With her new book out today, journalist Ali Mau talks about letting go of dark secrets, the incredibleness of her girlfriend and how she used to think she was fat.
In her incendiary memoir Ali Mau shatters forever the glossy image of TV blonde perfection she struck back in the early aughts when she read the news with then husband Simon Dallow. Of course, Mau had already seriously cracked that mold, separating from Dallow in 2009 and having her new same-sex relationship roughly “outed” by some of our finest mags and rags the following year.
She then went on to leave TV behind, returning to her origins as a print journalist and spearheading Stuff’s #MeToo investigations into sexual harassment and abuse. Through all of this she came across as smart, calm and straight-up but, as she reveals in her book, she was still guarding a secret, not only from those close to her but from herself: the deeply traumatising sexual abuse she’d endured as a child.
Learning in 2018 that both her sister and nephew were also victims of abuse was a devastating turning point; one that forced her to face her demons and which ultimately unleashed a new, even freer Ali Mau. She talks to Emily Simpson
There’s some very heavy stuff in this book – things you held inside for a big chunk of your life – and yet you come across as a happy breezy person. How have you managed to process everything?
I’m by nature an optimist. I’m not saying things have always worked out in my life, because plainly they haven’t, but in bad situations I’ve always believed that there’s something better waiting.
One thing the book taught me is how much like my mum I am. The things that defined her character – and I use the past tense because, with her dementia having reached the extent it has, she’s not really the same person anymore – but those things were her Protestant work ethic and her stoicism. She’s passed that onto me and I’m grateful because it allows me not to be overwhelmed by the dark things and to understand what matters – it’s not money or status, it’s the ability to contribute. That’s what makes me feel good about myself.
When you began your reporting in the #MeToo sphere, some of your own sexual abuse was still something you hadn’t allowed yourself to discuss or even think about. Do you think it was a subconscious driver of that work?
No. No I don’t. I think in that #MeToo work I was more connecting with my own experiences as a working woman over the course of my life. There are so many instances in the book of sexist behaviour and straight-out harassment that I experienced. You might think ‘you’ve been unlucky’ but most women my age will have really similar stories and a bunch of them. The only difference is that I’ve written them down – and some of them didn’t even make the book.
One pressure that women feel is to look a certain way and be a certain size and, as a newsreader, you sort of embodied that ideal. Did you feel that pressure yourself in a negative way?
Absolutely. There’s a photo of me in the book of myself at age 16 with my friend Katie. I was astonished when I saw that photo because at the time I thought I was fat. And I was tiny – tall, but tiny. I had fully absorbed the message about size that society had delivered, and still does, to young women, and I thought I needed to lose weight.
At school I turned myself into some kind of oracle about calorie counting; younger students would come to us older girls at the tuck shop and say ‘how many calories are there in this food or that?’ and we’d pass down the information!
That angle of society had me in its grip for a really long time and working in TV didn’t help. For a while I would say I was actually quite vain because I was working in an industry where how you looked and how people perceived you was important for maintaining your job. And we all looked the same, we had the same hair style, similar makeup styes, the same stylist, the same jackets…
Did leaving your TV career give you a feeling of freedom to be more yourself?
Oh yes 100 per cent and it happened in a rush because I went straight from TVNZ to Radio Live, a talkback show with Willie Jackson. I went from not being allowed to have an opinion to being employed to have an opinion.
As I’ve got older I’ve largely given up that thing that I’ve had all my life and many of us have – that ‘good girl’ thing. I care less about being liked these days than I care about being effective.
In the book you describe your decades of silence about your childhood sexual abuse as “holding a shadow”. Do you think it made you a bit closed in relationships?
I don’t. No I don’t. But it is important to note that this was a cataclysmic event that I buried. So although I’ve always been a very open person in my important relationships, it’s impossible to deny the fact that there was one thing I never talked about. So yes and no, I guess. It didn’t turn me into an untrusting person. But it did mean that I put a lot of stock in trust and loyalty. I consider myself a very loyal person and when that’s not returned I react very badly.
Having had a long heterosexual marriage followed by a long same-sex relationship would you say those two kinds of relationships are fundamentally different?
I don’t think I can answer that because I haven’t been in enough of either. I now have the joy of a long-term relationship (15 years at the end of this year!) which is incredibly fulfilling and where I want for nothing, and which is very equal in a way that a lot of hetero relationships are not.
People say ‘so are you really gay?’ Actually that’s not fair, they say ‘is the attraction about the gender or the person?’ and I say I think it’s about the person. Karleen is very captivating. My kids would say she has ‘ris’ to spare. She’s undeniable, a powerful personality, in the best way. Anybody who’s ever met her will understand what I’m talking about. She’s also incredibly kind. We share the same values. We care about each other obviously and we care about how our actions affect other people and the world. We’re aligned I guess.
You were trying to build your relationship at a time when you were already a major paparazzi target. Did that feel invasive?
Yes. It was one continuous nightmare. Simon and I separated in June 2009. And I was publicly outed by Woman’s Day in February 2010, so there was a good few months of running away from photographers in between; luckily I’d had some excellent advice on how to lose a tail in traffic so I put that to good use.
But it was awful. There was a bit of an outcry after the first front page stories were published and instead of understanding what they’d done those publications doubled down and ran stories justifying their actions. The excuse/reason that was used was that those photographers were “just doing their job” and my response to that is: get a job that doesn’t terrorise eight-year-old children.
But in a very New Zealand way the whole paparazzi thing was actually just two guys. Two guys with cameras. And I find that quite funny.
Do you consider yourself a Kiwi?
Yeah I do. I’m going to get my citizenship. I know I still sound a little bit Australian and I’m both, but I feel more Kiwi than Australian now.
The first person you opened up to about the sexual abuse, in 2018, was your sister Lisa who started the conversation and who was also abused. Has this created more of a bond between you?
Yeah… It sounds trite to say that something beautiful has come from such pain. But it’s true, it’s something that’s brought us very much closer together. Lisa and I were close as children because we were close in age, [my other sister] Samantha was a lot younger and little bit like an only child in some ways. Working through this has brought the three of us closer together, I love that so much.
Do you and Lisa have the same or different ways of coping with the abuse?
I think there was a little bit of difference. My sister had revealed her abuse to some of her partners over the years, whereas I hadn’t. I had told a tiny handful of people about [a different instance of] abuse from a neighbour which happened when I was ten. But even then it just was kind of obliquely mentioned, and I had never told a soul about [the other abuse].
Do you think there was anything in your abuser’s life that might have led to him becoming abusive?
I suspect, because it’s incredibly common, that there was abuse in his childhood as well, but I don’t think the reason is an excuse. He has said he knew that he was wrong to be doing what he was doing right from the start so he had every opportunity not to do it. I do believe strongly in personal responsibility and I believe in the power of a good apology.
Have you had a decent apology from him?
No I haven’t. He’s admitted it but whenever he talks about it, his focus is on himself and of course I’m very attuned to that because I’ve seen it so many times in my work, how perpetrators are very distressed but not for their victims/survivors but for how their own life has collapsed as a result of their actions.
How do you manage the dark emotions that must come with bringing the abuse to light?
I either think about horses or I’m reassured by my partner or I pour it into my work – and I’m definitely guilty of doing that a little bit too much. I can be very focused.
If I wake up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding I talk to myself very gently about how good my life is. I’m incredibly fortunate and well supported and pretty happy.
My two children (daughter Paris and son Joel) are just incredible, empathetic human beings. And I’m so grateful that they kind of snuck into adulthood just before all this really worrying social media driven stuff began to really take over. They’re both feminists. My son Joel was given a ‘woke lesbo’ t-shirt this year and he loves it.
How big a role do horses play in your life?
It’s been my life’s goal since I was five years old to live on my own land with horses and I managed to achieve that at age 56 when I moved out to the west coast. I waited 50 years for it. I was intending to take my horse for rides through the forest and on the beach but it turns out I’m a really competitive person, so I started doing some very low level dressage competitions. And I got bit bored with that and my horse was also bored, so in 2023 I asked my coach to give me jumping lessons. Within nine months she had taken me to the point where I was competing at Horse of the Year. I competed against all the serious riders in one of the championship classes and I came third. I cried. I sat on my horse and I just cried.
So yes, horses. I’m a horsey girl so I would say this but horses are therapeutic. Riding is really important for my mental health.
It seems like this is a time of life (Mau is 60) when everything is really coming together for you.
It’s so true. That’s why I feel sad for people who are afraid of ageing. Nobody likes getting older but your 50s are a fantastic decade. They have been for me anyway.
You’re the co-founder of Tika, a soon-to-be-launched platform helping connect and legally advise survivors of sexual abuse. What can we expect from that?
We know that one in three women and one in seven men will experience sexual harm of some kind – but that’s not a reflection of the numbers of perpetrators, because abusers typically have more than one victim. I think there are going to be a lot of people who register to Tika and put their details in and potentially the system finds a match with someone who had the same experience and that alone will give them an enormous benefit. We want to connect these people. Some of them will want legal help and I think some of them will want to meet each other and support each other and find community.
When my sister called me in 2018 and [revealed she was a victim of the same abuser], suddenly I wasn’t alone anymore.
People ask why I’ve written the book and part of it is because I’ve been asking other people to share their stories for so long why wouldn’t I share mine?
Sexual abuse doesn’t define you, it doesn’t define me. It’s something that happened that was wrong and illegal in a serious way.
As I was writing the book, the French trial of Dominique Pelicot was going on. And his ex-wife and victim Gisèle Pelicot said, ‘the shame doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to the perpetrator’.
That really hit me hard and I’m grateful to her for saying it.
No words for this, by Ali Mau (published by Harper Collins) is out now.
