Barbara Dreaver is run by Freemasons and demons, says lady in supermarket

2026-03-29 - 16:04

There is a special type of abuse and threats reserved for women, and there are extra issues for Māori and Pasifika women who work in the public eye. The attacks to which my male colleagues are subjected pale in comparison to the vitriol that is heaped at my door. About 80 percent of this comes from men. These are men of all nationalities. Women journalists in the Pacific also have it tough: some even face physical violence as they are seen to be treading outside a woman’s traditional role. The first time I received what I considered a threat was in 2004. I had been doing stories about a variety of scams when, a couple of nights in a row, I noticed a car with people in it parked across the road from my house. I didn’t take too much notice. On the third night it was there again. When I arrived home from work and went into my house, I discovered a beep beep beep beep on the landline, signalling there was a message waiting. I dialled in and heard what sounded like a child chanting in a high- pitched voice. As I strained to make out the words the voice suddenly lowered. An adult voice said, “I am coming to get you and your son.” When I got to work next morning, I dialled into my home answerphone and handed the receiver to the head of security. He didn’t like what he heard. Eyes narrowing, he said, “Leave it to me.” A few days later he called me into his office and said there would be no more problems, and there weren’t. I never asked him what had been done to solve the problem. * I always tell young reporters not to read comments on social media because this is where common decency goes to die. My good friend Teuila Blakely, an actor and writer who has been the target of more abuse than anyone I know, gave me some good advice: Never respond – it just validates the fools. Over the years I’ve had people commenting on my ‘fat and ugly’ body, my ‘horrible’ hair, my lisp (‘can’t understand why she’s in broadcasting; they should take her off the air’) and my race (‘just another coconut’; ‘plastic Polynesian’). Sometimes it’s best to be lighthearted. One time I was out to lunch at a café with Dominique Schwartz, then ABC Australia’s New Zealand correspondent. The woman behind the counter looked me up and down. “You look so much fatter on TV,” she said. Dominique and I started to laugh: I had just asked for extra sour cream and cheese on top of my chilli. The woman was not amused. “Didn’t you hear me? I said you look fat on TV.” As we left, we gave her a cheery wave. “Move out of the way,” I said to Dominique and laughed. “My fat arse is coming out the door.” Shops, especially supermarkets, can be problematic. I stick with ones where the staff know me and are protective. One day I was closely shadowed around the aisles by a man who looked to be in his early sixties. At the checkout he planted himself behind me, yelling at me to talk to him. After the checkout operator waved for a security officer he backed off, but he followed me outside and watched from a few metres away as I loaded up the car. As I drove out of the car park, he was still there, standing and staring. Another time a woman came up to me in the entry to a supermarket, hissing that I worked for an organisation run by Freemasons. “And demons,” she added for good measure. I told her loudly to get away from me and walked inside. She must have followed because she approached me again in one of the aisles, making it clear she knew who I was and where I worked. I again told her to go away. When I got to the checkout I talked to the operator, who summoned security. The guard escorted me to my car in the underground car park without further incident. Much as I try to laugh off such incidents, I have to admit they can be seriously unnerving. * Sometimes dubious actions against journalists originate in the media itself. One involved the efforts of a senior political journalist in New Zealand to get me sacked, or at the very least reprimanded. At the time I’d been at TVNZ only three years and was proud of a story I had just done in Fiji. The country was between coups and things were tense with the military. My story involved a Fijian man who had trained with an Israeli mercenary company. This company had subsequently offered its services to the Fiji government. After the story came out, the Fiji police raided Fiji TV, confiscated the tape of my story and began pushing TVNZ to allow its officers to question me. A male media executive in Fiji, with whom I had had run-ins over what I believed was unethical behaviour, wrote a personal email about me to two of his media friends in New Zealand. The email was full of statements such as “She has been strutting around the local journos claiming she is going to bring the Fiji government down” and ended with “Don’t you have enough to keep the Barbara Dreavers of this world at home?” The email, as a personal communication, was none of my business, but it became my business when the senior political journalist, one of the Fiji media executive’s friends who’d received it, forwarded it to the head of TVNZ news and current affairs with the words, “I thought you should see this.” He praised the executive as someone “active in promoting journalistic ethics through the Pacific” and “a very level-headed sort of a chap”. He had some sympathy for the man’s comments, he said. He had worked with me in Fiji himself. I had made things up and endangered other journalists. And that wasn’t the end of the matter. The Fiji-based executive got his reporters to ring TVNZ’s public affairs department to complain about the story. This was an unusual step: reporters should not be asked to ring and complain about a story their boss doesn’t like. Fortunately, the TVNZ bosses had my back. They responded: “Barbara Dreaver is a highly regarded and experienced journalist and TVNZ stands by her story.” They invited a formal complaint. None was made. The incident died a swift death. Taken with kind permission from the excellent new bestselling memoir Be Brave: The Life of a Pacific Correspondent by Barbara Dreaver (Awa Press, $45), available in bookstores nationwide.