Paul Holmes: A pitiless campaign against Veitch

Tony Veitch. Photo / Doug Sherring

It is over. His battle is lost. Tony Veitch's career and perhaps his life lie in ruins this weekend. I doubt he can ever work in broadcasting in this country again, in the jobs he loves. Certainly, it looks bleak from this end. I do not know if he could approach another broadcaster anywhere in the world at the moment without the stain following him. But time passes.

People forgive and we remember we are all human.

Those of us who know Tony Veitch and have worked with him are in shock at how quickly a man who seemed to have it all can lose almost everything in less than a fortnight. He has lost not just his income. He has lost his name. The fall of Tony Veitch is a genuine modern tragedy.

I believe I know something of what happened that awful night two-and-a-
half years ago but, of course, I was not there. There are always two sides. People forget things and memories distort. I know all that.

But it has nevertheless been a frightful, hysterical couple of weeks with vile claim after vile claim, two major broadcasting companies in the middle of it all, and a man, for obvious reasons, unable to defend himself because to do so would immediately incriminate him.

No one in this country is required to do that, surely.

I do not remember a more savage, more frenzied, more complete media consumption of anyone in the public eye. I do not recall anything as ruthless, as relentless, as coldly pitiless. In fact, I believe, and I am not alone, that Tony Veitch has been the victim of a highly organised campaign.

I do not minimise the evils and brutality of domestic violence. Men who bash their families serially are contemptible brutes. Yet, as the kinder part of my heart tells me, those men are victims too, victims of their inner selves and the lives that led them to it.

But this has been a carefully orchestrated plan to end a career and the life a man has built. A valuable broadcasting performer has been taken out of two prime broadcasting slots, the Radio Sport Breakfast Show and One News. Instead of us seeing justice, we may have been seeing revenge. Instead of journalism, we may have seen commerce.

There are serious questions. What happened that night? What are the facts? Why did it take the woman well over two years to complain to police? This is of fundamental importance. Why did the whole sorry saga start in a newspaper? Why did it take it so long to emerge? And why now? Why, when a confidentiality agreement was signed and money paid? Who did it come from? Did events in Tony Veitch's life provoke them? His marriage? His career progress? How was the Dominion Post so certain the incident had happened? And why did a Wellington paper break the story when the events, the people are so completely Auckland? I know from an insider at the Dominion Post that it did not come through a reporter. It came through management. This is extremely peculiar. Management does not generally find stories.