It was just after 8am on Thursday, January 11, 2018, when a female member of Canterbury League Club received a text from George Coorey, a director of the club and a long-standing friend of McIntyre, also a current director.
In late 2020, Liquor and Gaming NSW, the registered clubs regulator, launched an inquiry into whether Coorey was a fit and proper person following revelations in this masthead about the text message as well as complaints from a number of women about multiple instances of vulgar and inappropriate behaviour by Coorey, who was by then club chairman.
“Your [sic] most welcome,” texted Coorey replying to her message from the previous evening thanking him for organising a club jersey, “but you all have to suck off Mullet [another club member].”
When an associate of Coorey’s, Campsie builder Arthur Stanton, provided a statutory declaration claiming he had sent the offensive text message, Coorey was cleared.
Having been exonerated, Coorey is threatening to sue the club over the $70,000 legal fees he claims he incurred fighting the allegations.
However, it has emerged that Coorey approached at least one person to falsely claim responsibility for the text before Stanton volunteered. “I was that stunned,” said the friend who declined Coorey’s request.
Three women gave evidence to the regulator about Coorey’s inappropriate behaviour including that on multiple occasions he would “grab his crotch and fondle it whilst sticking his tongue out and running [it] around his lips”.
Swinging into action on his friend’s behalf was disgraced former Bulldogs boss McIntyre who, after a 20-year absence, was re-elected to the league club board in 2022.
Coorey, who provided a character reference for the jailed former Labor minister Eddie Obeid, in which he expressed “astonishment” that Obeid had been found guilty “knowing his personal qualities and character”, was on the football club board with McIntyre during the salary cap rort.
McIntyre, a retired solicitor, confessed he drafted most of the 18 sworn statements on behalf of witnesses, including his wife. The template for one such statement has been obtained by the Herald. “I have known George Coorey for more than [insert number] years,” the template says. “I have never seen George Coorey make a comment or gesture of a sexual nature to any female in the club nor has anyone ever indicated to me that he has done so.”
The template also suggested the women had only complained as revenge for Coorey calling them out for having affairs with men in his inner circle. This claim is vehemently denied by the women.
“The girls had no one to support them but themselves,” McIntyre said while boasting of the number of statements submitted on Coorey’s behalf.
Last year, the women wrote to the then-racing minister Kevin Anderson complaining that they were “confused and shocked” that ILGA had accepted without question the statutory declaration from Stanton. “ILGA failed to ask us if we knew Arthur Stanton and why would Arthur Stanton, someone we have never met or could identify in a crowd send a sexual text from another person’s phone at 8am?”
ILGA replied on the minister’s behalf that the matter had been investigated and closed.
The women, who feel let down by the system, say they want Coorey held accountable for the reputational damage he has caused them and their families.