In this extract from Steve Braunias’s new book, ex-fiancée Madison Ashton discusses central characters in the Polkinghorne case with the outrage of a wronged woman.
Madison Ashton was expected to be a key witness for the prosecution at the trial of the man she believed was separated from Pauline Hanna and had become her fiancé. But furious at her treatment by New Zealand Police, whom she claimed disrespected her, the Sydney sex worker never testified. She did follow the High Court trial of Philip Polkinghorne, sending comments to journalists covering it, including Steve Braunias. She visited Auckland after the trial was over, meeting Braunias for lunch at the city’s Park Hyatt hotel.
Only Madison Ashton looks like Madison Ashton. Even though there was something generic about her cosmetic maximisations – everything large, blown up – she had a natural and touching prettiness to her features. She wore leather pants and a tight blue top. Her nails were painted gold. At 50, she was classy and glamorous, and her manner was friendly, demure, shy.
We sat down and scanned the menu. There wasn’t a lot she could eat, as in she couldn’t really eat anything; she had recently gone for gastric surgery, and her post-op regime was no solids. We lunched for two hours. She had a ready wit and could be quite epigrammatic; she loved punning “hierarchy” as “whorearchy” to discuss her perception of the top echelons of sex workers. She saw herself in that top echelon. She had a belief in herself and her abilities. I felt she was genuine in every single thing she said. She was nobody’s fool. But like a lot of people with that determination she was prone to being her own fool, by talking herself up and overestimating her importance. She put up a hell of a front. She needed it. It guarded a person I thought of as terribly vulnerable and terribly lonely. She settled for tom yum soup.
She laughed at the interest the Polkinghorne trial had generated, and said, “You know, I couldn’t believe that it took hold so intensely here. I thought, oh, maybe you guys are just going through a slow news period.”
I said, “I think this would have been huge any year.”
“But he’s not even that rich. He’s real-estate rich. Like, he bought the house for a mil, and it’s appreciated by another four. And he’s got, you know, a few investments. But so has the entirety of Parnell and Remuera. And so if you think he’s rich, then you must think that half your population is loaded.”
“Well, that’s the right arithmetic, because he’s how the other half live.”
“Okay, so his sex-work expenditure was off the chart,” said the main beneficiary of his sex work expenditure. “He has no intention of changing that, because he’s a spendthrift narcissist. I absolutely regard him as a covert narcissist, as a clinically covert narcissist.”
“What are his good qualities?”
She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “I liked him a lot in the limited circumstances we were in. But you think one nice quality means it comes with many nice qualities, and it doesn’t. It was obviously in his interest to be nice to me. That’s baseline meet and greet.”
“He’s funny, though, right?”
“I never found him very funny.”
“But that’s his thing, his calling card. ‘A dry wit’, all that. But not funny? Really?”
“No.”
“What did you like about him?”
“That he was a fat chubby nerd and that he had an honest relationship with his wife. I saw a great relationship and I thought to myself, ‘I would go out of my way for a relationship like that.’ And I stupidly told him that I thought what they had was great, and that’s something that I would like for me if I could find it.”
“What do you mean?”
Our drinks arrived. I ordered a lager, and Madison was given her strawberry margarita.
“Just that he wasn’t sexually possessive,” she answered. “Like most men are like, ‘You can’t have my wife, and I own her and any sharing would be considered unfair or whatever.’ You know, the checklist. But they didn’t live by those rules. And they did it well and they weren’t stupid, and they weren’t, you know, unemployed or uneducated or anything like that. They were just people who lived a functional life. I thought that was awesome and I was like, ‘Great. I’d like that.’ Because I’m never going to give up my occupation for a relationship. I think I should be respected for the occupation that you meet me in, whether you engage in it or not. And he seemed cool with that. Well, how can he not be? He’s a consumer of it. You can’t have it both ways. I mean, everyone tries it on, but it’s unfair to act like, ‘Oh, I’m a lowly consumer and I have a problem with my partner being a sex worker.’ Fuck off!”
“But he was never like that.”
“No, he had a fetish for it. He doesn’t support me as a sex worker. He supports himself with his never-ending sexual wonderland that exists in his psychopathy. So I basically signed on to a relationship that was a never-ending occupation. I was never a human being. It was just him getting his rocks off in his very fertile mind.”
She was going one way with her memoir of her time with Polkinghorne, but I couldn’t help asking if there hadn’t been something fun, decent, loving or at least blandly comfortable going on between them.
I said, “Yeah, but did you have nice times outside of the sex?”
Her expression was severe. She said, “Oh, my god. Everyone asks the same boring fucking question. Okay. Firstly, I was abused before I even knew I was abused. And I was groomed, so any nice times were just a function of abuse.
“I don’t want to be asked those questions any more. You all know the same information. I was lied to and manipulated. So it was all bullshit. So what nice times am I supposed to go on about? What, the nice times that are a ticking time bomb? Those nice times?”
The soup arrived.
‘On the spectrum’
I thought I might gain some insight from her on Pauline. I wasn’t sure how many times they had met in Sydney, but I supposed some kind of intimacy or character assessment was achieved in their various threesomes or moresomes, and so I asked, “What was Pauline like?”
“Pauline was socially very awkward,” she said. “I think she was on the spectrum or something like that. That’s what I was picking up on.”
“Did you get to know her well?”
“No, not at all. How am I supposed to get to know someone at a booking? I’m doing my job. I’m here to, you know, do my service as they’ve rightfully paid for and expect, you know. But I just found that she just didn’t sort of pick up social cues. Very cold, and she wasn’t fun to be around.”
Our conversation turned to Polkinghorne’s family. “A classic narcissist’s family dynamic,” she pronounced.
“Did you meet [Polkinghorne’s sister] Ruth after Pauline had died?”
“No. Ruth came to my house to meet me. We had dinner. She kept up the fantasy and enabled his lie that he was divorced.”
“Did she actually lie about that to your face?”
“Well, she didn’t say anything. He’s telling her, ‘This is my partner. We’re gonna be together forever.’ But she knew he was still married and living with Pauline. And then there’s Tracey,” she said, meaning Pauline’s sister, who gave evidence claiming Pauline had wanted to kill herself after their father died. “She’s a loser. She’s a nothing. I looked at her social media and everything. She’s, you know, middle-aged, hefty.”
Everywhere, bitterness. I had seen a preview of it when Madison emailed a screenshot taken on the night of the verdict. It captured a social media post that Ruth had addressed to New Zealand Herald journalist Carolyne Meng-Yee: “Your are a c---. Just cos you didn’t get an interview.” Madison had stepped in, and replied, “The best part about all of this, regardless of the verdict, is that you will never ever live this down for the rest of your life … You deserve everything that’s coming to you.”
The overwhelming tone of it was nastiness. She was very skilled at lashing out, quite fearless; she had no one in her life, nothing to lose. For all her strength, her belief in herself, she was a loner, someone on the margins.
An edited extract from Polkinghorne: Inside the Trial of the Century by Steve Braunias (Allen & Unwin, RRP $37.99), out now.