On the night after missing the cut at the PGA Tour’s Sony Open, Australian golfer Robert Allenby claimed that he was drugged, robbed, beaten, thrown into the trunk of a car and dumped off at a park in Honolulu. However, new evidence reveals that Allenby’s narrative of the violent episode may not have actually happened.
The New York Post reported that Golf Channel investigated the January 16 incident by retracing Allenby’s activities and interviewing multiple witnesses. According to their investigation, the worlds 285th-ranked golfer, along with “a group of friends,” dropped $3,400 at Club Femme Nu, an adult entertainment club, until around midnight when they parted ways.
Allenby was later found at the park by several homeless people, one of whom alleges that he saw an inebriated Allenby stumbling and then falling, landing face-first on a lava rock. Toa Kaili said that he earlier observed Allenby passed out at a nearby footpath.
Kaili said that it took him ten minutes to wake Allenby up. The homeless Hawaiian man remarked: “He was beyond tipsy. This man was blitzed… He then started saying, ‘Where’s the other guy? You gave him the keys; to get the keys.’ I was like ‘Wooh, this dude is beyond having drinks.’”
When Allenby came to, according to Kaili, he acted perturbed and accused Kaili and his friend Chris Khamis of stealing his phone and wallet. The Australian showing no appreciation for the Hawaiian’s good Samaritan efforts angered Kaili, so he walked away.
Some two and a half hours after, in the exact same location where Kaili left Allenby, he found him again. Kaili claims that the golfer didn’t recognize him. Then, Allenby allegedly went off on a rant saying that some “punks robbed him.” Kaili recounted that, “He kept on saying, ‘You know who I am.’ I didn’t care because to me he was a guy passed out on the street and I was trying to help him.”
Khamis said that Allenby told him he was down about not making the cut at the Sony. But, according to Khamis, that didn’t keep Allenby from repeatedly shouting that he was a millionaire while waving his platinum credit card in the air.
“There was no crime [when I was present]. It was his stupidity,” Khamis said in an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “(Allenby) passed out and hit his head. I was there. Nobody pushed him out of a car.”
Another homeless woman Charade Keane also refuted the golfer’s story.
Honolulu police spokesman Michelle Yu said that no arrests have been made. She said that “The incident involving Mr Allenby continues to be classified as a second-degree robbery and fraudulent use of credit card.”
Allenby, who hasn’t won a PGA tour event since 2001, said he will be holding a press conference in Phoenix on Tuesday where the next stop on the PGA tour, the Phoenix Open, will be held.