The woman at the centre of allegations which effectively cost Dover Samuels his cabinet post has broken her silence.
Marama Marcarian, who had an affair with the sacked Maori Affairs Minister when she was a teenager, says she never wanted private matters aired publicly and that her life has been shattered.
"I wanted it left behind because it all happened so long ago," the 31-year-old told Woman's Day magazine.
But while lamenting her loss of privacy, she has also posed for photographs and publicly identified herself for the first time.
She does not make criminal allegations against Mr Samuels, nor does she exonerate him. She refers to herself as a victim. She is understood to have been working in a Rotorua hotel in June when the scandal broke. She says she saw a television news item about it and walked off the job never to return.
She does not specify when she and Mr Samuels began their sexual relationship, though she says she left school at 14. It began while she was living with him and his family in Northland after she ran away from her adoptive home, the article says.
"It wasn't a love thing."
She said she felt a sense of shame about her relationship with a man she had considered her uncle.
She felt traumatised and trapped after getting pregnant. She said Mr Samuels arranged for an abortion in Auckland and suggested she tell the clinic that she and her boyfriend were too young to have children.
Mr Samuels was sacked from the cabinet in June, a week after the allegations surfaced that he had had a relationship with an under-age girl in the mid-1980s.
But police found there were no criminal charges to answer.
Mr Samuels has made a formal complaint to the police that he was the subject of false allegations.
Act leader Richard Prebble raised the allegations, including rape, with Prime Minister Helen Clark after he had been approached by Marama Marcarian's birth mother, Beverly Rako, and uncle Rodney Tregerthan.
Marama Marcarian told Woman's Day that she had no idea the pair were planning to force the matter into the public arena by telling Mr Prebble.
She said it was six years earlier that she had told Beverly Rako about the relationship.
Mr Samuels said last night that he wished she had spoken publicly sooner, though he did not know whether his cabinet post would have been saved.
Police would not say if anyone was specifically identified in Mr Samuels' complaint that he was falsely accused. However, Mr Samuels told the Herald that Beverly Rako was one of the people named.
Samuels' lover: My life is ruined
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