AFL 2019 Dayne Zorko cheating, Kalinda Salla on Mummy Republic blog

The former partner of AFL star Dayne Zorko has spoken at length about the end of their five-year relationship.

Kalinda Salla endured a messy and public ending to her relationship with the Brisbane Lions player in November last year when an image of Zorko surfaced on Instagram.

The 30-year-old midfielder temporarily shut down his social media accounts after his Instagram was hacked. He separated from Brisbane pharmacist Salla, the mother of his three-year-old son Louis, soon after.

Salla, 25, has for the first time admitted to posting an image of Zorko asleep on the couch in his underwear which was tagged with a caption which hinted at a less than amicable split. The image was deleted on the same day it was posted.

“Thank goodness I know your passcode Dayne so I could see why you actually didn’t care about leaving me,” part of the caption claimed.

Salla’s Instagram admission was one of several shocking revelations the pharmacist graduate made this week when speaking out about the public scandal for the first time on the Mummy Republic Podcast with host Dannii Reed.

“It all sort of happened at once,” she said. “One of my friends sadly passed away, which was very devastating, and at the exact same time, I also split with my long-term partner and also my baby daddy, so there was quite a lot of things going on at once and it was quite stressful.”

She says she has no regrets about posting the photograph although she “deleted it a few hours later”. “But sadly someone screen-shotted it and it went viral and the next day it was in the newspaper and the day after that it was in the newspaper again and I ended up in the paper for a few weeks,” Salla said.

At the same time she was dealing with the public fall-out to her relationship breakdown the pair also sold their Brisbane home with a quick settlement which meant she had to move out within one month, just a few days before Christmas.

Salla said her relationship with Zorko had been strained for three years leading into their separation and that they were not “in a happy space”. “We just fought all the time, we weren’t in a happy space ... it just wasn’t a happy house,” she said. “Dayne and I had fallen out of love long before the breakup.”

Salla says one of the most painful consequences of her separation is the friendships that have also been broken within the Lions’ WAG community.

She claims some partners of Lions players, who she thought of as close friends, didn’t message her after the story broke.

“I was basically best friends with some of the girls and after the break-up happened and it was in the newspaper, some of them didn’t even message me,” she said. “I was quite shocked at that.

“That hurt me quite a lot because I just realised how fake the friendship was, but then there’s other girls, who I still keep in close communication with, which is good because it shows how close the friendship is.”

Salla says she has finally spoken about the scandal for the first time because she is ready to move forward and also wants to encourage other women in strained relationships not to stay together simply because it’s easy.

She said her and Zorko have found a way to co-parent their son despite the rough end to their relationship. “There’s no friendship there, it’s more just hate. I don’t resent him, he’s just a person, he’s just my child’s father,” she said. “He’s moved on, I’ve moved on. We’re both happy in our lives so I feel like it’s alright to talk about it now.”

“Don’t stay in a relationship because it’s easy or because you have a child, you need to also make yourself happy,” she added.

“You’ve only got one life, so you may as well live it the best you can. I wouldn’t want to stay in an unhappy relationship and I think from being in one, I’ve now learnt my lesson.”

News.com.au has sought comment from the Brisbane Lions.

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