About Ben Cousins
Benjamin Luke Cousins (born 30 June 1978) is an Australian former professional Australian rules footballer and media presenter. He played 270 games for the West Coast and Richmond in the Australian Football League (AFL) between 1996 and 2010, captained West Coast from 2001 to 2005, won the 2005 Brownlow Medal as the league's best and fairest player, and was a member of West Coast's 2006 premiership side. Cousins is listed by journalist Mike Sheahan as one of the fifty greatest players of all time. Cousins's playing career was overshadowed by a long-running substance abuse problem, principally involving methamphetamine. He was sacked by West Coast in October 2007 after being arrested for drug possession and the following month was banned by the AFL Commission for 12 months for "bringing the game into disrepute". After being selected by Richmond with the sixth pick of the 2009 pre-season draft he played 32 games across two seasons, retiring at the end of the 2010 season. His addiction was the subject of the 2010 documentary Such is Life: The Troubled Times of Ben Cousins, which aired shortly after his retirement and was one of the year's most-watched programs in Australia. In the decade following his retirement, Cousins was convicted of a series of criminal offences against the mother of his two children. In March 2017 he was sentenced at Perth Magistrates Court to 12 months' imprisonment after pleading guilty to eleven offences, including aggravated stalking, multiple breaches of a violence restraining order, and possession of methamphetamine; Magistrate Richard Huston described the conduct as "persistent, sustained and intended". He served the sentence at Acacia Prison and was released in January 2018. In November 2020, following a further arrest in April that year, he was convicted of aggravated stalking of the same complainant and sentenced to seven months' imprisonment backdated to his arrest. Australian Associated Press reported at the time that Cousins had accumulated 22 convictions for breaches of restraining orders, 20 of which had resulted in prison sentences. Since 2023 Cousins has rebuilt a career in Perth media. In June 2023 he began presenting sport for 7NEWS Morning Edition; he appeared as a contestant on the 2024 season of Dancing with the Stars Australia, and in February 2025 joined the Hit Network's Perth breakfast show Pete & Kymba with Ben Cousins on Mix 94.5. At 17, a week after his tenth WAFL game for East Fremantle, Cousins played his first AFL match and kicked two goals for West Coast against Geelong. During his 12-year, 238-game career with West Coast, he won several of the league's highest individual awards, including a Brownlow Medal, Most Valuable Player and a premiership medallion. He won the Norwich Rising Star award for his debut season in 1996, polling 15 votes from the six judges to beat Shannon Grant by one point. He won his first club Best and Fairest at the end of the season, a feat which he repeated in 2002 and 2003, and he was again named in the All-Australian Team in 2001 and 2002.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.