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Cricket legend Dean Jones’ secret family revealed

Dean Jones' secret family revealed

Dean Jones was named Father of the Year at the same time he had a secret lover in Sydney. Now he’s rejected their baby, she tells Woman’s Day about his double life.

It was a total shock when Dean Jones told Kerri-Anne Hamilton on their third date that he was married and had a family in Melbourne. That was in February, 1999, and the impressionable young woman from small-town Camden, outside Sydney, was furious.

“I’ll never forget it. It was at Nick’s seafood cafe on the beachfront at Bondi … I said, ‘Are you happily married?’ His answer was, ‘I’m never there’.”

Kerri-Anne decided she would not see the champion cricketer again. “I was disappointed and angry as hell,” she says. “I was going to drop him at the airport and never see him again. But he is very persuasive and he started dangling carrots, inviting me on trips away and taking me out to dinner. We’d go to Brisbane a lot and the Gold Coast and Hobart – but never Melbourne.”

The attractive flight attendant had first met Dean by chance during a corporate event at a Sydney golf course in 1998. He wooed her with relentless phone calls over several months before she agreed to go on a date with him.

And it was some first date, with “Deano” taking her to an exclusive Sydney nightclub and introducing her to former England captain Ian Botham and other sports stars.

It may not have been love at first sight – Kerri-Anne thought Dean was too old for her and she wasn’t a cricket fan – but she was soon smitten. “Within a month it was lock, stock and barrel and I was madly in love.”

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