Newshub’s AM host Melissa Chan-Green opens up on past abusive relationship - Steve Braunias

This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including exploring the NCEA and UE results of every college around NZ, the collapse of the Du Val property empire, revealing claims a former funeral director at Tipene Funerals was swindling grieving clients and charting the 10-year police probe that brought down Wayne Doyle and the Head Hunters.

The following article was one of the best-read Premium articles in 2024. The story originally ran in March.

The reason I asked the very probably about-to-be-made-redundant Melissa Chan-Green for an interview is because of something she said through her tears last Thursday morning on TV when she announced how it felt that Newshub was set to be axed.

The co-presenter of AM mentioned that she had worked as a broadcaster at the network for 17 years and along the way it had got her through “dark times”. I messaged her and asked if she would like to expand on that.

We met on Monday morning at her extremely white house - white walls, white lampshades, white sofa, orange dining table chairs from Nood - where she lives with her husband Caspar and their two preschool children, Busby and his sister Mabel, in a watery corner of west Auckland. She had given the interview request a lot of thought and was determined to talk publicly about those “dark times” for the first time.

Melissa Chan-Green has worked at TV3 for 17 years. Photo / Michael Craig

She said: “So there was a period where I was in a very abusive relationship. Going to work was my happy place. It’s where I felt like I was thriving. And it was kind of a break away from the reality of private life.

“So yeah. Even though I’ve been an ambassador for Women’s Refuge for a time, I haven’t said that out loud before, so publicly. So it kind of feels a bit strange. But it did have and still has I guess in some ways an impact on me, and I’m so proud of what I achieved at work through that time as well. Yeah. Kept me going really.”

I asked her what it was like to work as a broadcast journalist during those years of abuse.

“It was fulfilling. That’s how I was getting fulfilment. I’ve always loved my job but especially through that period. And also it made me so strong and fearless, actually, in the work that I was doing, because I knew what I’m surviving at home.

“I was like, ‘I can do anything, report from a conflict zone, because I’m capable of doing that’. I felt really strong in myself. I was probably doing some of my best work then.”

I asked her about the abuse.

She said: “I probably don’t want to go too much into how bad it was. Because... abuse is about control, right? And I’ve made sure that that control doesn’t continue post that relationship in terms of impacting my life now, or certainly not in a bad way. You know, I take the good out from what I learned from that.

“For example, I wrote down every memory of things that happened. It took me weeks. It was like a brain dump because I thought, ‘I don’t want to carry this in my head all the time, but I don’t also don’t want to forget what happened to me because it’s shaped who I am too’.

“So I thought, ‘If I just brain-dump it all out, it’s there and it’s downloaded and I can put it in some files somewhere, but I don’t have to carry it with me all the time’. And that was one way for me just to not have that continue to control me.

“And so I guess I don’t want to go too much into what actually happened because I also don’t want it to overshadow the 17 years that I had in my job because that would kind of take away from my career, which I’m proud of.

“So yeah. And I want women - and I know there’ll be lots who are in a situation like I was - to be aware that you can get out the other side and I also want people to know that, just because someone looks like they’ve got it all together, that might not necessarily be the case.

“And I guess I want to talk about this while I do still have some kind of platform. If this is to be the end of my career in media, I wouldn’t want to go without saying that, you know?”

AM hosts Lloyd Burr and Melissa Chan-Green shed tears as they opened their show last Thursday, talking about the Newshub closure. Photo / Newshub

The end of her career in media, at Newshub at least, was signalled last Wednesday when she took the two-minute walk with colleagues from the Newshub studios in Flower St to the nearby Dalmatian Cultural Society hall, where executives addressed an all-staff meeting at 11am. An email had been sent advising of “a proposed new structure with significant changes”.

“Some of us were joking about it. But in the pit of my stomach, I was feeling that this was something big. And so I just remember feeling a bit ill. A bit sick. Nauseous.

“I called home and said to Caspar, ‘There’s gonna be a big announcement. I don’t know what it is, and I’m not sure how long it’s gonna take or whether I’ll be able to call you and tell you what it is before you hear about it’. So I just wanted to give him a heads-up. He was so wonderful, just helping me stay calm and saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what it is, we’ve got our family and each other and whatever comes we’ll be great’. So yeah.”

There were chairs set out, with an aisle between them, and two men on barstools at the front of the hall addressed the staff. They began with a preamble - the old technique of comms that does not comm.

“The preamble to me was concerning,” she said. “If it’s not going to be a bad announcement, you just say that at the beginning. So I knew as soon as there was a preamble that this was not going to be welcome news.”

Melissa Chan-Green leaves a meeting where Newshub employees were told of the impending closure. Photo / Dean Purcell

She cried when the closure was announced. Afterwards, she walked back to the studios and then joined colleagues for a drink.

“It was kind of a funny atmosphere because we were reminiscing on good times and there was actually a lot of laughter and happiness about what we’ve done. And I was receiving so many messages and so much support, it kind of tempered the sadness of the occasion.

“And then when I got home that night, it was dinner and bath time with the kids, which is always a very busy time. And then I had to go straight to sleep to get some rest before the next show.

“Which is why I think I hadn’t really felt any of it until the moment that I had to go on air and talk about it. Before I went on, I was googling ‘heart attack symptoms’ because my heart had been racing for a very long time. And I felt numb. I concluded it was probably just anxiety.

“So I went on air and I thought, ‘If I take a deep breath I’ll be fine’. But I misjudged the timing of my breath! It was like, ‘I don’t have enough time to be calm about this now’.”

And so she cried, and it was in that raw emotion of weeping on live TV that she remembered “dark times”. The thing about appearing on a chatty, friendly TV current affairs and lifestyle programme five mornings a week is that presenters form a personal relationship with an audience, a trust that it’s okay to show who they really are; in 2019, former co-host Ryan Bridge came out as gay on AM.

She said, “I think both of us, we realised that on AM you have to share yourself whether it’s the good, the bad, the vulnerable. It’s very hard to do a three-hour show every morning and keep up an act.”

The closure of Newshub came just as the network was about to debut the new 7pm show fronted by Bridge. “Everybody was really excited about what that show could have or may still do for us as a channel. There was a lot of belief in him as a broadcaster.”

Chan-Green is excited for what the future might hold. Photo / Michael Craig

Throughout the interview, she mixed up past and present tense, speaking in a kind of twilight time zone. Maybe some iteration of Newshub will survive. Maybe it’s not over till it’s over. But she often spoke like it was already all over.

I asked her whether she thought her career as a broadcaster was finished, and she said: “I hope not. I feel like I certainly am not finished with the job, but if the job is finished with me, then I’m excited about what the future might hold.”

We sat on the Nood chairs at the dining table with a plate of ginger crunch and chocolate brownies. She didn’t eat any of them. She looked wan. She had slept a lot last weekend, exhausted by everything. She talked about how 2023 was the best year of her life - the birth of her second child, a happy family, leaving behind the misery of living in a leaky home in Kingsland to move into their extremely white house with water views.

“And,” she said, “I had a job I loved. Love.” Past tense, present tense; life at Newshub, waiting for the exact date of end times.