A family secret Ali Mau had carried in silence for more than 40 years was blown apart by a distraught phone call from her sister. Now, for the first time, she talks about the monster who haunted their childhood.
Warning: This story discusses issues of sexual abuse
Outside, the sky is darkening ominously. Gusts of wind whine through the house, setting the dog on edge. A pair of shoes on the deck begin to pool with water.
Curled barefoot on the couch, Ali Mau looks poised and composed as the squall whips past, bathing the bush-clad valley below her home in a soft, golden light.
The real storm, she knows, is yet to come.
Mau has pulled the pin on a hand grenade and lobbed it out into the world. Now, she’s quietly bracing for impact.
This is the first time Mau has spoken publicly about the long shadow a sexual predator cast over her childhood – and her horror at discovering she was not his only victim.
“That was the tipping point,” she tells Canvas, her toy spaniel-Shih Tzu cross, Frankie, snuggled into her side.
“I don’t know if otherwise I would have been willing to let things lie. If I’d had to go through this process of self-revelation on my own, I probably would have cracked.”
On Wednesday, her memoir No Words for This hits the bookstores. Readers will find some of the content shocking, she says.
“But I couldn’t have written about my life without including what happened to blow my family apart.”
Tracing her trajectory from a bullied, jug-eared schoolkid in suburban Melbourne to one of New Zealand’s most high-profile media personalities, the book is an engaging, candid and often deeply unsettling read.
The sickening secret at its heart is revealed in fragments that punctuate the main narrative, echoing the way snatches of childhood trauma she’d suppressed for decades began to break through her defences.
Mau likens them to brief, terrifying flashes from the muzzle of a gun.
“The memories were always there, but it’s almost like your psyche cannons off them,” she says.
“A little flicker arises and you push it down, forcing your mind away to think about something else. That’s the best way I can describe it. You know it’s there, but you refuse to confront it.”
The painful process of shuffling through the past while writing and editing her memoir has been cathartic and retraumatising. But if she’s been an emotional mess at times, there’s little sign of it today.
No question is off limits and there are moments of laughter and lightness, too, as we pick through the highlights and lowlights of a career in journalism that’s taken her from print to TV to radio and back to print again.
The former news presenter has been made redundant five times – the media industry can be fickle – and describes leaving Fair Go to co-host TV current affairs show Seven Sharp when it first aired as “probably the worst year of my professional life”.
Her composure owes something, perhaps, to the dispassionate professionalism she cultivated on-screen as one-half of TVNZ’s “golden couple”, anchoring the news alongside her then-husband Simon Dallow.
On the page, however, she doesn’t hold back.
“That’s the greatest revelation of being an older woman,” says Mau, who turned 60 last month.
“I fully embrace my anger and I’m unapologetic for it. It’s a nice feeling.”
Mau was first approached several years ago by “a handful of publishers” to write a book about her life.
As an author, she already had form. In 2015, she’d written First Lady: From Boyhood to Womanhood with Liz Roberts, the first New Zealander to undergo gender-reassignment surgery.
However, it wasn’t until she was laid off from Stuff, where she’d won the 2021 Reporter of the Year Award for her #MeTooNZ investigations, that Mau found herself with some spare time on her hands.
Partnering with Auckland lawyer Zoe Lawton, another #MeToo campaigner, she’d begun developing the early concept for Tika, a free access-to-justice platform where survivors of sexual assault will be supported to take class actions against serial offenders.
Funding is still being sought for the charity, which is scheduled to be launched in August.
According to police estimates, 930,000 New Zealanders have been directly affected by sexual harm of some sort in their lifetime. Excluding her own experiences of abuse from the public record wasn’t an option for Mau.
“The shame doesn’t sit with us,” she says, quoting French woman Gisele Pelicot, who was covertly drugged and raped by her husband over a nine-year period and waived her right to anonymity during his trial.
“That’s the seed of Tika, to help survivors understand they’re not the only one, because perpetrators do that by design.
“They isolate you and they make you think that if you tell anyone, something bad will happen, or that people will think you’re crazy and won’t believe you. So, yeah, that part [going public] doesn’t bother me.”
In the early 80s, Melbourne was still a hick town where even smart girls were funnelled into nursing or teaching.
Instead, Mau followed her father Leigh into journalism, landing a cadetship in Warracknabeal, a tiny town in the flatlands of Victoria’s wheat belt.
Controlling and volatile, Leigh was a dominant force in the family – a “giant, beer-swilling, muck-spouting hardman who could quote Hamlet or Wordsworth’s poetry at will”.
The middle of three daughters, Mau was emotionally far closer to her mother, Maureen, who’d emigrated from England only to find herself trapped in an unhappy marriage far from home.
What she did share with her father was a love for the power of words – an irony cleverly referenced in the book’s title. Much of her life was spent desperately seeking his approval, which he gave only sparingly.
Moving to New Zealand in the mid-90s had put some distance between Mau and her family.
It wasn’t until 2018 when a desperate phone call from her older sister, Lisa, in Australia broke a silence that had lasted between them for more than 40 years.
As young girls, the two sisters had been sexually abused by their father on multiple occasions.
“We’d never talked about it before,” says Mau.
“We both thought we were the only one.”
What Lisa had just discovered was that the abuse did not stop with them. Her son, Benny – now a celebrated artist in his 30s – had been repeatedly raped as a child by his grandfather.
The revelation literally knocked Mau off her feet.
“For the first time, I let the memories come in their entirety,” she writes in her memoir. “I do not stop them at the brink. I do not gatekeep. I let myself remember being 10, 11, 12 ...
“He does not rape me, but he destroys me nevertheless. Until Lisa called that night, I had never told a single soul.”
Mau’s elderly parents still live in Melbourne and her mother suffers from advanced dementia.
How much she understands of what happened is uncertain, but out of love and respect for her, the family hasn’t pressed criminal charges against Leigh.
He has, however, acknowledged his offending. Mau has one of those conversations recorded on tape.
Lisa and Benny have been closely involved with the memoir, which is being published in Australia. Mau also has the support of her younger sister, Sam, who was not abused by their father.
“An important thing to say is that if my mother’s dementia wasn’t as advanced as it is, I would not have written the book,” Mau says.
“Dad may well come across it. I don’t know how I feel about that. I know I don’t owe him anything.
“Unfortunately for us, our father is what society considers the worst kind of criminal. I mean, there’s no getting away from that.
“He says he knew all along that the choices he made were wrong. He says he regrets it but the regret is always about him and how it’s affected his life.”
Mau has seen it all before through her work with sexual abuse survivors, the way perpetrators minimise and excuse their behaviour.
“At one extreme, there are paedophiles who say, ‘She led me on.’ Then there are the ones like my father who say they regret it and just want to have their life back.
“They don’t really understand the impact it’s had – because who wants to face the fact that they are a monster?”
This isn’t the first time Mau’s private life has become front-page news, although the difference is that this time she’s in control of the story.
In No Words for This, she writes generously about her relationship with Simon Dallow, who she first encountered when he was a Contiki guide in Europe.
Their marriage was already in trouble, she says, when he fell in love with someone else. The separation was carefully managed by TVNZ’s publicity department, but the following year, Mau was outed by a banner headline splashed across a Sunday paper: “Ali Mau’s Lady Love”.
Fifteen years later, it’s difficult to imagine such a story provoking the media frenzy that followed, as paparazzi descended on Mau and her new partner, Karleen Edmonds (they’d met when Mau’s daughter, Paris, was in Edmonds’ hip-hop class).
Radio host Dom Harvey wrote an explicit rap song about it, which he aired on The Edge. When Mau landed the presenting role on Seven Sharp, Newstalk ZB host Bruce Russell dismissively referred to her as a dyke.
Mau, who later described herself as New Zealand’s best-known midlife bisexual, came out fighting.
“People will say [paparazzi] are just doing their jobs,” she says.
“My response to that would be, ‘Get a job that doesn’t terrorise families and make an 8-year-old boy have to plot secretly with his little schoolmate how they’re going to protect themselves at school from photographers that jump out of the bushes’.”
The couple is still together and Mau’s son Joel, who’s now 23 and a 1.87m-tall rep basketball player, seems to have survived the trauma. When he was home for Christmas, he got a “Woke Lesbo” T-shirt.
He and Paris, who had a featured role in the Auckland production of Kinky Boots in 2023, have both settled in Australia. Neither has any contact with their grandfather.
In her memoir, Mau also writes in some depth about key events that occurred on her watch, from breaking the news of Princess Diana’s death on live TV to covering the Christchurch earthquake and the trial of Grace Millane’s killer.
The British backpacker’s death affected her so strongly that when a shop assistant recognised Mau and told her Grace’s father, David, had died, she burst into tears.
“I try to explain in the book how everybody thinks journalists need to be completely removed [from a story] and never feel a thing and never advocate for anyone.
“That’s impossible. That’s not a description of a human being.
“You have to know when it’s the time to do your work without allowing that to intrude, but everybody feels it, and I felt it really deeply with that case.”
Female readers will undoubtedly recognise some of their own experiences in Mau’s grim accounts of men who think they have the right to make free with women’s bodies.
Her father’s transgression is the most egregious betrayal of trust but not the only one.
A neighbour assaulted her when she was 10.
One of her bosses, Australian TV legend John Sorell, was later outed as a Harvey Weinstein-style serial harasser.
An English finance specialist, who’d been deputised by a friend to show Mau around during her stopover in Hong Kong, tried to force his way into her hotel room.
Such encounters have led her to develop a well-tuned “dickhead radar”, but one of the qualities Mau has inherited from her mother is stoicism.
The crisis within her family has also drawn the three sisters much closer. A few weeks ago, Mau flew to Australia to visit her mother and meet Benny’s first child.
“I’m an optimist and a bit of a Pollyanna,” she says.
“People who know me now for my journalism, particularly around the feminist themes, would assume maybe that I’m a crotchety old lady, but I’m actually a bit ditzy.
“That’s what my kids and Karleen would say – that I’m what once upon a time you’d have called ‘a bit of a blonde’.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
Where to get help:
If it’s an emergency and you feel that you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
If you’ve ever experienced sexual assault or abuse and need to talk to someone, contact Safe to Talk confidentially, any time 24/7:
• Call 0800 044 334
• Text 4334
• Email support@safetotalk.nz
• For more info or to web chat visit safetotalk.nz
Alternatively contact your local police station - click here for a list.
If you have been sexually assaulted, remember it’s not your fault.
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