Herald on Sunday columnist Paul Holmes interviewed his broadcasting colleague Tony Veitch about the allegations Veitch assaulted his former partner
KEY POINTS:
Monday morning, when the Tony Veitch news broke in The Dominion Post, was a shocker. Just after 5.30 in the morning at Newstalk ZB, my producer Nadia Tolich and I were sitting at adjacent desks preparing the breakfast programme. Suddenly Nadia said quietly and urgently, "My God!" I looked up, saw the Dominion Post story on her screen and brought it up on my own computer.
As I read the tail end of it in disbelief, Tony Veitch wandered up to me, as he often does, and put his hand on my shoulder. I said, "Tony, what is this?" He pulled up a chair and sat down next to me. He told me with a kind of resignation that he had made a huge mistake two and a half years ago. We were half an hour from airtime. Ten minutes later, Veitch went to his studio, we went to ours. I felt sick. We would just have to get through the morning.
It is late Thursday afternoon when Veitch comes to my house for this interview, 24 hours after delivering his statement at the packed news conference. For four days now he has endured the nation's sound and fury. His career is on the brink of ruin and might even now have gone. He has not slept for four nights. He is shattered, wired and extremely emotional. He will break off our interview frequently as his voice breaks, his eyes fill and tears flow.
I have to tell you straight up, I consider myself a friend of Tony Veitch. I have worked with the man a long time and have always admired his good humour, his dedication, his energy and his extraordinary work ethic. He is enormously successful. I have watched him as, over more than a decade, he became a fine broadcaster. I admire fine and gifted broadcasting very much. It does not blind me, but in my own very public life I have learned to prize loyalty. I remain loyal to Tony Veitch, I have a job to do. I do not believe I have met Kristin Dunne-Powell but I believe she is a very nice person.
PH: So, how would you say you're bearing up?
TV: It has been an hour-by-hour survival proposition ... I'm struggling ... it's the darkest period I think I've ever had and, if I'm being honest, I can't see any light at the end of a very long tunnel.
PH: Have you been sleeping?
TV: No, I haven't slept for four days. On and off I wake up in complete grief.
PH: You have got, or you've had, a very good career going. I imagine that is part of the grief.
TV: Yeah, it is. Honestly? It is. It's been the most unbelievable journey to where I've got in my career. I never dreamed I'd be reading television news in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands, or a radio programme. To be honest, I played sport as a kid. I was scared of speaking in front of people in public. Petrified. It made me sick and then I learned how to control these demons and the fears. It's only in the past year that I've felt, with radio and television, that I can go on the air and feel confident.
PH: What is your situation, employment-wise?
TV: I don't know. I don't know where it's going ...
PH: Well, you've been suspended from radio.
TV: Yeah, and they're currently investigating that internally.
PH: TVNZ?
TV: Ah, at this stage, not sure.
PH: Situation fluid?
TV: Yep.
PH: How much of what happened that night can you tell me?
TV: Paul, for reasons of which I'm sure you're aware, I can just say there was a terrible incident which I have lived through, thought about, regretted, tried to explain in my own head and in my own heart since it happened two and a half years ago. What I can say is, I didn't know how to react or handle myself.
Tears well in Veitch's eyes. He cannot speak.
PH: Go on.
TV: I was at an absolute low of my life. I couldn't work out why I couldn't have a relationship. I had always wanted to be a father. The relationship I thought was going to give me that, was now over. We had tried to work at it a number of times and it hadn't worked. I had been in the radio show only for about 12 months. I struggled to do a job I didn't think would be that hard. I was doing mornings and learning how to beat the demons of fear, which I didn't know how to cope with.
PH: And being a public figure.
TV: I hated it and I still find it hard.
PH: Had you worked that night?
TV: I'd been at TVNZ.
PH: You say there was an argument. You argued for a couple of hours. What was the argument about?
TV: It's difficult because I don't want to get into things like that and I don't want to cause any more hurt.
PH: Are you telling me you had trouble with relationships?
TV: I've always had trouble forming relationships.
PH: Do you know why that is?
TV: I have my suspicions and I think one of the things that helped me, if I can say the only thing to come positively out of this, was counselling because I found it incredibly difficult to let people in and to form partnerships and relationships with anybody. I'm not making any excuses but I only learned when I went to counselling that I had never recovered from what happened with my parents and I carried a lot of that with me for many, many years. At counselling, I was able to go and explain what had happened and how I was dealing with it. I was simply looking for perfection in a relationship and if I didn't find perfection, I would end it. I didn't know how to deal with human beings who have frailties and I always wanted a relationship that gave me happiness.
PH: How old were you when your parents broke up?
TV: Eight.
PH: You're a perfectionist in your work?
TV: That's one of the reasons I was battling. I wanted every radio show, every TV show to be the best I'd ever done. What I was finding at the time, when I was trying to follow Martin Devlin after he left Radio Sport, was that I wasn't producing what I should and I wasn't happy in my life. I was incredibly unhappy. I was perceived as being this person who, in front of the camera, was always happy, young Veitchy, and behind it all I was incredibly lonely. I was so lonely and I wanted a relationship. I wanted to be happy.
PH: Tell me about Kristin.
TV: I loved Kristin. I did. And we were together for three and a half years and we broke up a number of times for the reason that when we had the tough times we didn't know the way out. And I've got to say I had to learn, and that's what I did learn, post this, how to deal with where you've got two people who don't know how to stop.
We are speaking very quietly now. Between our voices there are long pauses. Veitch talks about that night, about how he drove Kristin to the hospital.
TV: Imagine yourself in the worst possible situation with your partner. The worst possible situation. Something terrible had happened and we both knew that. This was a Sunday night. After about three hours of being with her at the hospital I had to go and jump on Radio Sport for a radio show for a couple of hours. At that point they thought Kristin had bruising.
PH: When did they find out she had bone injuries in her back?
TV: I found that out about two months later from her.
PH: So you were with her all night then went virtually straight to the radio programme.
TV: Yeah.
PH: And all night they thought it was bruising?
TV: According to the doctors at the hospital, yeah, bruising.
PH: So when we hear reports of a broken back, are they accurate?
TV: I don't know because I've never seen ... look, I believe what Kristin is saying. I've only heard from text messages and emails and on the occasions we caught up after the incident.
PH: Did you see her again?
TV: A number of times.
PH: So she maintained contact?
TV: Yeah, we were in contact for a few weeks afterwards, on and off. It was an incredibly difficult situation. Because we, I think I'm speaking of me here, I think we knew that we couldn't recover from that.
PH: Tell me about the payment.
TV: She came to me and we reached an agreement that I would pay her to cover her medical expenses, loss of income and to help her get on with her life again. I can't say more than that. We both agreed it was going to finally bring closure for both of us to move on in our relationships with our respective partners.
I ask him if he has a sense of shame about what he did and about its public revelation.
TV: Totally. All I ever wanted was for people to be proud of me and I guess that comes from my own insecurity and I just wanted people to say, that guy's a good guy. He does all right. Now they're going to say, "there's the guy who did that ... was involved in that ..."
He speaks of the progress he has made after a year of counselling and how, because of the counselling, he has been able to form a stable relationship with his wife, who stood by him so solidly last week. And who, he says, just minutes before he walked into last week's news conference, made the decision to go with him.
TV: I asked her to stand behind because I didn't want to see her face because I would have lost it. The one bright spot for me out of this, but the only thing that's kept me sane this week is that if everything hadn't happened I would not have learned lessons, I would not have gone to counselling. I would not have sat in front of a counsellor who was explaining ... it's almost like ... I remember coming home some days with revelations and I would learn stuff, and I would not have learned how to have a relationship and I would not have fallen in love and I wouldn't be married now. I would be alone.
PH: That's what you learned from counselling?
TV: I've learned more than you will ever know. The counselling is the most difficult thing I've ever done. To go and front up to somebody who is a complete stranger and build up confidence. I say to anybody out there, it is a terribly difficult thing to think about and I will be honest in saying when I turned up there each week I didn't look forward to it because it was incredibly painful. But incredibly necessary.
It helped Veitch to bare his soul to his in-laws to tell them what he had learned and that "it would not happen again." Now, he says, his parents-in-law are among the closest people in his life.
TV: My father-in-law stood by me and I will always thank him for that.
PH: Did you seriously think this would never come out?
TV: No, if I'm really honest I thought it would come out, I really did.
PH: So you were living for the day, really.
TV: I prayed it wouldn't and I told everybody close in my life. Everybody in my life who needed to know what happened that night knew.
Veitch says he knew rumours were floating around the media. He was waiting for the story to break.
TV: And every single time my phone rang I would think "this is it. This is the day." And the phone call came on a Sunday, last Sunday, an hour and a half before I did One News and I was nearly vomiting on the news.
PH: What is it like driving round and you're wall-to-wall on the airwaves?
TV: It's a bloody nightmare ... and I've tried not to listen. If I could escape this world at the moment, I would. Trust me, I would.
PH: What does that mean ... surely not ... ?
TV: I was in a state where I didn't want to live then. I didn't want to live. I needed out.
Veitch says he has always admired John Kirwan's depression campaign, that he was always touched by Kirwan's television promotions.
TV: I could understand where the guy was at. Public perception versus private pain.
I realise I have learned more about Tony Veitch in this hour of conversation than I ever knew. Veitch projects himself as a very tidy, commercial package within a narrow bandwidth. There are depths beneath depths.
PH: And what do you hope for Kristin?
TV: I hope what I've always hoped for, that she's happy. She's incredibly talented, she's motivated and when we were good we were in a fabulous relationship. When we were bad, it was tough. The last conversation we had was in Mission Bay over a glass of wine and a beer, about July last year ... just after she got married. We had a conversation and reflected on where our lives were and I was stoked because she found who she considered was her partner for life.
PH: Would you consider being part of a campaign against domestic violence?
TV: I would do it in a flash and I know people will say, "Well of course he would" but I would also like people to know that one thing I do know is how this can happen and how suddenly things can spiral and you can do things you never thought possible. And I've had a lot of people text me over the last few days saying they've done something bad domestically and one thing I hope out of all this, I hope that New Zealand gets the message. But before I do anything, I want to make sure that I have done all of the things I need to do, and have the support I need to make sure that I never get myself in to this position again. I hope people out there listen up and know it's not okay and I hope that everyone knows that it's not a stereotypical group that is responsible. It can happen to anyone.
PH: Will life ever be the same for you after this, do you think?
TV: No.
We take some photos in the late afternoon. He stands exhausted in my garden and is patient with the photographer. Then he is gone. There is another harrowing meeting to prepare for as he fights, as he must, to save his career and his livelihood.
