Child Rapist Was Allowed To Stay On A Women’s Football Team Because Of “Inclusive” League Policies

A trans-identified male who was convicted of multiple horrific sexual crimes against children was allowed to play in an American women’s Australian Rules football league due to its “inclusive” policies. A former champion player says a culture of “compliance” contributed to Joseph Hamilton being allowed to play the full-contact sport with women.

Hamilton, a former US Marine who now goes by “Lily,” joined the Golden Gate Australian Football League’s women’s side, the Iron Maidens, during the 2023 season. Female players were unaware that the male athlete tackling them on the field and joining them in private social settings was a registered sex offender.

According to a Quillette investigation published in August, a US military court found Hamilton guilty after he admitted to repeatedly raping a child under 12 between September 2003 and April 2004. Hamilton was also convicted of forcibly sodomizing two children under 12, with the offenses taking place in North Carolina between May 2003 and September 2003.

A court-martial order obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows Hamilton was sentenced on 7th September 2005 to 41 years’ confinement and a dishonourable discharge. Under a pre-trial agreement, the portion of the sentence exceeding 25 years was suspended.

Hamilton’s mugshot in the National Sex Offender Database.

Hamilton ultimately served approximately 15 years in prison. Quillette reported that he was released in 2021 or 2022, but Hamilton told CapRadio in 2024 that he emerged from prison in time to see the extensive protests that had shaken America in the summer of 2020.

Australian Rules football is not a low-contact recreational activity. The official league website describes USAFL club competition as “full contact” and the highest level of the sport in the United States, distinguishing it from a separate non-contact recreational version. Players sprint, collide, contest the ball in the air and tackle opponents to stop their movement or force a disposal, meaning female players were required to absorb contact from a male sex offender in a sport whose rules expressly contemplate forceful tackles and players being driven to the ground.

Hamilton was not merely permitted to appear on the fringes of the team. A now-deleted November 2023 club post named “L. Hamilton” as the recipient of its “Maidens Maiden Award,” alongside photographs of Hamilton playing and attending a club event. The same post celebrated the Iron Maidens winning their seventh national title.

Reduxx understands that women affiliated with the club were not informed about Hamilton’s sex-offender status during the season.

The allegations surrounding what happened after the discovery are almost as disturbing. Quillette obtained a complaint sent to USAFL president April Munn stating that then-GGAFL president Jules Hatfield quietly removed Hamilton after the 2023 season, but that club and Iron Maidens leaders did not formally tell all players why.

The complainant said women had shared hotel rooms, alcohol-fueled nights and family events involving children with Hamilton, yet were not given the opportunity to say whether he had made them uncomfortable or placed them at risk.

“Every woman has a right to know if she is sharing vulnerable space with a registered sex offender,” the complaint stated.

In a response dated September 3 of 2025, Munn reportedly said USAFL did not control clubs’ internal recruitment, roster decisions or removal procedures. She pledged a bylaw barring people convicted of sexually abusing children from league leadership positions, but not from playing or otherwise participating. Over one year later, and it is unknown if that bylaw has been put into place.

The league has also left the underlying sex-based safeguarding problem intact. Its current 2026 Nationals rules expressly prohibit women from playing in men’s games and provide a separate women’s competition. However, there are no published rules preventing males who identify as women from entering the women’s category.

Speaking to Reduxx, former professional soccer player and champion Australian Rules Football player Carly Smolak says it was around 2018 or 2019 when she first noticed biological males beginning to openly participate on United States Australian Rules Football League (USAFL) women’s teams. She says the decision to include men was “sprung on everyone,” and a culture of silence and compliance quickly settled in.

“When it comes to politics in general, you don’t see very many female athletes sticking their necks out in team settings because nobody wants to deal with the hysterics and bullying of the activist types,” Smolak says, recounting a time she “misgendered” a trans-identified male and was quickly chastised by one of her teammates. “Of course I just rolled my eyes, but that’s the type of response you can expect if you don’t just ‘sit there and take it like a good girl.’ It’s so disheartening to think how easily we as women are being controlled right now. What’s even more disheartening is that it is primarily women self-policing ”wrong think’ like a bunch of obedient foot soldiers.”

Smolak says she only interacted with Hamilton a handful of times and found his behavior off-putting. At a club party, Smolak says she observed Hamilton wearing “a very large hunting knife on his belt.” During another interaction, Hamilton entered a dark bedroom where Smolak’s partner was sleeping.

“He entered the room where my girlfriend, now-wife, was asleep and presumably alone while the rest of the team was downstairs. I heard him say ‘oh, who’s in here?’ I happened to be standing in the shadows and quickly emerged. Furious,” Smolak recounts.

“The one time he introduced himself to me, he was basically friendly. But it was at our trophy parade, where the team barhops throughout the Mission District in San Francisco. We fill the trophy up with beer, and everyone rotates around and drinks from it. Even though he had been on the team for less than a year, he took it upon himself to be the one pouring beer into everyone’s mouth. One of my teammates asked me why I wasn’t drinking from the trophy, and I think I ended up having to leave the bar and take a lap around the block because I was so upset that all of my teammates, some of the most badass women I know, would be ok with this,” Smolak says.

“But remember, we are all there for the love of the game. We are there to play sports, not to get in political debates. So in one sense, I really don’t blame anyone for not wanting to get involved in these arguments. That’s really not why we play sports. But on the other hand, I still cannot believe that women are being so compliant. It’s just mind boggling to me.”

Hamilton is not the only trans-identified male known to have played women’s Australian Rules football in the United States.

The New York Magpies have fielded two male players over six feet tall, Cricket Temple and Emma Moss. A 2025 team write-up described both as “star” players.

According to one USAFL player who spoke to Reduxx under the condition of anonymity, Temple was known for stripping his uniform between games and walking around the field in a “slip dress,” something the player described as “not something I’ve ever seen any of the female players do at a tournament either before or since.”

Temple has since moved to Toronto, Ontario, is currently playing for the Canadian Women’s National AFL Team.

Smolak says she is unaware of just how many trans-identified males may be playing for USAFL women’s teams.

“I personally know of at least four trans-identified males that have competed on women’s teams in the league, but I think there may be more. I am unsure of how many are playing in total, but what I do know is that anybody that I know that takes issue with males on the women’s teams will only discuss it behind closed doors, and otherwise stay pretty quiet about it,” she says.

“Even in the discussions that I have had where players expressed discomfort, it seemed to me they didn’t know if they were ‘allowed’ to feel uncomfortable. It’s like they felt bad for thinking these guys were creepy or shouldn’t be on the women’s teams. All of the messaging out there is that you’re a complete bigot if your instinct is that something is off.”

She continues: “There are a lot of loud activist types in the league that are pushing policy at the highest levels, asking people to sign petitions to advocate for the rights of trans-identified males, and even designing team uniforms to include the ‘progress flag.’ Frankly, I don’t know what the consensus is of the female players; in fact nobody does, because nobody has actually surveyed the players. All you see is a loud activist minority, and we really don’t know what percentage of the players fall into the quietly dissenting category.”

Hamilton’s latest independently-verifiable public work has centered on criminal-justice advocacy. The Boundless Freedom Project announced Hamilton as its program administrator on 14th June 2024. Two months later, on 15th August, CapRadio photographed Hamilton lobbying at the California Capitol on prison spending and quoted him as a representative of the organization.

Hamilton had previously promoted himself as a consultant to people preparing for federal prison and their families. In a 2022 podcast, he discussed working to reintegrate offenders into families in which relatives may have “negative feelings” about the offender’s conduct, while the programme introduced him only as a former prisoner, Marine and advocate for “queer rights.” His convictions for raping and forcibly sodomising children were not disclosed.

Hamilton also appeared in a 2023 Buddhist talk produced by the Boundless Freedom Project, speaking of confronting “the harm I had caused” without specifying that the harm involved the sexual abuse of children.

California’s public Megan’s Law registry nevertheless lists Hamilton as a registered sex offender. The registry includes identifying physical details and statutory references to his sex offenses—information that was publicly available while women were sharing a changing room, field, accommodation and social environment with him.

Notably, Hamilton is listed as a “female” offender in the registry.

Speaking to Reduxx, a representative from the Independent Council On Women’s Sports (ICONS) condemned USAFL policy for allowing men like Hamilton to both compete with women and avoid scrutiny.

“Female athletes are being gaslit on a mass scale. They are being told they can’t trust their instincts, shouldn’t expect privacy in their intimate spaces, and aren’t entitled to fairness in their own sports,” she said. “This isn’t even the first instance we’ve recorded of a sex offender beginning to ‘identify’ as a woman and slipping into women’s sports completely unobstructed.”

The ICONS representative references an earlier Reduxx investigation into Cary Sutton, a repeat child sex offender and tennis coach who began going by “Cari” and entered women’s competitions after transitioning.

Sutton had previously served more than two years in prison after being arrested in the late 1990s on two counts of statutory rape. After his release, he secured work coaching tennis at Laurel Park in Georgia, where a contractor had failed to conduct a background check. Sutton then sexually exploited a 12-year-old girl, providing her with a secret mobile phone used to send lewd messages. He was convicted of felony child molestation in 2009 and required to register as a sex offender.

After beginning to identify as a woman around 2020 or 2021, Sutton altered his first name from “Cary” to “Cari” and entered three women’s tennis events in 2022.

He competed in six more women’s events in 2023, including a match against a 14-year-old girl. The US Tennis Association suspended Sutton in June 2023 and the US Center for SafeSport added him to its disciplinary database that October, although the USTA did not designate him permanently ineligible.

“The culture of silence and compliance witnessed by Carly Smolak at USAFL is a problem across so many sports, but when these ‘inclusive policies’ are allowing even male convicted sex offenders to enter women’s sports and spaces, there can be no question about the danger they pose to women and girls,” the ICONS representative says. “USAFL needs to protect its female athletes. All sporting bodies need to make it their priority to offer a safe and fair space for women and girls to participate instead of worrying about satisfying an increasingly unstable minority of vocal activists.”

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