Footballer, rich man, celebrity, consumer: Media blindness and the denial of domestic abuse in the Stephanie Ward and Danny Simpson case

Abstract

Mainstream media sense-making around domestic abuse perpetrated by soccer players within the English Premier League has not been examined to any significant degree by criminologists. Within this article, we describe our study of national news media reporting on the Stephanie Ward and Danny Simpson case. We discovered that media representations were blind to the domestic abuse perpetrated by Simpson, denying him the identity of the ‘abuser’ and presenting Ward as the aggressor. All of this played out against a structural backdrop of consumerism, which reinforces misogynistic expectations of who women in football circles are and how they should behave.