Blonde Ambition

by Annette Sharp

  After Centenera, there would be other stylists. Fashion editor and stylist Trevor Stones, known for his work on Foxtel’s Project Runway, would help fine-tune Roxy’s look, as would edgy ex-Cleo New Zealand magazine fashion stylist Marina Didovich, a former photography student who had styled the likes of actresses Cate Blanchett and Jodi Anasta for magazine shoots.

  Roxy’s new wardrobe buys were statement pieces that said power and money. She now had both and would use social media to reinforce that. Increasingly she posted photographs of herself and her outfits to Instagram, like any reality star might, and tagged her outfits in the style of her fashion icon Kim Kardashian who likely received her clothes for free. Not so Roxy. Stylists shared stories of her spending $300 000 on a single shopping spree. They added that these days, she rejected anything that was two seasons old and was using designer stylebooks—like a bona fide fashion editor—to help make her choices.

  The evolution of brand Roxy—powerful businesswoman, working mother, jetsetting world traveller—continued in earnest. By the time she opened her @roxyjacenko Instagram account in 2014, an account that would be more personal and demonstrate she was evolving independently of Sweaty Betty, she was heavily invested in the business of promoting her own celebrity.

  She had attained the status of Sydney icon with her appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice, and with her subsequent elevation to Who Weekly magazine’s Most Intriguing People list 2013, she could now claim to be the nation’s most recognisable fashion PR identity.

  Instagram had become a peephole into Roxy’s own life. She posted the edited highlights of her day—an insight into where she was going, what she was driving, who she was with, her handbags, children and occasionally husband, whose appearance on her social media accounts created the impression that he had given it approval. You required a lot of international holidays and trips and fashion posts to sustain interest in such an account, but with Curtis as her partner, she would have both. She had never travelled as much in her life as she did now with ‘Oli’ as her husband.

  Despite denying in February 2012 that she was actively trying to raise her own profile, Roxy would acknowledge that her higher profile and growing public image impacted business, telling Mumbrella:

  Look [my profile has] definitely benefited the business … and the book [Strictly Confidential] has as well. For our clients to be able to say, this is a book by our PR company, they’re really proud of that. It brings more business, there’s no question, but there’s also a side of your personal life that is exposed and I’ve had that happen to me.

  As bruising as the reality TV experience had been in 2013, by 2014 she was much revived after a year away from it. So in 2014, she would reveal plans for another reality TV program, telling the MailOnline she was ‘in talks’ to star in her own reality TV show with her daughter. ‘There has been a discussion, and these discussions continue,’ she said, though nothing eventuated in the years to 2016.

  By 2015, she would have a new nose. The nose job would prompt a flurry of media interest after she posted shots of her bruised face and plastered nose to Instagram. If there had been any negative comments concerning her new profile on her social media accounts, they were quickly deleted and not shared. The feedback on Roxy’s Instagram account was overwhelmingly positive always.

  Some saw the new nose as evidence social media was having a ruinous effect on Roxy. Her nose—though prominent—had been pure Roxy. Strong, a little off-centre, one of a kind, and part of her signature brand. But social media’s new ubiquitous Roxy didn’t like what she had called her ‘Jewish’ nose, so it had to go: ‘I fixed that up,’ she told Beauticate. ‘If I haven’t been happy with something, I’ve worked to fix it.’

  Roxy’s new Euro-flash style was starting to rub off on the Bettys. Under the influence of a growing number of image-shaping ‘key influencers’ in their new virtual business world, how could it not? A spray-tanner was booked to arrive once a week—usually a Friday afternoon—at the Sweaty Betty office to tan Roxy. Anyone who wanted a tan was encouraged to book a session. It looked to outsiders and prospective new clients that nearly everyone at Sweaty Betty was a glamorous, eternally tanned, flaxen-haired bottle blonde. A departed Betty said in general Roxy liked her PR staff to be ‘good-looking, well-groomed and glossy—like Sydney’.

  There was a rumour doing the rounds—unproven—that Roxy’s word on style was gospel at Sweaty Betty and that she had even inspired the Bettys’ more intimate grooming habits. Roxy had once joked to online media that she needed ‘a clone’ to help with the workload.

  When a 60 Minutes crew was granted access to her office in 2016, it looked as though she had thrown an extra zero on her clone-order paperwork and gotten ten Roxys—all blonde, dressed in black and wearing stilettos, exactly like Roxy had in the first week of Curtis’s trial. Roxy’s influence in her professional domain was undeniable.

  If Roxy had heard the fashion maxim ‘less is more’, there was little evidence of it. From her shining example on Instagram, it was easier to believe she held with the view that ‘more is more’. That certainly was the case when it came to money.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Power Paradox

  I’ve worked bloody hard for everything

  Roxy

  AS FAR BACK as anyone could remember, Roxy had always had money. Her father would tell the story of putting his hand in his pocket to ask his plucky teenage daughter if she needed money only to be told ‘no’—she had her own. Roxy had always been motivated to make her own and was proud that in the Jacenko household, where money and wealth were discussed over dinner, she had.

  She was raised to be a self-sufficient and independent soul, an only child until age ten, rattling around in a huge mansion, making the long 45-minute solo commute across the Harbour Bridge from Hunters Hill on the leafy north shore to Rose Bay in Sydney’s east in a taxi each day to attend her prestigious private school.

  By the time she was working at McDonald’s at age fourteen, Roxy’s independence had grown fierce. Making money at a young age had made her feel validated and she would make it her mission to make more. She didn’t want to be one of those people who lived on handouts from their parents. Those people annoyed her—just as they annoyed her self-made parents.

  She had accumulated many rich friends—in fact she had made a point of surrounding herself with extremely wealthy people. Her boyfriends had gotten richer, her best friend Jessica Ingham was considered an heiress, a number of employees at Sweaty Betty had come from privileged eastern suburbs families. It was clear money mattered.

  One of Roxy’s favourite expressions was ‘money talks’.

  ‘She really doesn’t care how smart you were,’ said a former Betty who left the company feeling burned and burnt out. ‘She used to say: “Do you want to be driving a Holden or a Ferrari?”’

  Roxy felt the same about air travel. Why travel commercially when you could travel privately? While working on The Celebrity Apprentice she told a colleague: ‘I’ve never flown commercial in Australia. I always fly private.’ At age thirty-two, she had never been to the Qantas Club lounge at the domestic terminal, something the children of the rich routinely took for granted. ‘Is all that food free?’ she asked her travelling companion, gesturing towards the petit fours on her first Qantas Club sojourn on the Channel’s Nine account. Her companion took it to mean Roxy had never considered there might be small luxuries to be had flying commercially.

  Despite her lavish style, Roxy knew how to save money. As a child, she learned from her mother how to haggle to get a better price. She was conservative with staff wages at Sweaty Betty, yet was obsessed with pursuing her dream to own both residential and commercial property like her parents: ‘I wouldn’t be a smart business person if I didn’t continue to look at how to grow the investments I have,’ she would tell The Daily Telegraph. ‘I have residential, now it’s time to up the ante and go for a commercial property.’

  ‘I always found it hard to liste
n to her say she grew up with nothing,’ said another former Betty. ‘Well she didn’t. She grew up in Woollahra and on the waterfront at Hunters Hill. Everyone that she loved came from money. Her relationship with them depended on how much their family was worth.’

  Her own family had been worth a fortune until the bitter divorce between her parents saw the family’s wealth greatly eroded. Between them Nick and Doreen Jacenko had, from 1980 to 2010, built an impressive empire.

  In conjunction with their factory in Sri Lanka and thriving Capitol Clothing business that generated upwards of $13 million a year, their combined wealth at the time their marriage was foundering in 2011 might easily have matched the estimated $40 million estate BRW magazine attached to the Curtis family in 2008. When their marriage finally ended in 2013—a few months after Roxy’s star had peaked on The Celebrity Apprentice—the Jacenko’s estate included the waterfront house in Vaucluse that sold in 2014 for $15.6 million and commercial properties in Beaconsfield, Alexandria and Ultimo conservatively worth $15 to $20 million.

  Roxy’s happiest childhood years had been spent in the home Nick and Doreen had built on two side-by-side waterfront blocks of land in Hunters Hill. As they started their marriage, the couple had to work at compromise: unable to agree on whether to have an indoor or outdoor pool, they had one of each. Fast forward 30-plus years and now they couldn’t agree on their divorce settlement.

  The pair had been duelling over their estate for three years by the time Oliver Curtis went to jail in June 2016. Beautiful trophies and toys, accumulated over almost 40 years, had been lost in a hostile private war that had taken its effect on both Doreen and Nick and dissolved the assets of the headstrong pair each day. It looked as though the settlement might still have years to run. With Doreen in his corner it had taken the best part of a decade to tie up the loose ends from his first marriage. With her offside, it would likely take longer to finalise the end of his second. She was a tough opponent.

  The situation made Roxy angry. That first decade in a largely empty Hunters Hill mansion had seen Roxy forge close relationships with her parents. They had always been her best friends and best enemies. When her parents fought during Roxy’s childhood, the socially precocious child had learned to pick a side. Though she was like the mother who had sharpened her edges, she had always been a daddy’s girl. ‘We were so close,’ said Nick. She clearly still thought of herself as daddy’s girl when, in 2013, Nick started his relationship with fashion designer Lisa Ho.

  Roxy, said sources, became convinced Ho, who had survived her own financial crisis, would displace her in her father’s life. Her second Jazzy Lou book seemed to imitate life. Like Nick, Jazzy’s father would take up with a new woman, a fashion designer called Tessa Blow. Nick described the book, which he hadn’t read but had heard about, as ‘far-fetched’—‘I would have expected vindictiveness to be in there,’ he said in 2014.

  Roxy would express to the Bettys her belief Ho could end up with her inheritance. The idea became a new obsession. From September 2013, Roxy had her father banned from the Sweaty Betty premises—in a building he owned. Roxy would tell her staff it was ‘because he chose the fashion designer over our family’.

  Because it was her nature to fight—‘war mode is her milieu’, said one observer—Roxy would fight and fight hard. Because her father and his new love were out of favour, her mother Doreen was back in. This was Roxy’s default. She would become her mother’s self-appointed aide-de-camp on the divorce battleground.

  ‘Separately the women were mercurial. Together, Nick had more than met his match,’ said one who feared for all.

  Nick would say that as the settlement negotiation drew on, his wife and daughter banded together to keep him from accessing his money. As settlements were drafted and disposed of, Doreen offered Nick, sixty-six, an allowance and told him he’d be ‘dead in five years’ so should have no need of a settlement.

  Roxy hadn’t spoken to her father for the best part of a year by the time her second child was born in 2014. As a consequence, Nick had never met his 2-year-old grandson Hunter when he bumped into Roxy and Doreen on a leafy Woollahra street one day in May 2016, three days after Curtis’s insider trading trial began.

  He would allege he was assaulted by his daughter and then by his ex-wife while his son-in-law and granddaughter, Pixie, watched. The grandson he had never met ‘screamed’ on the footpath during the encounter.

  Nick and Ho, fifty-five, would file a police report after the random meeting on salubrious Moncur Street at 6 p.m. on Saturday 14 May—Mother’s Day eve. Roxy’s father would tell The Daily Telegraph that without provocation his 36-year-old daughter grabbed him by the neck of his T-shirt and struck him around the head and chest about twenty times while hurling abuse at him.

  Ho, who was walking hand in hand with her new fiancé as they scoped Woollahra’s restaurant belt for some dinner, would confirm that after allegedly unleashing a flurry of blows upon her father, Roxy would turn her attention on the designer. She allegedly grabbed Ho by a scarf she was wearing around her neck, reeled her in and struck the mother of three repeatedly with ‘a closed fist’ to the head and neck. As Ho became the focus of Roxy’s attack, her mother Doreen allegedly continued the assault on her ex-husband, knocking his glasses from his face as she hit him about the head. Doreen then allegedly pushed Ho from behind.

  Police confirmed the couple filed reports at Paddington police station at about 7 p.m. that same night and that police were investigating the matter.

  ‘[Roxy] was screaming “You should be ashamed of yourself” over and over,’ Nick stated. He added he didn’t know what his daughter was referring to.

  ‘She was also yelling “How was New Zealand?” We had just returned from a trip and she must have been tracking us via social media or my credit cards. She knew we’d been away and it annoyed her.’

  Curtis beseeched the couple to ‘just keep walking’.

  ‘I asked Oli to tell Roxy to let go of my scarf so we could move on. I told him “I can’t move—she has hold of my scarf”.’

  Nick and Ho told The Daily Telegraph they wanted to go public with details of the incident in the hope it would jog the memories of witnesses who might come forward so the couple could proceed legally with the matter. They were contemplating taking out Apprehended Violence Orders.

  Through lawyers, Roxy would vehemently deny the claims. She later told the MailOnline: ‘There is no basis for these allegations. I can only attribute such comments to a sad quest for public notoriety by my father Nick Jacenko and Lisa Ho.’

  Family sources maintained the outburst was borne of Doreen and Nick’s protracted divorce settlement that had ruined their business and robbed them both of their incomes. As a result of their marriage ending, the Capitol factory in Sri Lanka had been closed, Nick would say by Doreen, and 400 staff dismissed in one day. Nick believed Doreen feared he and Ho would fire up production at the Sri Lanka factory on a new collection of ‘Lisa Ho’ branded garments.

  Doreen had put caveats on their commercial properties; construction work on the couple’s new harbourside Vaucluse house had stalled and would not be completed under their ownership.

  A much-prized million-dollar Aquariva wooden speedboat, which had been Nick’s motivation for buying the block in Vaucluse, for he enjoyed the idea of a boatshed, would fall into ruin after it was moved from its protective shed—Nick would say ‘stolen’ by his estranged wife—and hidden in what would become its watery grave further up the Parramatta River. The beautiful and fragile craft should have been stored dry and wrapped in covers.

  This alleged assault was not Roxy’s first encounter with Ho. Soon after Ho began her relationship with Nick in 2013, the designer had been verballed by Roxy while handing out Voluntary Euthanasia Party pamphlets at Double Bay Public School on 7 September, the day of the federal election.

  Roxy, Ho would say, confronted her at the polling booth and started taunting her as she distributed pamphlets asking if, foll
owing a stellar fashion career in which she had dressed the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Kate Bosworth, Elle Macpherson, Miranda Kerr and Ivanka Trump, the voluntary work at the polling booth was her new job.

  ‘It was mean girl stuff,’ said a witness. ‘It came out of nowhere and was savage.’

  The well-heeled voters of Double Bay would look away from the nasty domestic disturbance that day—just as the prosperous diners of Woollahra would two years on.

  In 2013, there were many casualties in the Australian fashion industry. Designer Kirrily Johnston had entered into administration. Fashion icon Collette Dinnigan had closed much of her business and wound up production on the evening wear collection that had made her name. Alannah Hill and Kit Willow had also been squeezed out of businesses they created in the decades before.

  The closure of some revered fashion labels would be felt down the line in fashion PR. If designers’ businesses were closing, they had no need for PR. Public relations agencies would find themselves on the list of creditors and, left out of pocket, would also have to consolidate their businesses.

  Roxy’s business had adapted to the changing conditions. Outwardly, Roxy had acknowledged her business was changing. If this had impacted her earnings detrimentally, she was giving nothing away. By the time Sweaty Betty celebrated its tenth year in business in 2014, Roxy had a new Bentley—market value between $200 000 and $300 000—parked in her garage. Though the $460 000 Ferrari was gone, suggesting to Roxy’s admirers that she and Curtis had reinvested in the Bentley, her critics believed the Bentley was a promotional vehicle that Roxy had on loan.