Luke Bateman earned $400K yearly but lost it all to gambling, leading to missing items at home.
During his darkest chapter, things would go missing from Luke Bateman's apartment.
"My partner would come home from work and be like, 'Where's this?'
"I would've taken it to Cash Converters and sold it for cash so I could go and gamble," the former NRL player-turned-fantasy writer tells Australian Story.
It was 2019, and Bateman was at the height of a debilitating gambling addiction so severe he couldn't afford to feed himself. He was a professional NRL player with the Canberra Raiders at the time, earning $400,000 a year.