When Footy Families and Dark Secrets Collide
There are weeks in the footy calendar where the oval ball takes a back seat to something far heavier — and this is one of them. The story emerging around Kay Reid, mother of premiership players Ben and Sam Reid, and her family’s long-standing ties to Dezi Freeman and his kin is the kind of thing that stops you mid-scroll on a Tuesday morning and makes you put the coffee down.
Look, I’ve been watching this game long enough to know that footballers and their families exist in real communities, not just on highlight reels. But even by the standards of a Richmond supporter who has lived through decades of heartbreak and three flags in four years — a combination that would test anyone’s sense of perspective — this one is genuinely confronting.
What We Know So Far
Kay Reid, wife of former AFL administrator Bruce Reid and the matriarch of a family that has contributed no small amount to the competition, has spoken publicly about the family’s connection to Dezi Freeman. Freeman, it should be noted, is the man at the centre of serious allegations involving the killing of a police officer — allegations that are a matter for the courts, not for a footy website.
What Kay has revealed is that the ties between the two families go back roughly two decades. She says she and Bruce helped Freeman’s wife travel to Australia, and that the family stored firearms belonging to the Freemans. It is reported that those guns were lawfully held at the time — something that matters a great deal in how this story is framed.
None of what has emerged suggests the Reids knew anything criminal was coming. That’s an important distinction, and one worth repeating clearly before anyone gets carried away with the keyboard.
The AFL World Is Smaller Than You Think
One of the things non-footy people never quite grasp is just how tight the networks around this game are. We’re not talking about the Premier League here, with its anonymous millions pouring through turnstiles. Australian rules football — at its roots — is a community sport. Players grow up together. Families intertwine. Coaches know coaches who know recruiters who know blokes from the country town where someone was born.
\p>The Reids are embedded in that world. Bruce Reid built a career in AFL administration. Ben and Sam Reid won premierships — Ben with Geelong, Sam with Greater Western Sydney — and the family has long been regarded as one of the game’s decent ones. Kay Reid speaking publicly about all this suggests she’s not hiding from it, which, frankly, takes a certain kind of courage when the story involves something this grim.
The point isn’t to make this about footy. The point is that real people, with real footy lives, sometimes have real connections to things that go badly wrong. That’s not unique to the AFL world — it’s just human.
Storing Guns — The Detail That Raises Eyebrows
I’ll be honest: the detail that the Reids stored the Freeman family’s firearms is the one that lodged itself in my brain and didn’t move. On its own, storing someone’s legally registered firearms isn’t a crime. It happens in rural communities, it happens when people move house, it happens for any number of mundane reasons.
But context has a way of reframing the mundane, doesn’t it. When the person whose guns you once held is later accused of shooting a police officer, the mundane becomes — at minimum — something you’d want to explain publicly. Which is exactly what Kay Reid appears to be doing.
Whether the guns stored by the Reids have any direct relevance to the subsequent allegations against Freeman is a matter for investigators and courts. It is not a matter for this column to speculate on, and I won’t. But you’d have to be either incurious or dishonest to pretend the detail doesn’t warrant attention.
Fairness to the Reids
Here’s where I plant my flag: nothing that has emerged publicly implicates Kay or Bruce Reid in any wrongdoing. Being connected to someone who later commits a serious crime does not make you complicit in that crime. If it did, half the country would be in trouble based solely on distant Facebook acquaintances.
The Reids have apparrently cooperated with authorities, and Kay’s decision to speak publicly — rather than circle the wagons and stay silent — speaks to a family trying to be straight about an extraordinarily difficult situation. That deserves to be acknowledged, even in a column that’s not exactly known for handing out gold stars.
I’ve seen the AFL community turn on people very quickly when the headlines go bad. This doesn’t feel like a situation that warrants that response. It feels like a situation that warrants some patience and a decent respect for what hasn’t yet been fully established.
What Footy Can and Can’t Fix
We ask a lot of football, culturally speaking. We ask it to unite us, to give us heroes, to provide a clean narrative of effort rewarded and community celebrated. And mostly it does a reasonable job — even if you support Richmond and spent most of the 1990s in a state of low-grade despair.
But footy can’t insulate anyone from the full catastrophe of ordinary life. Ben and Sam Reid’s mum helped a woman get to Australia. She stored some guns. She maintained a friendship across two decades that has now been caught in the blast radius of a terrible event. None of that fits neatly into a Best and Fairest speech or a club values poster.
The game produces people — flawed, generous, complicated, loyal to a fault sometimes — and then those people go and live their actual lives. Occasionally those lives intersect with tragedy in ways no one could have predicted or prevented. This appears to be one of those times.
A Note on How This Gets Covered
There’s a version of this story that gets told with maximum heat and minimum light — the AFL connection front and centre, the family names in the headline, the implication of something sinister hovering just below the surface of every sentence. That version sells clicks. It also does real damage to real people before anything has been established.
I’d like to think we can do better than that. The courts will determine what Dezi Freeman is and isn’t responsible for. Investigators will follow whatever evidentiary threads need following. The Reids have spoken. What’s left is for everyone else — media, fans, the footy public — to resist the urge to run ahead of what’s actually known.
That’s harder than it sounds in 2025, I grant you. The takes ecosystem doesn’t reward patience. But some stories are bigger than the game and require a different speed — a slower one, with more care taken at every turn.
The Game Goes On — As It Always Does
There’ll be football this weekend. There’ll be goals kicked and marks taken and coaches losing their minds at interchange decisions that only they can see the logic of. The competition doesn’t pause for the complicated moments in the lives of the people connected to it.
That’s fine. That’s how it should be, in a way. But it’s worth occasionally lifting your eyes from the ladder and the injury list and recognising that the people who make up this game — players, officials, their families — are carrying things we’ll never fully know about. Sometimes those things find their way into the open.
Kay Reid’s willingness to speak says something about her character. What it says about everything else around her — that’s a longer story, still being written.
