{"id":494764,"date":"2026-06-25T11:41:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T11:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/494764\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T11:41:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T11:41:12","slug":"nz-nrl-player-asu-kepaoa-banned-for-homophobic-slur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/494764\/","title":{"rendered":"NZ NRL player Asu Kepaoa banned for homophobic slur"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"NQVPqQgxO\" style=\"display:none\">Homophobic slurs in the NRL are rare.<\/p>\n<p class=\"NQVPqQgxO\" style=\"display:none\">The last player to be charged was the New Zealand Warriors\u2019 Marcelo Montoya in 2002. He received a four-match ban.<\/p>\n<p class=\"NQVPqQgxO\" style=\"display:none\">In contrast, there have been nine similar incidents since the start of 2024 in Australian Rules football, most recently this month when the Gold Coast Sun\u2019s Max Knobel was banned for four games.<\/p>\n<p class=\"NQVPqQgxO\" style=\"display:none\">Kepaoa\u2019s punishment came just weeks after former rugby league hard man Kane Evans came out as gay \u2013 only the second man from the sport in Australia to do so, and the first since 1994.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Homophobic slurs in the NRL are rare. The last player to be charged was the New Zealand Warriors\u2019&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[74,9092,243881,1135,26977,1558,18836,2082,19134,206847,243882,78719,14731,3556,111,2653,139,577,69,175177,9617,6327,3048,247680,104646,9521,213,3382,102],"class_list":["post-494764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-after","tag-against","tag-asu","tag-australian","tag-banned","tag-been","tag-club","tag-for","tag-forward","tag-homophobic","tag-kepaoa","tag-knights","tag-league","tag-national","tag-new-zealand","tag-newcastle","tag-newzealand","tag-nrl","tag-nz","tag-opponent","tag-player","tag-rugby","tag-said","tag-sixmatch","tag-slapped","tag-slur","tag-sports","tag-using","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}