January 9, 2026 — 11:00am
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Former AFL WAG Amie Rohan was on my radar at the gym weeks before we spoke. I clocked how one minute she’d be deadlifting hilariously heavy bars, the next hoisting her newborn from his pram and handing homemade yoghurt cups to her two daughters. I didn’t realise who she was but told her she was ace.
I’m older than her mum, but we became unlikely friends. One day, Amie needed an emergency babysitter. I was gobsmacked by the 5 million socks drying neatly in her laundry and the fact her kids’ playroom had no electronic toys. Walls were hung with the periodic table and world maps.
Lachie Neale celebrates winning the 2025 grand final between Geelong Cats and Brisbane Lions. Jason South
My lasting fascination with Amie though was, and is, that she survived a public humiliation and a private grief with dignity when her then-Geelong Football Club player husband Gary Rohan left her when their youngest was months old, amid rumours of a romance with a club physio.
Amie was suddenly a single mum and Gary earned a spot next to Wayne Carey in the AFL’s ranks of marital drama grubs.
Which is why, when the Lachie Neale story broke, I thought of Amie. Since Christmas, she’s been camping (with the kids and her new fabulous family man partner) so we haven’t talked, but I reckon this latest AFL “playing away” drama will bring back awful memories. And I bet she’s drafted messages to Jules Neale, wanting to be empathetic without overstepping.
Jules and Lachie Neale on Brownlow night 2025.AFL Photos
I’d also like to support Jules. Weeks on, I still can’t get my head around the Shakespearean scale of the implosion of her marriage to AFL untouchable Lachie and how it has the same archetypes of the Rohan COVID-hub scenario and the Carey saga in 2002, in which the former North Melbourne captain had an affair with his vice captain’s wife: betrayal, hubris, a fallen king.
The Neale plot, no doubt already familiar to you, has a furious wife going scorched earth via Instagram, displaying not vengefulness but certainty. A former best friend leaning into publicity. A 2025 grand final photo of the alleged other woman with her knee pressed into Lachie’s, apparent intimacy frozen in plain sight.
While I’m aware an interest in other people’s heartbreak is tacky, I want to know what comes next. Wondering if, assuming Lachie did stray, the alleged relationship that upended his life still holds any appeal now that it’s stripped of secrecy and fantasy.
Jules Neale (left) and her estranged friend Tess Crosley on grand final day 2025. Instagram
But most of all I wonder whether anyone involved thought through the question that sits beneath every affair story. Not even necessarily a moral question, but a practical one.
Will this be worth it?
Is short-term heat – whatever form it takes, sexy texts, the brush of a hand that feels more exciting than a full-body hug with a spouse, a hotel room rendezvous where guilt fights ego – worth blowing up good lives and risking everything for?
And you do risk everything when desire outruns good judgment. Because nothing stays hidden. Someone wants more and leaves a breadcrumb. Someone checks a phone. A gut feeling gets followed.
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The reckoning arrives eventually, and it involves tonnes of collateral damage.
Home, money, trust, children. All in the gun. The boring intimacy of daily life that seems suddenly as precious as rubies. Think. Are they worth more than strange sex?
Yep, some affairs do lead to lasting love. But far more often what’s left, especially when the kids are tiny, a la the Neales, is a ledger that doesn’t make for happy reading. Lachie’s appears particularly expensive.
He loses a wife who gave up her career for his, who no doubt did years of unpaid PR for the Lions (and don’t think the club will look after Jules now. They’ll raise the drawbridge.) He’ll have to fly cross-country to see his babies. He won’t be called “the great man himself” by sponsors or radio hosts now.
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And without a full mea culpa and not just a dicky pledge to work on himself, good luck with a post-footy media career.
The part that tends to get waved away when affairs are framed as emotional detours or private misjudgments is exposure that doesn’t just end relationships. It redraws lives.
If the answer to whether it’s worth it isn’t an instant, unequivocal yes, then the self-destruction begins long before anyone touches a leg or lifts a phone.
Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.
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