Candice Warner breaks down in fresh reveal about infamous scandal

Candice Warner has been brought to tears re-living the "hurt" that her infamous toilet tryst with Sonny Bill Williams has caused. The 38-year-old former ironwoman - and wife of Aussie cricket star David Warner - has been forced to endure more than a decade of public shame and ridicule after being filmed inside a toilet cubicle with the All Blacks legend at the Clovelly Hotel in 2007.

Warner (then Candice Falzon) was single at the time when a member of the public filmed her and Williams in the cubicle together at the Sydney venue. Candice, 22, was an elite ironwoman and 21-year-old Williams was just starting his NRL career with the Bulldogs. Williams had a girlfriend at the time.

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Both Warner and Williams have come out in the past to express their remorse over the scandal, with Candice set to release a tell-all new memoir that goes into detail about the controversy. In conjunction with the release of her new book 'Running Strong', Candice has also conducted an exclusive face-to-face with Stellar on Sunday.

The 38-year-old will also feature on Channel 10's The Project on Sunday night, with the network providing a snippet of the interview with host, Sarah Harris. During the short clip, Warner is reduced to tears discussing the impact the toilet tryst scandal continues to have to this day.

“It’s clear that all these years later, that shame has been a really heavy burden to carry,” Project host Sarah Harris says to Warner on the clip. Candice breaks down before replying: “It’s really real for me, it’s the pain that I caused my family, it’s the pain and hurt, like it’s so deep. I just thought ‘this is it,’ I just couldn’t take it anymore.

“I couldn’t take the headlines, I couldn’t take disappointing my parents, I couldn’t take it all, it was all too much. From then on (my brother) Pat would check in on me daily and I felt like I needed to get to that point to be able to move on to a degree.”

Warner will also touch on the infamous Australian cricket sandpaper scandal that her husband David was at the centre of in 2018. The infamous series saw Cameron Bancroft caught rubbing sandpaper on the ball, resulting in lengthy bans for Bancroft as well as Warner and Australia's captain at the time, Steve Smith.

“We felt like criminals, we felt and were treated like absolute criminals,” Candice said, while also suggesting there was no information yet to become public that cost David his place in the Australia side and saw him banned from leadership positions at Cricket Australia (CA). “I know enough to know he’s taken his fair share of the blame. Maybe a little too much,” she added.

Candice Warner's book to 'touch on absolutely everything'

During that infamous cricket tour of South Africa, Candice was made to re-live the shame from her toilet tryst more than a decade earlier after fans wore masks with Williams' face on them. David Warner was also involved in an ugly altercation with South African wicket-keeper Quinton de Kock in a stairwell in the grandstand, with Warner claiming de Kock had sledged him about his wife.

Candice promised earlier this year that her new book would be a 'warts and all' look at her life and won't shy away from anything too personal. “I touch on absolutely everything, every single thing from the Clovelly Hotel incident to South Africa,” she said. “Anything that you have seen in a headline, it will be talked about. It is something that I have wanted to do for a while but it has never been the right time.”

Candice has touched on the toilet tryst scandal previously, during an appearance on reality TV show SAS Australia in 2020. “In my early 20s I made a very big mistake,” she said.

“It is something I am not proud of but something I can never take back. I put myself in a situation where I shouldn’t have and because of that I brought embarrassment (and) shame to my family.”

In an interview with ABC program 'Australian Story' in 2008, Candice said: “I wasn’t in a state where I didn’t know what happened, but you don’t think of how your actions, when you’re drunk, can have an affect on your life. You really don’t. You are in your own little zone. Although you are conscious of what you’re doing, you’re not really.”

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