Untouchable girls

Stroppy for a reason

While I was on the phone this morning with Ally Naylor, one of the women who has accused Xero founder and CEO Sir Rod Drury of unwanted sexual contact, a media release arrived in my inbox:

After a beautiful life, Dame Jools Topp passed away peacefully at her home on Saturday with her twin sister Lynda, brother Bruce, close friends and all her fur-babies by her side.

Oof.

My mind did a weird, instant time-travel back to 1986, to the lounge in the house across the road from mine, my friend Rachel propped up on a hospital bed, her mum trying to clear the fluid from her lungs. Later that year, after a short but beautiful life, Rachel’s cystic fibrosis could no longer be managed.

Rachel.

My mind returned to Rachel because she loved the Topp Twins’ Untouchable Girls and played it on repeat.

We’re stroppy, we’re aggressive, we’ll take over the world.

Rachel never got the chance. She died before we finished high school.

Today it struck me though that the idea lives on in the many stroppy women I’ve met lately, who are fed up and can no longer be bothered trying to pretend otherwise.

They are not stroppy in the sense of being difficult for the sake of it. They are women who, by their own accounts, have run out of patience.

Ally Naylor, Amy*, and Megan Ruddle are the focus of my recent reporting. They were doing their jobs – Ally and Amy at Xero, Megan as Drury’s chef then a manager at his Queenstown property – when they claim Drury made unwanted advances. (Drury denies any and all wrongdoing.)

Xero has now apologised to Naylor’s lawyer after discovering, while responding to a Privacy Act request, that despite assurances of confidentiality, her name was inadvertently given to Drury during the investigation into her 2017 whistleblower complaint.

Just before that apology story, Savannah Carter was stroppy too, going public with a video of the moment she was apparently slapped in the face by Wealth Mentor CEO Kyron Gosse. At the time, she was a contractor to the company, in a studio session, filming.

When she told her story, Gosse issued a cease and desist and has not responded to any of my or other journalists’ questions since.

Before that it was Rabea Santjer, Maree* and Māia*, whose stories forced Equippers Church to review its approach to sexual abuse claims. Not that they will know the outcome: it’s a confidential review and none of them have been spoken to for that process.

They were churchgoers who wanted the institution to protect them and others like them. Dissatisfied with the answers they got, they went public.

Before that it was Zara, a sex worker who told of how she had caught senior government press secretary Michael Forbes in the act of audio recording a session with her. Zara was just trying to earn a living and be safe at work. At the brothel, when they took his phone off him, they found a gallery of pictures including video he’d filmed through a window of women getting ready to go out. Police investigated but did not charge him, and most of the women in his photo/video gallery still won’t know they feature.

So Zara told her story. Forbes resigned from his job as the Prime Minister’s acting deputy chief press secretary, both he and his boss acknowledging his position was untenable.

Before that it was Ali Cook, indecently assaulted by members of a visiting Vietnamese police delegation while she was just trying to go about her part-time job in a Wellington restaurant. Her efforts to persuade authorities to have them extradited looked doomed, then hopeful, then doomed again. She just wanted a chance at justice, and to have been safe at work.

This is merely a snapshot of the past year and a half. You can see why I don’t use the word stroppy pejoratively, and why that song sprang to mind today.

Reporting these stories has shown me that very few people go public first; almost everyone tries other avenues. All of these women made the difficult, uncomfortable, and in some cases terrifying decision to step into the spotlight because of their frustration with the processes they tried to trust, and so they found themselves taking a step that I try never to underestimate: putting their trust in a journalist instead.

As I have written before, telling those stories doesn’t necessarily provide a remedy. What it does do is put their experiences on the public record and make it harder for the rest of us to look away.

Maybe there’ll be a day when there are no more stories like this to tell. It would be a welcome change to report on institutions treating people with dignity and keeping them safe. (Yes I do know those places exist, but you get the point. And as we learned in journalism school, planes that land safely don’t make the news.)

In the meantime, thank you for the inspiration, Dame Jools: The OG stroppy and aggressive wahine, political and hilarious, rocking a strapless towelling jumpsuit, untouchable.

Moe mai rā.

*Not her real name.