I hate to say I called it. But I absolutely called it.
This week, the Instagram account belonging to the ‘other woman’ in Lachie Neale’s marriage split, Tess Crosley, quietly vanished.
Rarely does a disappearing Instagram belonging to a single mum from Brisbane make headlines – but Tess Crosley is, of course, no ordinary single mum from Brisbane.
Headlines screamed about her ‘vanishing act’, fuelling speculation about why the woman who’d spent three months posting thirst traps abruptly pulled the plug on her profile and disappeared from view.
Some perhaps wondered if she was trying to slip back into obscurity after her alleged indiscretion shattered two marriages – her own and the Neales’s.
Maybe she finally realised that being known solely for an alleged affair isn’t exactly the kind of fame anyone wants to cling to.
‘Delete these… you’re embarrassing yourself,’ Jules Neale (right) commented below this photo of her former friend Tess Crosley (left) after discovering her alleged affair with husband Lachie
While her account has since flickered back to life after three days in the dark, her brief disappearance felt like confirmation of a theory I first set out here on January 6.
Back then, I warned Tess that the worst part of being in a media scandal isn’t gritting your teeth through the storm itself, but the quiet, sad fallout you’re left to sweep up once the paparazzi lose interest and move on to their next target.
We saw evidence of that gut-wrenching aftermath over the weekend when fraught photos emerged of Tess and her estranged husband Ben Crosley briefly reuniting.
Their marriage clearly did not survive her alleged affair with the former Brisbane Lions co-captain. Sadly, Lachie and Jules have also separated.
Do affairs come with a hint of forbidden excitement? Of course. But the fallout of this particular indiscretion certainly didn’t look pretty in the unforgiving light of day.
Before Tess’s Instagram hiatus, I had been surprised to see that not only was she posting selfies like a wannabe influencer, but she even had a swift pivot on the dating app Raya, the so-called playground of the famous and the semi-famous.
Seeing the latest pap photos of Tess, and noting her digital detox, I wondered if she now understands that there’s no happy ending to be found chasing notoriety.
Three months ago, I wrote that when the spotlight dims on a love scandal, one thing tends to stick: women don’t forget the ‘other woman’.
After being identified as the ‘other woman’ in Lachie and Jules Neales’s marriage split, Tess spent months posting racy photos like these on her public Instagram account
Think about it. Is there anything more intimidating than frosty stares from other wives as you step into a café, or having to brace yourself for judgment at the school gate come pick-up time?
And she only has herself to blame.
Notwithstanding the not-so-small detail that she allegedly crossed the line with her best friend’s husband, those flirty bikini selfies she kept uploading in the months after her fling with Lachie was exposed now look like a masterclass in poor judgement.
What makes this all so infuriating to me is that it didn’t have to be this way.
In my circles – and any publicist worth her fee will tell you the same – there’s an unspoken rule about what you do when you’re caught in an alleged affair: you disappear.
You say bye-bye to any form of social media and put it straight on private. You cancel all social engagements – yes, including Pilates classes – and you lay very low until people have found someone else to gossip about.
Take Adam Levine. In 2022, influencer Sumner Stroh set TikTok alight with claims of a year-long affair, closely followed by a wave of women exposing his thirsty DMs.
Levine denied an affair, though he admitted he ‘crossed the line during a regrettable period in my life’. After that brief statement, the Maroon 5 frontman did what so few scandal-hit Hollywood stars manage: he vanished.
No embarrassingly staged pap shots playing happy families with his wounded wife. Just a simple apology and then radio silence.
When he re-emerged a year later, reunited with wife Behati Prinsloo as the model family man, the scandal had lost its sting and public outrage had melted away. Time, as always, did the heavy lifting.
Tess, while hardly a celebrity in the same tier, should have taken a leaf out of Levine’s book.
Instead, her personal life became a feeding frenzy – precisely because she kept delivering the goods.
I watched, slightly horrified, as she donned her cutest baby blue activewear, designer sunnies, and a perfectly pulled-back ponytail to… checks notes… take out the bins with the paps outside.
And who could forget when she posted bikini selfies days after the alleged affair hit the headlines? I honestly wondered if she was OK.
Other preening photos followed, then the revelation she was dating again on Raya. It all seemed so… embarrassing.
And then I remembered. That was the word that started everything.
As I was writing this column on Tuesday, I saw Tess’s Instagram profile flicker back to life, triggering a fresh wave of second‑hand dread as I braced for whatever comes next
Cast your mind back to December when Jules Neale uncovered the alleged affair and went public on Instagram to say she had been betrayed in the worst way.
She followed that with a now-immortal comment directed at Tess – the one that identified her as the woman at the centre of her marriage split.
It was posted below a photo of the Neales and the Crosleys together after last year’s AFL Grand Final. Tess and Lachie’s knees were touching, as if they were the married couple.
Jules’s words were blunt, unforgiving, accusatory: ‘Delete these… you’re embarrassing yourself.’
In hindsight, she wasn’t simply angry – she was right. By carrying on in plain sight, Tess was, in every sense, embarrassing herself.
But after it was all exposed, she didn’t just ignore Jules’s advice – she doubled down.
The smart play would’ve been to delete her Instagram entirely. Instead, she kept posting, acting as if nothing had happened while the whole country watched – half fascinated, half baffled by her apparent lack of remorse.
Now it’s April. The world has moved on. Tess Crosley’s name is already slipping from the spotlight and she seems to be navigating a separation, far from the headlines that once tracked her every move.
Meanwhile, the country has turned its attention back to football.
When her account disappeared on Saturday, it seemed Tess had finally heeded Jules’s advice and decided to stop embarrassing herself.
But as I was writing this column on Tuesday, I saw her profile flicker back to life, triggering a fresh wave of second‑hand dread as I braced for whatever comes next.
A bikini shot? A girls’ trip? Another vague hint about ‘two sides’ to the saga?
Deep down, I suspect Tess knows the only winning move is silence.
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