Guy Sebastian Opens Up About Court Case Against Former Manager

Guy Sebastian has spoken up about the “painful” court case he endured as his former manager, Titus Day, was charged with embezzling his client’s money.

Day pleased ‘not guilty’ to 47 counts of embezzlement, but a jury ultimately found him guilty of 34 charges on the basis that he had embezzled $624,675.41.

Day will be sentenced in September.

Sebastian said that rather than being invested in whether or not his former manager and friend “does time” for his crimes, he thinks it’s more important to find ways to ensure this won’t happen to other artists.

“I was the victim in it. So I think I realised early on, it’s bigger than me,” he told “The Kyle & Jackie O Show” on Kiis 106.5.

“It’s actually, like, why are all the good managers and people who do this with real, pure passion and good motives have to have that label of ‘dodgy manager’? Like you look at managers, you watch the new “Elvis” movie, managers just get such a bad wrap…

“But I just think why can’t we just implement things that start to turn that around and make it more difficult for managers to do that? And the way that you would do that in this case is obviously not to just brush this thing over. It’s a very serious charge, like 34 counts that he was found guilty of, and it was very painful to fight it. It shouldn’t have been that painful. There’s artists that can’t do what I just did. They can’t go through this process. Like indie artists and people who are just living gig by gig. So I just think it’s beyond me a little bit and it’s more about setting a precedent to make sure this doesn’t happen.”

Sebastian also revealed that, despite the apparent bigger picture motivations, he knew his own reputation would also likely be on trial.

This suspicion came to fruition when Day’s team entered emails into evidence where Sebastian referred to an audience segment as “fat older feral women”.

Co-host of “The Kyle and Jackie O Show”, Kyle Sandilands, said this was the point where the saga devolved into a “grubby mess”.

“Well, that was part of the fight for me,” Sebastian said of clearing his name. “I always knew that. As you know Kyle, you’re so close with your manager that you joke around, you say stuff, you tell them your deepest, darkest secrets and fears, and you joke…

“The biggest weapon, really, as a public person is they go ‘Oh, if you keep going, I’m going to smash your reputation and I’m going to use my media contacts’ – and there’s no control over what they’re telling, the side of the story that they’re spinning to all sorts of people. And it actually just makes victims out of way more people, because all these people are buying into it and then they’re almost acting as willing weapons.”

Sebastian also implied that due to the way the court system works, a lot of Day’s evidence caught him off guard.

“There’s stuff you don’t realise, like they, if you’re a victim, right, every piece of evidence is entered in, and they sat on it for two years or whatever, and then their [the defence’s] evidence is provided literally on the spot, so you don’t see any evidence [in advance]. It’s just presented to you on the spot. And I understand why and all that sort of stuff, but I don’t know, I just thought everyone put their evidence in,” he said.

He also attempted to educate Sandilands, his co-host Jackie ‘O’ Henderson and the wider audience, about the way the process worked, noting it wasn’t actually him taking on Day in court.

“I think what people think is it’s like ‘Me versus him’, and so I’m included on everything, [but] it was him [Day] versus the Crown. So because he [Day] was charged by police and charged by the Crown, I was just a witness,” Sebastian explained.

Despite being “just a witness”, Sebastian noted the complex toll it had taken on him and those around him.

“I think that’s the thing, fraud is so damaging to so many people and yet it is a boring thing to charge because for those detectives and stuff it’s months and months of just crunching numbers and going through bank records and trying to figure out how deep this thing went,” he said.

“It was a painful fight. It just went on for so long. And I know I’ve said in the past, I’ve just been so confused by it all, because it’s so hard to imagine that it had to get to that place. It didn’t need to.”

Guy Sebastian and best friend Tim Freeburn are in the midst of walking 500 kilometres from Wagga Wagga to Sydney in a bid to raise funds for in-school mental health programs for kids.

They are currently less than $50,000 shy of their $1 million goal. You can find out more and donate here.