News
Robert Allenby: A meandering story leading...where?
Robert Allenby, citing his injuries and advice from his doctor, has withdrawn from the Humana Challenge this week, the latest news to a meandering story that seems to have no end.
Allenby, as the story first emerged from sketchy details, including his own, was with two friends, one of them his caddie, at the Amuse Wine Bar in Honolulu Friday night after missing the cut in the Sony Open in Hawaii. He recalls paying the bill and then becoming separated from them. "And the next thing you know I'm being dumped in a park miles away," he told Australian Associated Press.
He was possibly drugged, he said later, then was kidnapped, robbed, beaten, thrown into the trunk of a car and left at the park six miles from the bar.
A homeless woman, now identified as Charade Keane, said in a television interview that she saw Allenby arguing with two men only about a block away from the wine bar, intervened, and led him to a cab.
"I said, 'Hold on, don't yell at this man, he needs help,'" Keane said. "So at that point, I did not know who had done this to him. I really wanted to get him into a cab. He didn't want to call the police."
Earlier news reports, meanwhile, said that a retired military man found him and put him in a cab that returned him to the hotel at which he was staying near Waialea Country Club.
On Monday night, Allenby and Keane met on camera (see below), and he thanked her for helping him. Their exchange:
Allenby: "Thank you for looking after me."
Keane: "No problem."
Allenby: "I appreciate what you did for me."
Allenby then said to her, "I have two-and-a-half hours of my life that I don't know anything about. I don't know what happened to me."
Allenby rewarded her with an American Express gift card worth $1,000.
Keane later told an Australian television station that she saw Allenby offering the men with whom Allenby appeared to be arguing $500 to return his belongings.
"He said he wasn't feeling great, can't open my eye, haven't been able to sleep," Rosaforte said. As for Keane's conflicting story, Rosaforte reported that Allenby said, "I guess she's getting paid," without elaboration.
In a text to Rosaforte, Allenby wrote, "Such a shame that people are focusing on whether this is the truth or not. All they need to know whether this is the truth is just to look at my face."
Allenby is entered in the Waste Management Phoenix Open next week.