On 22 October 2018, Mahalia Swinfield hit send on the email she had been drafting in her head for weeks.
“The daily bullying, and constant abuse I, and many others, have been subject to is no longer worth it,” she wrote to her boss of three years. “Please see this as notice of my resignation effective immediately.”
The boss in question was Ralph Carr, a high-profile Melbourne talent manager who was last month found guilty of raping a former employee in 2023. Through his company Ralph Carr Management, Carr once represented some of the biggest names in Australian pop music, including Kate Ceberano, Vanessa Amorosi and Tina Arena, whom he married while she was signed to him (they divorced and ended their professional relationship in 1999).
A suppression order on Carr’s name was lifted on Monday and the Guardian can now reveal that dozens of women who worked for RCM accuse him of verbally abusive and intimidating behaviour dating back to the 90s. A number also accuse him of sexual harassment.
Swinfield was 24 when he hired her in 2015. She had been warned of his fearsome reputation, she says, but jobs in the music industry were difficult to come by and she thought she was tough enough to take it.
What she didn’t know was that for three decades, according to almost 30 sources interviewed by Guardian Australia, Carr had been using his power to bully, verbally abuse and sexually harass women who worked for him.
Several former employees, all women, have come forward with allegations of a toxic workplace, describing Carr as “terrifying”, “creepy”, “abusive” and “intimidating”.
Five, including Swinfield, have made allegations of inappropriate sexual comments or advances, and others believe their time working for Carr resulted in psychological damage – panic attacks, anxiety and a general loss in confidence – which for some still persists today.
“Your behaviour is repeatedly degrading, belittling, and humiliating,” Swinfield wrote in her resignation letter.
In a statement to the Guardian, Carr’s legal representative said Carr “sternly denies these dated claims”.
“However, they come at a time where it would be inappropriate to comment further. Mr Carr maintains his innocence for the County Court matter in the strongest possible terms.”
RCM has recently lost most of its high-profile clients but had continued to manage a small number of AFL players, most notably the former star Richmond midfielder Dustin Martin.
In a statement on Monday, Martin said he was “shocked” to learn of the rape convictions. “Effective immediately, I have ended my professional relationship with my former manager,” he said.
‘He would back you into a corner’
On the second floor of a building on Lennox Street, in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond, Ralph Carr Management was described by multiple sources as a revolving door for young women in their late teens or early 20s who were keen to break into the industry.
Once in the door, young female employees say Carr was verbally abusive and manipulative. Many describe him as volatile and unpredictable, flitting between intimacy and praise to dismissiveness, vindictiveness and rage, sometimes threatening their careers.
Jessamy Gee, who worked there from 2005 to 2008, beginning when she was just 20, describes him as “incredibly abusive” and “the worst bully I’ve ever encountered”. “It was common for him … to get centimetres from your face and scream at you,” she says, describing him as “red and angry and intimidating and completely illogical and unreasonable”.
Kathryn Tollerud, who worked there between 2007 and 2008, says: “If you arrived before him you were terrified for the minute he walked in.” She compared him to a jack-in-the-box: “All day you’re winding it up and at some point you know that thing is going to jump out and frighten you … You’re waiting for it.”
Eight women have told the Guardian he would shout their names across the office and expect them to race to his desk. Tahlia, who was 21 when she began there in 2015, says he would “abuse the shit out of” anyone who didn’t move fast enough.
According to their accounts, Carr would slam doors and bang objects on tables or hurl them across rooms. Some claim they would be the favourite one day but frozen out the next; he would get jealous if his employees developed close relationships with clients and would play staff against each other. Tamblyne Cooper, who worked at RCM in 2014, describes a “ripple effect” of toxicity: “You felt like you couldn’t trust anybody,” she says.
Olivia Boddeus was 21 when she started as an intern in 2014, as part of her degree, and managed high school girls at RCM on work experience. In a report to the university, she wrote of the “power struggles, ego, jealousy, stress and competitive tension” among staff. She wrote that she was grateful for the opportunity Carr had given her but “workplace harassment and bullying” gave her “anxiety” that eventually caused “a mental breakdown”, leading her to resign.
Years later, she remembers Carr as intimidating, manipulative and a bully: “It was just an all-round pretty abusive, toxic culture. I’d come home crying every day.”
Sara, who worked for Carr from 2011 to 2014, remembers feeling “very intimidated but also scared, and kind of trapped”. “I can remember every single person there crying at some point,” she says, but she was a particular target: he threw things at her and screamed at her, or refused to talk to her for days at a time. She was so scared of his reaction to her resignation that she rehearsed it for weeks.
His anger was “fiery and aggressive … you wouldn’t see it boiling up”, she says. “He would back you into a corner, he’d have you somewhere where he had the physical advantage.” Sometimes, she alleges, he stood between her and an exit while screaming. “You’d be paralysed with fear … you were completely powerless.”
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailSara told Carr she had ADHD, which he used as ammunition, she claims. One time she says he yelled at her, “Are you having a brain haemorrhage?”, knowing that this was how her father had died. “That was the breaking point.”
A colleague says she witnessed how dramatically his alleged bullying affected Sara. “He wore her down to a point where she just broke.”
Courtney Austin was 22 when she started at RCM in 2015. “I naively thought he was encouraging young women in the industry – but in reality he was only hiring them because they could be walked all over,” she says. “He would just snap, scream across the room, ‘You’re so fucking stupid’ – he looked like a bull ready to charge.” She remembers feeling “actual sheer panic” and starting each day with “utter dread”.
Clare Heasly, a childhood friend of Tina Arena’s who worked for her in the 90s, felt so threatened by Carr at a venue on the singer’s 1997 In Deep tour that she went into “physical shock”, she says. “He clenched his fist and stood over me and his whole arm … was shaking. He was itching to punch me. I was so frightened – I knew that if I moved or said anything he would lose control and I would be his punching bag. He said, ‘You fucking bitch, I’m going to fucking kill you, who the fuck do you think you are.’”
After hiding for more than an hour, Heasly says she told the promoter and the tour manager, who ejected Carr from the premises. The tour manager, who asked not to be named, remembers Heasly being “upset and shaken” and gave her a whistle to blow to alert the rest of the crew if Carr came close again. “Was Ralph more aggressive than most? Yeah, he was up there,” he says. “Was he abusive and domineering? Yeah, he was up there. But he wasn’t alone. There were plenty of guys like that.”
Arena told the Guardian she had been told about the episode at the time, describing it as deeply disturbing.
Heasly blames only Carr for what happened: not anyone else working on that tour, including Arena. “It’s taken 20 years to get past it,” she says. “I was deeply, deeply affected by it.”
He would choose ‘the really hot girls’
One woman who worked for Carr for two years from 2010 remembers scouting for new interns: “I was told to print off all the résumés and delete the ones that were male, delete the ones that were older than 25,” she says. More often than not, Carr would choose “the really hot girls, around 18 or so”.
Anna, whose name has been changed, was 24 when she was hired in 2013. At a glamorous work event she was invited to soon after starting, she says, Carr followed her up a flight of stairs, touched her waist, leant in towards her and told her: “You look sexy in that dress.” She says it “felt very intimate” but she tried to brush it off. The next day she remembers he was “incredibly closed off … he completely ignored me”.
Not long after that, she says, Carr asked her to a work dinner in South Yarra with a powerful man in the industry. She says Carr told her: “Make sure you wear something sexy.”
She says she is “almost ashamed” she never pushed back: “When I look back I feel disgusted but at the time I thought, ‘This will just placate him, let’s keep it all friendly and fun and then I can get out of it without causing a scene.’” She had seen Carr become “really fucking intimidating” when he didn’t get his way. Also, she says, there was another side to him: he was charming and at times “fun to be around” and he offered access to a world that was “so exciting”.
When Anna resigned in 2014 to take another job, she remembers Carr begging her to stay. “He got on his knees in front of me and clasped his hands together, pleading, then put his hands on my knees,” she says. “I think he felt betrayed.”
But the Monday after she left RCM, she claims Carr called her yelling. “He was like, ‘I’m going to fucking bury you, the big man upstairs sees everything … you’re fucked, I’m going to ruin your career.’ … I was terrified for weeks.”
She adds: “I’ve obviously buried the trauma of his behaviour really deep because talking about it still spikes my anxiety in a really physical way.”
Anna quit 14 months after starting work for Carr. Jo, who worked at RCM in 2008, lasted only three.
Jo was 19 and Carr was in his 50s when she says he sent her a message while they were both at work. That message no longer exists but Jo says she remembers it vividly: “Shh … don’t tell anyone but you look really cute today.”
“As the receptionist … I had to greet his girlfriend [Emma], who was pregnant at the time, every afternoon when she came in,” she says. Carr married Emma in 2009; the pair have three children and divorced in 2018. “I felt way too uncomfortable … I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.” She resigned a few weeks later.
Jo now works at One of One, a not-for-profit she co-founded that celebrates women in the music industry, in which they are vastly under-represented – in part, she believes, because of men like Carr.
“I regret that I said nothing about this to anyone sooner but when you’re 19 there’s no one you can talk to,” she says. RCM had no HR department to field formal complaints, and many women say they feared losing their jobs.
In Australia’s small music industry, that fear can feel very real – and many women have told the Guardian that Carr exploited it, trumpeting his ability to make or break careers and threatening their prospects if he didn’t get his way.
‘It just made my skin crawl’
Jessamy Gee and Kathryn Tollerud worked for Carr in the mid to late 2000s. “Alcohol was such a big part of that industry,” Tollerud says. “I remember getting phone calls to go out and drink with Ralph and his friends at ridiculous times of the night. If you said no … you had a really crap next week at work.”
One night Carr took Gee, Tollerud and others from one venue to a strip club without warning.
The women felt uncomfortable there, Gee says, but being so new to the industry, they had no reference points for what was appropriate. “Having young, inexperienced women around him was strategic,” she says. “He can tell them whatever he wants. He can make himself out as a hero, a big shot … He’d tell you that this is the way it is, this is the industry, and if you can’t handle it you’re weak.”
Tollerud is now the mother of two young boys, which informed her decision to come forward now: “I want them to see that their mum is going to stand up and say this behaviour is not OK.”
Sam Righi runs the promotions company Big Deal Touring, which worked with Carr until midway through 2018 when Righi filed a claim in the federal court for Carr to pay him $120,300 he allegedly owed. The court ordered RCM’s touring arm to be wound up in insolvency.
Righi remembers Carr saying sexually inappropriate things about his staff and clients, and describes the way Carr treated his staff as “disgusting”, “shocking” and “belittling”. In meetings Righi was present at, he says, Carr would “shut them down and say ‘shut up you idiots, what do you know’ … he treated them like trash.”
Seven of the women the Guardian spoke to say he would make them stand between him and his keyboard, forcing them to bend over in front of him to type his emails while he sat back and watched over their shoulders, barking orders. “The way he would sit behind you at the computer was disgusting,” says Nicole Kerr, who worked there in 2014. “You were crouched over typing for him, and he’s sitting behind you up straight, sitting there saying, ‘TYPE FASTER’ … It’s not a good position for a woman to be in … in front of a man, bent over like that.”
Righi remembers a 2017 video call with Carr “clear as day”. He says Carr positioned the camera so that Righi couldn’t see his face, explaining: “You don’t need to see faces, you’ll see why in a minute.”
According to Righi, Carr, who was in his late 50s, called Swinfield, then in her mid-20s, to his laptop.
“She was bending over the desk … and all I’m seeing, my whole phone is covered with looking right down her top.”
Swinfield remembers this too: “I remember straightening myself up so it wasn’t the case, and then Ralph readjusting the camera so it was in the same place,” she says.
The inappropriate sexual behaviour wasn’t new to Swinfield. In messages the Guardian has seen, an intern she had hired contacted her, anxious about how to respond to personal messages from Carr; “I don’t feel very good about coming into the office,” she said.
The way he treated and looked at this woman “just made my skin crawl”, Swinfield says, adding that it was “creepy as fuck”. When Carr asked another intern to drinks, Swinfield helped brainstorm her response.
Intern Fuckkk what do I say
Mahalia fucking hell dude..
Mahalia ok.. here’s what you do
Mahalia actually.. fucking hell thats really annoying.
Mahalia you kinda just need to say that you don’t want to, and you need to be firm about it.. but i understand you don’t want to piss him off..
Intern Should I just be like oh yeah after work drinks with the crew? ill see what Mahalia and Adrian and stuff are doing or did you already invite them?
Mahalia i think if it was me, i’d say “glad you’re feeling better man, but i dunno about going out for a drink… i really like working here and i don’t wanna do anything that would make that uncomfortable for me, or you”
Intern You reckon? okay hold up
Mahalia yeah – i only say that because that way you are covered.. if you have it in writing that the idea of drinking with him makes you uncomfortable, and he fires you, or keeps trying, you have it in writing ya know?
Mahalia i know it’s uncomfortable, but it would just suck if he did something horrible like fire you because you didn’t go out with him (not likely, but it is possible)… at least if you make it clear in writing to him, you have proof
“I hated bringing these young girls in that had these really amazing thoughts of what the industry was, and were then confronted by him,” she says.
“I couldn’t bear to keep finding them in the bathrooms in tears. They would cry because of his bullying, and how stupid he would make them feel. In one instance, she remembers Carr bringing an intern into his office, calling her work “a piece of shit” then telling her to “go back to … being the office dickhead”.
Eventually, Swinfield found a solution: she stopped hiring them.
‘It’s something that’s stayed with me’
Many former employees have told the Guardian that they haven’t been able to leave the experience behind.
Tahlia remembers being called “fucking retarded” and “a fucking idiot”. The “constant abuse and yelling and swearing” made her afraid of going into the office by herself: “I went into shock and didn’t know what to do … but I was 21, fresh out of uni and trying to get my foot in the door.”
Her anxiety peaked in June 2016 when she found herself frozen at a train station on her way to the office, feeling unable to breathe or move. “My lungs were closing in,” she says. She ended up contacting a co-worker and saying “I’m stuck, I literally feel like I’m dying, I can’t breathe.” She is one of a number of employees who have experienced panic attacks they believe were a result of working for Carr.
“I shut myself off from everything … I’d get home and just have breakdowns,” Tahlia says. When she quit, she was charged with finding a replacement; Carr told her to only look for “young girls who will speak when spoken to”.
She says it took her six months to feel confident in her new workplace. “I got help after I left but it’s something that’s stayed with me.”
Janine Kerr was Arena’s personal assistant in the 90s and says she had to work for Carr too. She remembers him as a “bully” and a “thug” who “yelled and screamed and carried on like a five-year-old if he didn’t get his way”.
“I’m probably a little tougher than the rest but I did have times where I went home and cried,” Kerr says. “He intimidated people to the point where they were scared to go into the office … [These young women] are green and excited to learn, and want to be there. They’re paid peanuts, and then you suck the life out of them … That’s not fair.”
For Lauren Poulter, who worked for Carr for two years from 2010, it took a year to get over the stress of it and close to a decade to regain her confidence.
For Nicole Kerr, one month was enough. “Life is too short to put up with abuse five days a week,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “I won’t be returning.”
Additional reporting by Nino Bucci
• Information and support is available in Australia at Lifeline on 13 11 14, Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636 and Full Stop Australia on 1800 385 578. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
