Layne Beachley responds to claims she bullied women on tour, “I’ve still got peers assassinating my character”

Misogyny made me do it, explains the seven-time champ.

The almost-greatest XX surfer ever, seven-time world champ Layne Beachley, has responded, obliquely at least, to Keala Kennelly’s wild ol raft of accusations, aired last week on the podcast We Shouldn’t Be Friends, hosted by Nick Carroll and Hannah Anderson.

Kennelly had said Layne Beachley made her life on tour hell and subsequently outed her as a lesbian to Billabong’s team manager, back in those trad days when gals swept kitchen floors and men ran roughshod over their womenfolk.

“Layne doesn’t look up to anybody. She puts herself on her own pedestal and just looks in the mirror. I’ve never met a more arrogant, self-aggrandising person in my life,” Kennelly said.

“We had the same sponsor, Billabong, so I had to do a lot of things with her and stay with her. She actually made my time on tour very miserable, that one. Yeah, she like kinda outed me to my team manager at Billabong when we were in Brazil, which was really fucked to me at that time.”

And, 

“When your not so secret weapon is shitting on everyone else to make yourself seem big and them small, then you’re just an asshole with a lot of trophies.”

On the occasion of Layne Beachley receiving 2025’s The Dawn award by the Sport Australia Hall of Fame, given to those “who are courageous, brave, and have changed sport for the better” she explained it was misogyny that made her do it. 

“We shit talked each other. We put each other down. We clawed at each other. We had a scarcity mentality, which was reinforced by the behaviour of our male peers,” Beachley, who is fifty-three, told the Fairfax Press.

“In our industry, our own governing body told us that we’re not worthy, that we’re not valued and that they didn’t listen to us.

“All of that reinforced our scarcity mentality, which meant that we just saw women succeeding and wanted to pull them down, because they were taking something away from us, as opposed to inspiring us to be better.”

“There are very few women from the tour who, one, are still friends with me and, two, have forgiven me for the [poor] way in which I behaved [back then]. I believed I had to passionately dislike my competition in order to beat them. I’ve still got peers basically assassinating my character because it was my fault, and that’s a sad indictment of the state of women’s surfing and the generation I came through.

“It was never my intention to hurt or shame or insult. But obviously I did that, and I forgive myself for that. Some people choose not to forgive me for that and there’s nothing much I can do about it.”