Australian professional golfer Robert Allenby will hold a news conference Tuesday in Arizona to address the elusive facts surrounding a night of drinking and admitted memory loss in Honolulu.
Allenby is expected to face questions about a Golf Channel report Monday that claimed the four-time tour winner ran up a $3,400 bar tab at a Honolulu strip club the night he was allegedly kidnapped.
The news conference will be held Tuesday morning at the Waste Management Phoenix Open in Arizona, Allenby’s first tournament since missing the cut at the Sony Open in Honolulu on Jan. 16.
Allenby originally told the media that he had been drugged, kidnapped, robbed of his credit cards, thrown into a car trunk and dumped 6.5 miles away in a park that night. That account, he said, came in part from a homeless woman who helped him get away from attackers.
Police have opened investigations into second-degree robbery and fraudulent use of credit card in a case that has received widespread media attention amid conflicting accounts.
Police offered no further details about the case Monday except to say the investigation is continuing with a focus on what are believed to be more than $20,000 in fraudulent charges on Allenby’s cards.
Allenby told reporters last week that he was eating dinner at Amuse Wine Bar at the Honolulu Design Center, at Kapiolani Boulevard and Piikoi Street, the night of Jan. 16 and then somehow wound up bloodied on the street, with two men kicking him on the ground.
But a homeless man told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that Allenby injured himself by passing out and hitting his head on a rock. The Australian also told the man he was depressed and had been drugged at a strip club where he went to get some "action."
"There was no crime (when I was present). It was his stupidity," Chris Khamis said in an interview. "(Allenby) passed out and hit his head. I was there. Nobody pushed him out of a car."
On Monday the Golf Channel reported that Allenby, who had dinner with his caddie and a friend from Australia, ultimately left the wine bar with two men and a woman and ended up at Club Femme Nu, an adult entertainment club about a mile up the street on Kapiolani Boulevard.
GolfChannel.com reported Monday that multiple sources working at the club Jan. 16 told GolfChannel.com that Allenby was there at about midnight with "a group of friends" and ran up a $3,400 bar tab.
Asked by a Star-Advertiser reporter Monday, two different employees said they didn’t know whether Allenby was at the club that night, but that there was no one at the club who had worked that night.
GolfChannel.com said Allenby’s caddie, Mick Middlemo, said the golfer appeared to be fine when he left him at Amuse, but Middlemo also speculated that someone may have slipped something into Allenby’s drink.
Allenby told the Golf Channel on Friday that there’s a 21⁄2-hour gap in his memory from that night and that much of what he told police came from the homeless woman, Charade Keane. But Allenby continued to maintain he was assaulted and added that he was having nightmares about it.
Allenby, who withdrew from last week’s Humana Challenge in California, gave Keane a $1,000 gift card to thank her for helping him.
Keane has denied telling him he was thrown to the street from the trunk of a car.
