Blonde Ambition

  Her decision to invite the 60 Minutes cameras in for her surgery at Freemasons Epworth Hospital in Melbourne so that the product of the surgery—a chunk of bloody flesh containing a cyst—could be revealed on camera, brought backlash. Mum and dad Australians would ask the question ‘Roxy who?’ as they struggled to understand why it was necessary for the PR queen to invite cameras in for the lumpectomy. In online blogs they would write Roxy was ‘sick in the head’, ‘deluded’ and ‘lonely’ for consulting her preschool-aged daughter and inviting her to feel the cyst. Many recommended psychiatric intervention. Television critics struggled to understand why 60 Minutes was ‘stooping to a new low’ content wise. Furious breast cancer survivors were angered Roxy had rejected a Sydney surgeon’s advice to have the entire breast removed—effectively choosing a breast implant over surgery that stood a better chance of extending her life. Even Dr Paul Crea, the Sydney surgeon who had in vain advised actress Belinda Emmett to have a mastectomy which may have saved her life—Emmett eventually died of secondary cancers after resolving to keep her diseased breast—would say there would always be patients who would reject expert advice. ‘In the treatment of breast cancer, a total mastectomy is always better than a partial one or lumpectomy even though the recovery time is greater,’ the St Vincent’s Hospital surgeon said

  The biggest bombshell of the 60 Minutes program concerned Roxy’s children who, she admitted, hadn’t been told their father was in jail though he would be imprisoned for a year at least. Pixie and little Hunter, two, had been told Daddy was in China on business—their mother hadn’t wanted her children to think of their father as a ‘baddie’. Roxy admitted telling her children their father would be home at Christmas—‘because they’ve got no idea when Christmas is, it could be twelve months or two years to them’.

  One of Langdon’s questions clearly hit a nerve with Roxy. Asked if she had an ‘image problem’, the image and brand specialist would respond with barely contained anger: ‘Jealousy is a curse.’

  Roxy would visit Curtis in jail on 8 July—two weeks after he was placed into detention. That Friday, wearing blue jeans and a black poloneck skivvy and none of her usual $180 000 diamond baubles, she travelled to Parklea Correctional Centre in Sydney’s west to visit her white-collar criminal at what media related was his second or third jail in two weeks.

  The press had been tracking the 30-year-old since he was taken into custody on 24 June. According to reports, Curtis spent the first week of his prison sentence in holding cells in Sydney’s CBD police headquarters in Surry Hills due to a shortage of beds at Silverwater jail further west. He was then moved—initially to Silverwater where his co-conspirator Hartman served his 15-month sentence, and then further west again to Parklea. It was at Parklea that Roxy was snapped by a news photographer, emerging after a visit with her husband of four years and carrying a receipt for property and two small, clear snap-lock bags, the contents of which were indistinguishable in the photos.

  Shortly after the visit, Curtis was transported five hours down the Monaro Highway to Cooma. The jail, south of Canberra, is not far from the Victorian border. It was once, in 1877, a lunatic asylum and remains a freezing 150-year-old facility.

  After exposing her armpit scar for Woman’s Day’s cameras the day after the 60 Minutes interview aired, Roxy would tell Sydney breakfast radio stars Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O that ‘Oli’ was now working as a clerk in an administrative role and going to the gym ‘a lot’. He was allowed $100 a week in his prison account, which she topped up, and was saving up for ‘a doona’.

  Roxy was permitted two 1-hour visits a week with her husband, but by the middle of September had made none subsequent to the early visit to Parklea. Phone calls, which she said occurred daily, would have to suffice.

  The state of the couple’s marriage had been a subject of speculation since 2014 when, two years into her marriage, Roxy told the MailOnline the couple were ‘polar opposites’—a ‘lucky’ thing, she said, or else ‘we would be strangling each other’.

  ‘I think anyone who says that a marriage is a bed of roses and that they’re living marital bliss, is talking bullshit because it’s not true and that honeymoon period does end,’ she said in November 2014 while launching her third book at another glamorous location.

  She wouldn’t visit her husband on his thirty-first birthday in August 2016. Father’s Day would come and go without a visitation. The talk that their marriage was in trouble swirled in PR offices, among mothers at Pixie’s preschool and in the cafés of Bondi and Double Bay where Roxy lived and worked.

  After the deluge of criticism that followed 60 Minutes, Roxy would cave in and hand the phone to her daughter when the little girl’s father rang three days before her fifth birthday on 13 August.

  ‘It was the worst thing,’ she would tell more than 300 000 breakfast radio listeners on KIIS FM. ‘He phoned on a Saturday—she cried for the whole day after. Her first words were: “When are you coming home?”’

  Six weeks after Pixie’s birthday, Roxy would finally set off to Cooma alone, on 24 September, in a privately chartered jet—paying, media estimated, $5700 for the 6-hour round trip from Bankstown airport to the Snowy Mountains. Her luxurious transportation was in line with her lifestyle but was a far cry from Curtis’s new life in a three-by-four-metre freezing cell where he would spend sixteen hours a day dressed not in his preferred designer labels of Gucci and Hermès but in a prison-issued green tracksuit.

  Roxy had been telling friends she had prepared for life without Curtis. She had even started calling herself a ‘single mum’. Possibly it was in jest.

  Geographically separated from her husband, she would soon reestablish a close connection to her ex, multi-millionaire boyfriend Nabil Gazal. Nabil, or ‘Junior’, was seeing a lot of Roxy by the time she boarded the little 5-passenger Cessna Citation Mustang to see Curtis in Cooma.

  Gazal and Roxy had been sighted heading into a private dining room at Japanese restaurant Saké in The Rocks on 17 September—one week before she caught her chartered plane to Cooma. Three days after her visit with her husband, she and Gazal were spied settling at a table at Bills café in Darlinghurst, shortly before noon on Tuesday 27 September. Roxy, said fellow diners, appeared to have gone to some trouble for the catch-up with her younger ex. She was wearing a leather dress that looked suspiciously like Louis Vuitton.

  There had been previous sightings of the couple together. ‘Junior’, who had been the one to initiate their break-up when they’d dated almost six years earlier, had also been sighted with her at Machiavelli in the CBD. Machiavelli, the restaurant choice of powerbrokers and politicians, was not where one dined to not be seen. If it had been the couple’s hope to avoid detection, surely they’d have chosen a more clandestine meeting place, like Gazal’s luxurious Potts Point apartment.

  As it happened, by October, Roxy had been sighted there too. The Gazal family, according to family friends, were up in arms that the young scion and future head of the building company, rumoured to be worth in the region of a billion dollars, was spending an increasing amount of time with his ex-flame, a married mother of two, when he could have ‘any other’ beautiful and less conspicuous woman in the country.

  Younger brother Nicholas was said to have ‘gone off his head’ before announcing to ‘everyone’ his brother was falling for Roxy’s charms again. Gazal’s two sisters, Nicole and Nora, had stopped talking to their brother, while the family matriarch Maud was deeply worried.

  Family insiders would say Old Nabil had been opposed to the union initially, prompting Junior to end the affair to please his dying father—and healthy mother. But now that Old Nabil was deceased, Junior felt he could make his own decisions about the company he kept, regardless of what his healthy mother wanted. The week before Curtis’s appeal would come before the court, a laughing Roxy—without her wedding and engagement rings—would be photographed with Gazal leaving a restaurant in Potts Point near his apartment.

  The Gazal
family weren’t the only ones struggling to make sense of Roxy’s behaviour following Curtis’s jailing. The Curtis family had also become increasingly estranged from their daughter-in-law. Roxy’s children had seen little of their paternal grandparents in 2016. The relationship between Roxy and her in-laws had been icy for a couple of years. Friends of the Curtises said the relationship was tested when Roxy put her foot down and blocked Curtis’s plans to attend his sister Sophie’s wedding at Qualia resort on Hamilton Island in April 2014. Then in the ninth month of her pregnancy with Hunter and launching Pixie’s Bows, the offshore wedding had been a trifle inconvenient for Roxy.

  Relations had deteriorated further afterwards. It was a great shame, everyone agreed. Roxy had no relationship with her own sister and it had been through fellow PR consultant Sophie that she had met her husband.

  ‘The way Roxy has treated the Curtises has been terrible,’ said a friend of the family who was also in PR. ‘Initially they were seduced by Roxy, as everyone is, but after she married Oli she changed towards them. She is great at dividing and conquering. There is no justification for what she has put them through.’

  Like Nick Jacenko and Ruby, Nick, Angela and Sophie Curtis had found themselves consigned to the sidelines of Pixie’s and Hunter’s young lives.

  It would surprise no-one when Roxy missed her own sister’s surprise wedding in Los Angeles in October 2016. The pair hadn’t fully repaired their relationship in the eight years since their notorious fight at a Sydney nightclub.

  The space in Roxy’s life that might have been filled with Curtis and their extended families had she been on better terms with them, would be filled instead with her children, the ongoing renovation of her Paddington office space, social media and her businesses.

  ‘In your personal life you have to take things as they come and manage them accordingly,’ Roxy told the MailOnline in 2014. ‘I don’t cry in the corner about what is or isn’t happening in my life. You get on with it and deal with it as it happens.’

  After falling out with her father in 2013, and likely in anticipation of the future sell-off of her parents’ joint properties, the Sweaty Betty team had quit Beaconsfield and settled into new office premises at 53 Cross Street, Double Bay in the summer of 2014. The building was also home to the restaurant of successful reality TV chef Evan Hansimikali, of ‘Evan and Bella’ fame from the 2005 season of My Restaurant Rules. The location gave Roxy proximity to the reality stardom she hoped one day to rediscover. Hansimikali’s Pink Salt restaurant had once been the White Blue Restaurant & Bar, owned by a posse of Greek businessmen, including Roxy’s old boyfriend, convicted drug dealer John Macris.

  Sweaty Betty PR was spruiking new associations with Vespa Australia, Italian-born chef Stefano Manfredi, make-up brand Nude By Nature, Kismet By Milka jewellery, Lady Jayne hair products, The Style Smith blog, the Four In Hand Hotel, Mosman’s Buena bar, Bar Machiavelli, Fashion Weekend Sydney, Pacifico Optical and online fashion retailer Cosette, and had ongoing associations with Donut Time, Avon, Napoleon Perdis and Leading Hotels of the World.

  In a diabolically clever move, Roxy had even picked up the granddaughter of Kerry Packer as a client. The name Francesca Packer Barham could open any door in town and, in 2015, Barham retained Roxy as her publicist. The psychology student, twenty-one, was enjoying a gap year in 2016 and Roxy was advising her on social media and fashion. Barham’s mother, Gretel, was unsure of her daughter’s new attachment to Roxy but her daughter had moved out of home and was always going to rebel a little as she searched for a foothold into the future. If Roxy was as lucky as her former mentor Theo Onisforou had been with old Kerry, she might find some of ‘Chessie’s’ golddust would rub off.

  The PR business was in good shape, as too was the @sweatybettypr Instagram page, which had broken through the 100 000 follower barrier.

  Following The Ministry of Talent’s well-received launch in 2013, Roxy would review the business two years later after losing some of her biggest foundation bloggers. In 2015, Elle Ferguson and Tash Sefton and their They All Hate Us blog quit Ministry for international modelling and talent agency IMG, menswear blog Front Row Suit moved on to model agency Chic Management’s talent arm, while Bianca Cheah of Sportelux and Sydney Fashion Blogger’s Antoinette Marie had started self-managing.

  The changes prompted a rethink by Roxy who would look to reality TV to fill the void. She started approaching the cast from the latest series of The Bachelor to join the Ministry as bloggers.

  Ministry’s Instagram account had 54 000 followers in October 2016—the lowest of Roxy’s three Insta-fuelled businesses—while Pixie’s Bows had pop-up stalls but remained exclusively an online proposition. Roxy would say she was selling ‘hundreds of thousands of bows’ before her cancer scare and Curtis’s insider trading scandal. Thanks to her highly rotated promotional posts on her own and Pixie’s social media accounts—and interviews she’d done throughout the year—sales could be expected to lift, if only in the short term.

  Pixie’s Instagram had started to level out at 112 000 follows—though on some days she could receive over a thousand likes if she could manage to drag little brother Hunter into a post or into a session with the kids’ personal trainer.

  Roxy was defiant in the face of sceptics and critics who asked why she was ‘shopping’ her cancer news to the nation in three paid interviews. She would say she was selling the interviews to raise public awareness about the importance of self-examination and to raise money for charity. Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie had, with her March 2015 revelation that she carried the BRCA1 gene, started a conversation internationally about breast cancer, mastectomies and uterine cancer, just as singer Kylie Minogue had with her 2005 diagnosis, lumpectomy and chemotherapy. Roxy would donate her unspecified profits from the paid interviews to three cancer research organisations—Breast Cancer Network Australia, Ovarian Cancer Australia and The Australasian Gastro-Intestinal Cancer Trials Group.

  Her donations of course brought out her sceptics. These were the same people who couldn’t swallow the line she’d only appeared on The Celebrity Apprentice to raise money for charity three years earlier. Roxy’s charitable donations had grown along with her celebrity.

  Motivations aside, the cancer seemed to be responding well after five weeks of radiation treatment that ended in September. Roxy had no qualms about sharing something as personal as a health crisis with the media. It appeared everything was content or an opportunity for engagement with the general public.

  In 2013, she had spoken to Fairfax Media about a dependence on Nurofen that had bordered on addiction beginning soon after she opened Sweaty Betty in 2004. She recounted driving through Woollahra one day when searing stomach pain prompted her to stop her car in the middle of the road: ‘I actually thought I was going to die. It felt like my whole insides were about to explode. I was like, “Oh my god, call an ambulance!”’ On the way to hospital, as she would tell journalist Jane Cadzow, she informed a paramedic she had taken six tablets of Nurofen Plus—a non-prescription painkiller that contains codeine and ibuprofen. The incredulous paramedic had asked her: ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  Frequent headaches had driven her to the over-the-counter drug. She started taking two, then four, then six, sometimes eight. She said the headaches would disappear and she would feel ‘all Zen’. ‘I had this aura of calmness about me. My arms felt like jelly, my legs felt like jelly, and I was Zenned out.’

  She would continue taking the non-prescription drug habitually—which was giving her the symptoms of euphoria—until she developed stomach ulcers that finally burst.

  A decade on in 2015, she had contracted a serious infection following highly publicised rhinoplasty that would require her to be readmitted to hospital and put on a PICC line (peripherally inserted central catheter) to administer intravenous antibiotics. She shared a picture of herself playing with her children, with the PICC line in plain view, and days later she would present a seminar with PICC line arm bandage o
n full display before contracting pneumonia, because she worked ‘like a lunatic and I don’t give myself any time to rest’.

  Health scares were not new to Roxy. Nor were they ever private matters, it seemed. She had also contracted Bell’s palsy—a condition that paralyses muscles on one side of the face—in the final weeks of her pregnancy with Hunter.

  ‘I noticed [something was different] when I was in the office and caught my reflection,’ she told news and entertainment website News.com in April 2014.

  It just felt wrong, like my brain was telling my face to move, but when it was, it was in a strange and delayed capacity. I couldn’t smile properly—I’m bubbly and always smiling and having a joke and I couldn’t [on that day] … I was sad because I was thinking about when Pixie’s brother was born, I would want to hold him over my face to have a picture taken. Silly, but it’s what came to my mind instantly.

  Given the post C-section abdominal tear she’d encountered rushing back to work after Pixie was born, some people believed Roxy didn’t always know what was in her best interests when it came to her health and publicity. None knew what to make of some plainly whacky PR industry small talk that had it Roxy was ‘cycling’ her own blood at the office and, following a clash of appointments, had once been sighted wearing a small device and a large amount of intravenous tubing.

  The Roxy phenomenon, academics would say, fell into the category of modern-day narcissist. Learned psychologists had been debating the effects of social media and Instagram on adolescents and adults alike for some time. Roxy’s generation of millennials was on its way to becoming the most narcissistic generation of all time.

  Certainly it appeared Roxy couldn’t get enough of her own image—on social media, on television, on podcasts, on blogs. If the nation and the wider world were in the middle of a narcissist’s epidemic as many believed, Roxy had become a poster girl for it.