Mitch Brown, the first openly bisexual player in the Australian Football League (AFL), has admitted that loneliness after his marriage ended nearly pulled him into the manosphere. The former West Coast Eagles player says isolation and social media algorithms slowly fed him misogynistic content that he now rejects.
For anyone lucky enough not to know, the manosphere is the loose online network of male influencers who cast women and feminism as the enemy. Brown didn’t go searching for it. He says the algorithms did the work, serving him more of it as his world got smaller.
The honesty is the striking part. Brown, who first wrote about this for the Guardian, says the end of his marriage left him feeling like “a loser”, “a failure” and a “s**t dad”. “My world became tiny and that’s where my dependence on the online world grew,” he wrote. Bit by bit, the videos moved his politics.
“I watched videos of people criticising feminist voices like Abbie Chatfield and found myself agreeing with them,” he said. “My political beliefs started to change.”
What turned him around was the people closest to him, not an argument online. Brown credits his former wife, netballer Shae Bolton-Brown, and his current partner, Lou Keck, with challenging him. “I am repulsed now by some of my actions and beliefs from that time, but neither woman ever turned their back on me,” he wrote.
“This is not something I find easy to admit. I struggle to reconcile that version of myself, as recent as two years ago, with the man I am today.”
So why should a footballer’s confession matter to us? Because Brown came out in 2025, after 94 games and a decade in the AFL, and he has said there was “never an opportunity to speak openly or explore your feelings or questions in a safe way.” DNA readers already know him as our Man of the Year cover star on DNA #311.
A man who knows what hiding costs is now owning how close he came to a worse version of himself, and at DNA we’ll take that over another highlight reel any day. Out, honest and still figuring it out, which is the most useful kind of role model there is.
