, her self-esteem plummeted and her former work felt out of reach.
“I’m so sorry I’m fat, I promise I’ll get skinny, just please don’t cheat on me,” she begged. Wallace in her darker moments, overcome with anxiety when he travelled for away games. “Just give me a little bit longer.” And each time he reassured her, “you’re beautiful”.
But by last September the gut feeling she had tried to put aside, as his phone stayed glued face-down by their bed and as the distance between them deepened, had grown into an unavoidable thumping.
So she sat down with her husband on a Friday morning and asked to see his phone, and as she saw the messages, her life gave way beneath her like a trap door.
“I was in shock and I wanted to believe that my husband wouldn’t do this to me,” Thorpe, 31, recalls. “I feel so silly because I was so smug for so long that I had a man who wasn’t like that. I felt for all these other women I knew it was happening to. It felt so embarrassing – and how many people knew, is what I always ask myself.”
When approached by this publication, Wallace declined to comment.
Marital problems are not exclusive to the NRL,
and claims of infidelity are not exclusive to men. Thorpe has learnt that resolutely since she first spoke about her separation on her new podcast series on May 24. Her phone buzzed with messages from friends and strangers, divulging affairs, sharing their broken marriages, many of which they were still in.
But the most common response she received about her podcast, More Than Just a Mum, was how brave she was for speaking about it.
“Which is lovely but also sad at the same time,” Thorpe says. “That people see that you have to be brave to talk about what you’ve been through. I think anyone should be able to talk about what they’ve gone through without feeling scared of judgment or repercussions.”
Thorpe won’t go into detail about what happened during the end of her marriage, nor will she detail her dealings with the Titans. But there are many reasons she wanted to share her personal story. Simply, she believes more women should know they don’t have to suffer in silence, as women often do and as she did for much of the past two years.
“You don’t want to air your marital problems but I want women to know that it is happening a
lot more than we realise and it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with us,” she says.
“I know I’m not the only one and my whole mission has always been if I can help one woman in my life then that’s the greatest accomplishment.”
It was barely a few weeks after Thorpe first
confronted Wallace that Phoebe Burgess appeared in The Weekend Australian on October 16. Her husband, NRL star Sam Burgess, had shed tears of regret on reality program SAS Australia and an angered Phoebe, a woman at the centre of an NRL breakup, was sharing her story and calling out the game for forgiving players’ behaviours.
Thorpe’s support network had engulfed her and at that stage she had no idea what would happen to her marriage, which they would try to reconcile for many months until it became unsalvageable.
“It was the weirdest experience to be hearing (a similar) story told through another woman’s voice,” Thorpe says.
“I’m sitting there listening to Phoebe and thinking in my head, ‘why did she put up with this? What was she thinking?’ And then to sit back and go, ‘what the hell have I been thinking?’ It was really confronting.”
She reached out to Burgess at the time. And in the wake of her own marriage breakdown, she says women in the NRL community have been the most supportive. “I just lived five years of my life thinking I had this amazing man who was an exception to the rule,” she says.
“At this point I wonder if there is an exception to that NRL stereotype – I hope to God for all the other committed wives and partners that there are lots of exceptions to the rules – but this isn’t a secret.”
The NRL has had its share of behaviour issues in recent years. The league determined to reform the game and the NRL integrity unit works with clubs and players to do so.
During her separation, Thorpe reached out to a Titans staff member she trusts, who has since checked in on her, but she believes the club could offer more support. “Their first response is to protect the club and to protect the player,” she says. “These boys can barely breathe in some ways, the clubs step in so heavily in their lives; then when it’s these things that’s affecting their wives and children, you get nothing from them.”
In response to Thorpe’s concerns about support, Titans management provided a club statement.
“The Titans provide welfare support to all players, staff and families. It is a critical part of our club and something we treat with utmost importance. We hold personal and private staff matters in absolute in-confidence.”
On June 9, they announced the 2022 season would be Wallace’s last after six years with the club and wished him well for the future. He was signed by the Redcliffe Dolphins for their inaugural season next year.
Thorpe grew up in Forest Lake, in Brisbane’s
outer west. Her father Glenn managed shopping centres and her mother Vicki is a teacher and university lecturer. They were a family of achievers. Her younger brother, Stuart, owns a successful mechanic business on the Sunshine Coast.
Thorpe, though, had two distinct dreams as a child: to become a judge, thanks to US legal drama Judging Amy, and to get married and have a family. The latter was so strong she made Powerpoint presentations depicting her dream wedding.
“How funny and so embarrassing,” she laughs. “My whole life I loved love, so it wasn’t because I wanted this big flashy wedding, it was what the wedding signified in that one day I was going to find my Prince Charming … and I couldn’t wait for that day.
Thorpe was 24 when she won Miss World Australia in 2014, studying journalism before moving into law. She placed in the top five at the international pageant in London that year and began a whirlwind new life of modelling and ambassadorships, which sparked a new ambition in television presenting.
“God, I just loved it. I was always busy,” Thorpe says. “If I wasn’t at an event networking, I was at home writing back to emails to line up the next thing. It was honestly such an amazing time of life.”
But while her career was thriving – a presenting role on Channel 7’s The Great South-east soon followed – that dream of a loving relationship continued to elude her.
It arrived unexpectedly in mid-2017 when a brand she worked with announced she was getting a co-ambassador, a male NRL player.
“I wasn’t into football. I believed the stereotype from what I’d seen and heard and wanted nothing to do with a footballer, ever,” she says. “I was walking in the rain and he was leaning up against a pole with his back to me. He turned around and said ‘hi’, and that is what I remember, falling instantly in love.”
But it wasn’t a simple relationship. Thorpe knew she was taking on an ex-partner and two little girls – Lara, now 9, and Peyton, 7.
His difficult NRL schedule meant Wallace, who looked after his daughters every second weekend, wasn’t always available and Thorpe, who loved children and instantly adored them, happily stepped in.
“Not only did I think he was the guy who didn’t fit the mould, I opened my mind up to the idea footballers aren’t as bad as we’ve all been saying.”
While she knew the way some women interacted with footballers, an intangible threat at first, experiencing it was a confronting reality. She was taking Lara and Peyton to the bathroom at halftime during one of the first Titans home games she attended when she overheard a conversation between two women.
“They said ‘we need to find out where the boys are going to be tonight, we have to go there and I’m going to go home with any of them, I don’t care which one’,” she recalls.
Their relationship continued in a romantic whirlwind. Wallace popped the question in Paris in October 2018, and Thorpe discovered she was pregnant the following January, overwhelmed with joy that her own child might look at her the way Wallace’s girls looked at him and their mother.
They married that May in a small ceremony on the Gold Coast.
Thorpe had contracted cytomegalovirus (CMV) in her first trimester of pregnancy, which is just a cold for an adult but can lead to a disability for an unborn child. As her pregnancy continued, the potential complications of the virus came on top of placenta previa, enduring morning sickness, iron infusions and dangerously high blood pressure that required medication and time in hospital.
By August, when scans revealed her baby was failing to thrive, panic-stricken and overwhelmed she begged her doctors – her body was failing her child and they needed to get her out. She had an emergency caesarean on August 14 to deliver Kennedy, born six weeks premature with no amniotic fluid left to survive in.
To cut the risk of infection due to her being on medication and affected by CMV, they were told to stay isolated for up to six months while they monitored Kennedy’s white blood cells.
“In hindsight it was the constant feeling of just being down all the time, it didn’t matter what happened,” she says.
“When I look back now I can describe the whole thing as being a really dark cloud that totally consumed me. Two days ago I was having a bath with Kennedy and she wanted to look at videos of her as a baby and we’re sitting in the bath looking at things and it hit me that I don’t actually remember her as a baby, and that breaks my heart.”
The world was plunged into a global pandemic
in early 2020 and the isolation Thorpe had known as a new mum now became endless.
Having gained weight during her pregnancy, she struggled to leave the house, often breaking down in a panic when she tried to get dressed.
“I was just so embarrassed all the time. I was so ashamed of myself, for Jarrod,” she recalls.
“I didn’t want to not go back to work but I felt like, how could I step foot back in the door looking like that. People wouldn’t even recognise me.”
By the end of 2020, Thorpe collapsed in her wardrobe, tearing the clothes from her body, and for the first time told Wallace that she wasn’t OK, that she needed help. “I felt like I’d let him down so much for that whole time. I wasn’t a fun person to be around, I didn’t want to go anywhere,” she says. “I had seen the way women are in this world, I was so terrified that he was going to do something.
“Even when he travelled I would be an anxious mess, just calling him saying, ‘do you promise you won’t cheat on me, promise you won’t cheat’ … and him swearing that he would never do that.”
But the relentlessness of their lives, and the dark cloud she was living under, persisted. She began therapy the following June, where she was encouraged to put herself first again. Even though it pained her, she simply couldn’t look after Wallace’s daughters every second week.
I know I’m not the only one and my whole mission has always been if I can help one woman in my life then that’s the greatest accomplishment.
After she discovered the messages on
Wallace’s phone in September she says they both didn’t want to give up on their marriage, with a toddler and two girls who had already lived through a separation.
“Then unfortunately as time went on I found out more information and it just got to a point where it just wasn’t going to be salvageable.”
She says that only became clear around March, when she was able to properly move forward with her life. She’d visited a number of doctors by then, who had diagnosed her with postnatal depression and anxiety, for which she began taking medication, and her family, friends and neighbours continued to surround her.
The fog lifting from her mind, she returned to work in April, landing a job on Gold Coast radio on Hot Tomato’s street team and her own podcast, where she will speak to a guest each week about their different struggles as mothers.
“This is the old Courtney again, and also maybe being away from a relationship that I thought was wonderful and realising that maybe, because of both of us, it wasn’t as wonderful as I thought.
At home she is busy creating new memories with Kennedy to fill in the
gaps from the past two years – heading to Main Beach in the morning to collect shells, going on coffee dates, dancing ballet together and now gymnastics.
“There’s so much regret over what she has already seen that my focus now that I am better is to just make sure she feels happy and safe and loved at all times,” she says.
But Thorpe knows that, whatever happened in her marriage, she is now on her way to being happy, and a step closer each day to feeling like enough.