My take: both your friend and the woman are responsible for themselves. If you're friend had chosen to have an affair with her, that would have been his responsibility vis-�-vis his wife. He's the one who has made a commitment to his wife. If a married woman has an affair there seems to be much less tendency to blame the person that she has the affair with rather than the woman herself.

Also, in my opinion, if your friend had not first made it clear the woman's advances (assuming that is what they were) were unwelcome, then I don't see why he should take it to HR. As I have indicated above, I don't think flirting in the workplace is necessarily wrong (although it's fraught and I certainly would be pretty wary about doing it) provided it is not unwelcome. Some things (crass comments, sleazy behaviour) will obviously be unwelcome but in other cases it will depend on the response you get. Also there may be other dynamics that might make it inappropriate such as I mentioned above where one person is supervising the other. Even then that still doesn't seem like a sackable offence to my way of thinking but I'm clearly out of step with whatever is going down at the AFL. That's why I'm curious to know the facts that are relevant to their reasoning.