All the tricks Don Burke used on A Current Affair to convince Australia he was telling the truth.

On Monday night, 70-year-old Don Burke, the man who has been publicly accused by at least 50 people of sexual misconduct towards several women, sat across from Tracey Grimshaw on Channel Nine’s A Current Affair.

The seasoned presenter, who spent more than 17 years with that very network, knew exactly the audience he was speaking to.

These were the people who had dearly loved him, inviting him into their homes every Friday night by switching on one of Australia’s most successful lifestyle programs, Burke’s Backyard.

And Burke – unlike his alleged victims who appeared on the 7:30 Report, only moments after his interview ended – is, quite literally, an expert in winning people over on television.

On this bonus episode of Out Loud, Holly, Rachel and Jessie discuss Don Burke and his interview last night with Tracey Grimshaw. Post continues below. 

He knows how to appeal to the average person, curled up on their lounge in the evening. He knows how to make them like him. He knows how to make them believe him.

Grimshaw sat, her face stern and her questions perfectly pointed, representing the industry that had turned against him.

But Burke was not speaking to Grimshaw. It was not her he was there to convince.

It was us.

He began by apologising. Not to the women who had come forward, he would get to that later, but to his family and to us, the people who had supported Burke’s Backyard. 

The gardener and grandfather was calm and remarkably composed, wearing a shirt all our granddads own, his hair and beard just as we remember it.

“I’m a perfectionist that drove people very hard,” he says, conceding “there are a lot of people that don’t like me”.

They don’t like him, therefore, because he worked hard. He was good at his job. He just wanted the absolute best, and wouldn’t let other people’s incompetency get in the way.

By beginning with his failings, he develops rapport and empathy with his audience. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” he implies, without ever actually saying it.

His language, from the moment the interview begins, is intentional. He might be accused of some vile acts, and be, as former Channel Nine CEO David Leckie, described him, “a horrible, horrible, horrible man…” but he is not, it would seem, an idiot.

“I’ve got a lot of failings,” he says more than once, “but I am not that man.”

Burke tries to flip the narrative on its head, turning it into something that is not entirely unbelievable.

There were people he hurt on his way to the top, as a result of his burning ambition, and now they’re out to get him.

It’s a ‘witch hunt’, he insists, a term thrown around by men at the centre of a reckoning – entirely ignorant to the fact witch hunts, historically, overwhelmingly hunted women.

No matter how outlandish the allegation Grimshaw faces him with, Burke never raises his voice or becomes aggressive. He makes us ask:

‘How could a man this articulate, this calm, ever be capable of what these women are accusing him of?’

He has perfected his ‘confused’ face. The expression he pulls every time Grimshaw says something crude or obscene.

He accepts he might have "terrified a few people, and whatever and so on," purposefully minimising the gravity of the accusations, but "these sorts of things bear no relationship to who I am and what I'm about."

These things happened 30 years ago, Burke emphasises. Who can remember back that far? These women must have built their stories over time; we all exaggerate, don't we?

"Never. Never anything like that. Nor would I," he might not remember specific instances, but he knows it's not consistent with his values.

He is funny, mind you. And some people just don't understand it. "A ribald sense of humour," he insists, it's just who he is - part of the very Burke we all fell in love with.

Couldn't it be possible that he was being funny, being familiar, and now that this Weinstein business is all out in the open, they think they have something to latch onto? Bring a man down, just as his career is coming to a close?

In the second half of the interview, his language begins to paint an even clearer image of 'Burke-the-victim'.

"I suffer," he says, his brown eyes intense and seemingly genuine. "It's a failing," he reflects, when claiming he lives with undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome, unable to read people's body language.

Other people, for whom this skill comes easily, can not understand how he "can't see it," but he just can't. "It's genetic."

Burke shared his failings.

He appeared vulnerable.

He owned up to some things.

He appeared on television to defend himself.

These are not the traditional behaviours we associate with a guilty man.

And that was completely on purpose.