She’s known for being the relentlessly funny, upbeat co-host of ZM’s afternoon show Bree & Clint and of reality TV show Celebrity Treasure Island, but behind the laughter lurks great darkness.
The day it happened, Bree Tomasel was 9 years old. She was sitting at her grandmother’s kitchen table when there was a knock at the door, followed by a commotion, and then a man yelled: “Where are your f***ing keys?”
Suddenly, two strangers were in the kitchen and one of them had a knife to her grandmother’s throat.
It was the middle of the day in a quiet town in suburban Queensland. Bree and her mother had gone into town to run some errands and on the way home had stopped off to visit her grandmother. Two men had seen their beaten-up old Land Cruiser in her grandmother’s driveway and wanted it.
But when Bree’s mother gave them the keys, they didn’t leave. Instead, they started demanding money. When her mother said they didn’t have any, one of them yelled, “You’re f***ing lying”. Then he grabbed Bree, put her in a headlock and held a knife to her throat.
“I was going to die,” she writes in her new book, Unapologetically Me. “I knew it. This was the end.”
While her attacker pressed the rusty hunting blade into her skin, the other man ransacked the house looking for money. He found a banking bag, but it was empty. Bree’s mum had banked the cash earlier that day. When she told him, he became enraged.
He said: “You’re f***ing lying!”
Then, the terrible words: “I’m taking your daughter.”
He pulled off her seat and dragged her across the kitchen, still holding the knife to her throat.
She screamed, “Mum, help! Don’t let them take me!”
Her mum pushed past and stood between her daughter and the door. She told the man to take her instead.
He yelled, “f*** you, I’m taking the girl.”
Bree writes, “Nothing was ever the same again.”
The attack is the defining moment of the book and, to some extent, her life. Now 35, she suffers from ongoing anxiety and panic attacks and has had two mental breakdowns, all of which she believes can be linked directly to the attack.
She writes: “I believed so deeply I was going to die and I have never been able to fully shake that feeling. The trauma changed my brain.”
Now, talking with the Herald ahead of the book’s launch, she says of her two breakdowns: “In those moments, both times, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’ll come out the other side of this as the same person. I don’t think I’ll ever feel like me again’ … which is f***ing scary and something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
When publisher Allen & Unwin approached her to write a memoir, she said their request was basically as follows: “What are all the really hard parts of your life that you don’t really want to think about or talk about too much? Now think about it really intricately and put it on paper so everyone else can read it.”
She says her immediate response was: “Great, love it, my worst nightmare.”
She is a highly successful radio DJ and TV personality with a massive social media following: 750,000 followers on Facebook, 500,000 on TikTok, 327,000 on Instagram. She’s built both her radio career and online persona around being funny and upbeat, and, when she discusses her mental illness, she sometimes does so with a laugh. This can make it seem as if it hasn’t made her life a misery. But it has. It really has.
Soon after she was attacked as a 9-year-old, she had several sessions with a child psychologist. She no longer remembers anything about the sessions, but she does remember becoming very angry after one of them, telling her mum in the car on the way home that she wouldn’t go back and that she never wanted to talk about the attack ever again.
The question, then, is why now, 20-something years later, she’s done exactly that, in great and horrifying detail, for the whole world to read.
Before writing about it, in a chapter titled “Terror”, she called her mum. The shared experience of the attack, she says, has bonded them forever. She remembers vividly the moment her mum told the men to take her instead.
“I can remember exactly how she sounded, how she literally was staring them in the eye. And I just remember thinking, ‘She doesn’t know what these people are capable of, or what they’re gonna do. She just knows that she would rather it be her than me’.
“I saw in that moment that she would give her own life for me.”
In the end, she didn’t have to. The second attacker, returning after ransacking the house, convinced his mate to let Bree go. She would not be killed and she would not be kidnapped. She would survive, but she would not be fine.
Reliving the episode with her mum was hard: “There were tears between her and me as we were talking about it,” she says. And there was plenty more crying while she wrote about it in excruciating, sometimes forensic detail, in the book – describing the feel of the attacker’s breath on the side of her face, for instance, and the stench he gave off of filth and cigarettes.
“A lot of tears,” she says. “And every time I read it I cry as well.
“You never get over it.”
It’s a lot for one person to deal with: a near-death experience during a home invasion, aged 9; probable PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), anxiety; panic attacks and two mental breakdowns. But then, three years ago, a friend messaged to ask if she’d ever thought about being assessed for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). She hadn’t, but once she started researching the symptoms, she realised she really should.
As a kid, she says, she had sometimes found it physically impossible to concentrate: “Like there were 10 televisions turned on at once inside my brain and I had to figure out which one to focus on – as well as trying to follow along with the teacher”.
She had assumed that was just life, but now, googling furiously, she was starting to suspect it wasn’t. She eventually went to see a psychologist. The psychologist agreed.
The subsequent diagnosis, she writes in the book, was a “mindf***”. She went through what she describes as a “grieving process” for the person she’d once believed she was.
She describes having ADHD as like trying to drive an abnormal car.
“It looks okay from the outside,” she writes, “but on the inside it’s a bit rickety and I know there’s something f***ed up about it. My car doesn’t work like the other cars, but I have to try to keep this car on the road that’s designed for normal cars.”
She was prescribed medication, but it didn’t help so she stopped. Instead, she’s come up with her own ways to manage the disorder. For instance, she’s kinder to herself – she has come to appreciate the benefits of the unique way her mind works, giving her “superpowers”.
“I think a lot of ADHD people are like that, like being creative or having weird and different thoughts to other people and using that outside-of-the-box thinking, which has always been a big strength of mine.”
The book’s other big storyline is her homosexuality. She describes her decision to keep it secret from her family as her life’s biggest regret. Her eventual coming out, she says, was a “shitshow” that dragged on for roughly a decade.
She had been in multiple same-sex relationships over several years by the time she came out to her mum, aged 21, but when she did, she made her mum promise to keep the secret from her dad.
“Which, looking back on that now, that’s pretty f***ed up of me. But she did, she kept it a secret, and I think it’s been the only real secret in their marriage for 30-something years. So she has regrets too.”
She says she knew how strongly her dad disapproved of homosexuality, and she didn’t want him to know because she dreaded his reaction.
In the book, she writes: “Would he be disgusted by his own daughter? Highly likely. Would he be ashamed of me? Yes, I believed he would – and that broke my heart.”
She says now: “I’m still dealing, I think, with a lot of years where I bottled up shame and had to hide things … so there’s still some resentment there, for sure.”
The process of writing the book helped her deal with some of it. There were questions she wanted her dad to answer, she says, and the book provided the perfect excuse to ask them.
She says the main question was: “Did, you know? Did you know, and not say anything?” She had always suspected he did.
“You’d have to be an idiot and completely oblivious, and he’s not. He’s just not. So I always felt like he knew and he didn’t say anything. And so I asked all those questions and he said he had “inklings” – is how he puts it – when I was in my early 20s.”
She sees now that he was dealing with his own stuff, including “everything that had kind of been drilled into him”, particularly by the Catholic church, but she still feels resentment. “I wish I could go back and change it, but I can’t. We can only move forward now.”
She wishes he had come to her and made clear she didn’t have to hide. It was his responsibility, she feels, to tell her it wouldn’t change the way he felt about her.
“I resent him a little bit for that – for not bringing it out into the open earlier.”
Hiding had become a way of life. During her first breakdown, in 2015, she’d shut herself off from friends and the world and lived only to work. She was ashamed of her inability to cope. She thought she was the only person in the world who couldn’t.
But by the time of her second breakdown, during the Covid lockdowns of 2020, something in her had changed. She felt that telling her story could help others. At the very least, she thought, it might help someone feel less alone.
Her co-host Clint Roberts wasn’t sure she should do it. She believes he was worried she would go to pieces. But she didn’t care. She no longer wanted to be someone who hid.
On air, she asked listeners if they were okay, then told them that if they weren’t, that was okay because she felt the same. “Right now,” she said, “I don’t feel okay.”
There was no humour, no punchline, just the raw admission of her suffering. The listener messages started coming then, and it seemed they would never stop.
“Thousands of messages,” she says. “Thousands. To be honest, it was actually overwhelming. I talk about it in the book: one particular message I got from this girl, it makes me emotional, talking about it.
“She messaged me and said, ‘I’ve never messaged someone from the media … but I was in the car the other day on the way to do something to myself and I heard you and I turned around and went home’.
“That’s something that I’ll never forget.”
When she was first approached to write the book, she says she did a lot of soul-searching, of exactly the type you would expect from someone with pathological anxiety.
“I was like, ‘Why would I write this book? No one wants to read this. What is the point? Why? Why am I writing this?’”
The reason, she decided, was to help people. As she understood better than most, we are in the midst of a mental health crisis. People are not okay, and she’s one of them, and she felt the importance of letting people know that. Because, for all the greater openness about mental health, she says the shame and stigma remain.
“People are like, ‘Oh, it’s changing and it’s getting better’, but I’m, like, ‘Yeah, but it’s pretty f***ing slow’.
“We can make it faster because I feel like people need it now. I feel like people need to know that there are ways to deal with it. There is help. There are other people that feel the exact same way as you.”
She says that reading back over the book sometimes makes her cringe (“I sound like a mental case”) but the parts of the book she hates the most are also the parts she loves the most. She knows the value of her vulnerability.
“The whole point is to help at least one person – hopefully more, because it’s taking a lot of f***ing energy, so it’d be nice if it helps more than one – but I feel like that’s what I was meant to do. I feel like that’s my purpose.”
On the surface, at least, she seems good. And sometimes she is. Sometimes, she says, she has no anxiety at all. But at other times, it’s crippling and “takes over my entire brain and life”.
For instance, on the first day of filming every new season of Celebrity Treasure Island, she looks out at the sea of television personalities and thinks about how much better they’d be than her as hosts.
She writes: “I still have a full-blown panic attack every time I agree to do another season, those negative voices in my head, wondering why they’ve asked me back and telling me I’ll do a bad job this time.”
She still carries the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam wherever she goes. She rarely uses it, in part because she worries about its addictive properties, but just knowing it’s there helps keep her anxiety in check.
“It’s a battle that I’ll fight my whole life,” she says. “But it’s also something I’m not ashamed of any more.”
Her most recent panic attack occurred when the book was about to go to print. She was stressed, worried that what she’d written wasn’t any good, worried that she was going to upset people. It had been a lot. But she knew how to deal with it. She took half a lorazepam, got a good night’s sleep and in the morning she was okay.
Several weeks later, when asked to talk about her most recent panic attack, she didn’t hide from it, didn’t pretend everything was okay, didn’t pretend that her long and sometimes horrific experience of mental illness could be neatly tied up and given a happy ending. She wasn’t hiding any more.
Unapologetically Me by Bree Tomasel (Allen & Unwin, $37.99) is published in New Zealand on October 15. Celebrity Treasure Island screens on TVNZ2 and TVNZ+, Monday to Wednesday
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