Explosive interview: Tracey Spicer blows the whistle on bullying and abuse by TV bosses
In an explosive interview, newsreader Tracey Spicer bravely reveals to Michael Sheather the shocking sexism she experienced behind the TV cameras and her battles with death threats and a dangerous stalker.
Tracey Spicer never expected that kind of Christmas greeting from a boss. Sashaying a little unsteadily across the room, one of her TV colleagues, a well-known man several rungs up the corporate ladder, sidled up to her in the midst of the station’s annual
Christmas celebrations.
Tracey, at the time one of the most respected and popular faces on TV news, suddenly felt his warm, slightly clammy hand on her right buttock. The sensation, she recalls, was as shocking and sickening as it was unwelcome.
“He groped around for a second or two and said, ‘Looking good, Trace. Lost a bit of weight, eh?’,” recalls Tracey, 49. “I actually turned around to slap him, but realised it was one of my bosses. So, I just lowered my arm. I said, ‘Yeah, after my mother died, I didn’t feel like eating.’ He mumbled, ‘Nice arse’, and staggered off.”
It is hard to imagine a more confronting chapter in anyone’s career. “It was one of the most unpleasant and uncomfortable feelings I have ever experienced,” says Tracey.
“Let’s call that for what it is – that’s not sexual harassment. That is sexual assault. That has no place in any workplace, let alone in TV. It was a time when women were perceived as Barbie dolls, just there to read the news. Let us be blunt about it – we were Barbie dolls that could be played with in many ways by the male executives. I was always the good girl so I didn’t want to cause a fuss and
I let [the incident] go. However, that didn’t make it palatable.
“And it wasn’t just some unwelcome touching. It went much deeper than that. It was a wallpaper of invisible misogyny. It was wallpaper because it was always around you, but in many ways, you became accustomed to it. When it is always there, you don’t always see it for what it really is. It is just there.”
Yet that entrenched sexism, while diminished from its most virulent forms that existed a decade ago, is still alive and well in some sections of Australian broadcasting.
In a career spanning nearly 30 years as a news journalist with some of Australia’s most successful television stations, Tracey has shouldered many accusations, attitudes and judgments from male executives which are, at their very heart, insensitive, blatantly sexist and inherently unfair. She has endured stalkers, death threats, a marriage breakdown, personal abuse and much, much more.
However, it was always the attitudes of her male colleagues that rankled most. “In TV, women are often judged by what they are wearing and the way they wear their hair, instead of what is in their hearts or in their heads,” says Tracey.
“There are those in the industry who gauge a woman journalist, not by her skill, but by what they call f**kability,” says Tracey. “They call it the f**kability factor – in other words, you have to be sexually attractive to keep your job. You can’t be too old, you can’t be too fat, you can’t be too opinionated. It’s actually very sad.”
Tracey was accused of being “too long in the tooth” when she was
37 and of having “limited intellect” simply because she is a blonde.
More than that, Tracey says, she was dismissed – “boned” is how she actually describes it – from her role as a national newsreader and presenter with Network Ten, not because she was bad at her job, but because she had just given birth to a second child and was, therefore, past her use-by date.
It was this incident that turned the compliant good girl into a woman finally prepared to stand up for herself – and for others who had also suffered discrimination for daring to get pregnant. Tracey’s decision to take Network Ten to court for unfair dismissal helped shift the landscape in Australian TV from an entrenched culture of sexism towards a more acceptable gender equality.
Navigating the boys’ club
Tracey was born in 1967, to Marcia, a former model and real estate agent, and Paul, an airline clerk, and grew up in Redcliffe, a suburb of Brisbane. There wasn’t much money, but there were always lively discussions and both her mum and dad had a fierce sense of social justice that fuelled debates around the dinner table.
From an early age, Tracey wanted to be a journalist and, after high school, embarked on a business communications degree before landing a junior reporter’s role at a Brisbane radio station. “It was such an eyeopener because I was brought up in a family where girls and women were equal to boys and men,” says Tracey. “I had no idea how male-dominated the industry was back then. I was the first woman in the newsroom.”
While the men Tracey worked with were older and “like brothers and fathers to me, very nurturing and supportive”, she was still “treated a little like an exotic pet”. Yet that was just a hint of what was to come.
After a year or so, she moved to Melbourne as a reporter at 3AW. “There was a real bullying culture in that newsroom; yelling and screaming, and if you ever made a mistake, then you had something thrown at your head,” says Tracey. “It really toughened me up. There were a lot of men in positions of power and the women were the younger ones.”
As shocking as that might have been, there was also the emotional abuse that came with being female. When Tracey jumped to a country TV station to try her hand at television, she was called “the chubby girl” – even though she was a size 12 and no one ever mentioned the paunches on her male colleagues.
“It wasn’t just the sexual harassment – left, right and centre – but also the belittling of women’s intellect,” recalls Tracey. “My boss called me in one day and told me that I would never make it in the city because I ‘was blonde and people think that blondes are stupid’.”
It was a theme that haunted her career. In her early-20s, she joined the famed Packer-owned Nine Network newsroom in Melbourne, run by the widely respected but also infamous journalist John Sorell, known in the industry as The Bear. A tough, hardswearing former merchant seaman, Sorell was also an award-winning reporter with a down-market approach to news that kept him and Nine at the top of the ratings. “He used to say that he ‘didn’t do stories about the two As
There was a real bullying culture in that newsroom, yelling and screaming.
– AIDS and Aborigines. I do stories on T and A – tits and arse’,” recalls Tracey.
“One of my colleagues, a lovely soft-natured woman, was yelled at across the newsroom, ‘I want two inches off your hair and two inches off your arse’. Sorell and Mr Packer liked their on-air women thin. The newsroom was full of these lollipop ladies who’d dieted themselves down to be way too thin for their frame. In a way, it was like group abuse. They used to talk about the Nine family. It was more like the Manson family.”
Moreover, Tracey became part of it. “I started wearing shorter skirts than I would normally wear,” she says. “I went drinking with the boys. I swore my head off because that was the cultural expectation and the norm. I laughed along with all the sexist jokes. I feel ashamed of myself for doing that, but it was almost like Stockholm Syndrome. We all felt we had to assimilate to get along, but after a year, I’d had enough. I had to get out.”
Her escape hatch opened in the form of an offer from a rival network, but instead of fluffy animal stories, Tracey insisted she get a chance at police, courts and politics, and even some news reading. “It was an opportunity to die for,” she says.
Yet when the opportunity became reality, what she felt like was crying. Tracey had moved north to Brisbane to help present the Queensland news. When she had finished one of her first appearances, she bumped into one of the bosses and asked how she had gone.
“He said, ‘I think you need to stick your tits out more’,” says Tracey. “I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ He replied, ‘Give the audience something to look at.’ I was mortified and hunched over to hide my breasts. I felt ashamed, as though it was somehow my fault I had breasts. But, again,
I didn’t speak up against it.”
“A boil to be lanced”
Nevertheless, Tracey’s stocks began to rise. She was soon on her way to Sydney, the “Emerald City” as she calls it. “It was the big time and it still is for any aspiring journalist,” she says. Yet she was about to find out that the city wasn’t as glittering as it seemed.
Tracey’s new role was reading the national weekend news and reporting three days a week. She and her boyfriend, Matthew, moved to a cockroach-infested flat in Birchgrove in Sydney’s inner west.
She attracted the kind of attention that you don’t need in TV. Flowers, cards and letters began to arrive at the station from a viewer, a man named Vince. He even sent photos of himself – on a tractor sporting a handlebar moustache.
“He looked a bit like a young Ivan Milat,” says Tracey. “The letters were like War And Peace and it seemed as though he believed I was talking directly to him when I was reading the news. After a while, he turned aggressive and wanted to kill me. He was clearly a sick man. It was scary, but I also felt sorry for him in some way.
“Even so, I had to have a security guard with me. He sat outside my flat at night. I was warned that since Vince had recently attacked his mother with a knife, if he ever approached me in the street, then I should simply run as fast as I could, which wasn’t all that reassuring because I hadn’t run in decades.”
Her stalker eventually disappeared after a court ordered him to start taking medication. Yet, at the same time, Tracey’s bosses were keen for her to change her appearance – not because of Vince or his threats – but because, as a blonde, she looked too much like her colleague.
“The message filtered down through the make-up artist that we needed to change the way I looked,” says Tracey. “She said, ‘The bosses think you look too much like Sandra Sully.’ I thought that was hilarious because we had similar hairstyles, but very different shaped faces, different colour eyes, different heights, different builds. So I had to get my hair cut short and dyed red. It came from upper management, who bizarrely had this opinion that women, they look the same.”
Even more strangely, she was asked to invite her colleague Georgie Gardner for a run. “My news director pulled me aside to ask a favour,” says Tracey. “He wanted to know how close I was to Georgie. Of course, I wanted to know why. He said I should ask her to go for a run after work because ‘she is porking up a bit’. I was stunned.”
By the time Tracey was in her early 30s, her place at Network Ten was assured, but her private life was in tatters. Her mother contracted pancreatic cancer and as Marcia became sicker, the stress took its toll on Tracey. She’d married her boyfriend, Matt, a year before, but the fractures in their relationship were beginning to show under the stress.
“Mum was my rock, our family’s rock, but she was very ill and it felt like our family was crumbling around me,” says Tracey. “After she died, I blamed Matt for a lot of my feelings and took it out on him unfairly. In the end, we broke up.”
In the intervening years,
Tracey met Jason Thompson, a cameraman at Network Ten, with whom she fell deeply in love. They married and began to plan for a family. Yet having and a television career, as Tracey had discovered, mixed like oil and water, especially for women.
“Every single one of my friends in the industry had either been sidelined or outright sacked when they became pregnant and gave birth to their child,” says Tracey. “When women had children, they were no longer seen as sexy on camera.”
She became pregnant with her first child, but suffered a life-threatening complication three months before the birth – placenta previa, where the placenta covers the cervix and stops a baby from being born. “It meant I had to spend three months flat on my back at home recovering, otherwise, I would have risked bleeding to death or the death of my child,” says Tracey. “But while I was at home, I kept getting phone calls from different producers saying, ‘Trace, [you’re] getting a bit long in the tooth. When you come back, you’ll probably want to be behind the scenes. Most women want to be with their babies. Why would you want to come back to work?’
The whole narrative was building.”
Tracey’s son, Taj, was born prematurely in 2004 and he spent two and a half weeks fighting for his life in intensive care. “We got him home on Christmas Eve,” she recalls. Two months later, Tracey was planning to return to work. When she called in, she was told “things had changed”.
“I could see which way this was going, so I threw myself into research,” she says. “I researched every piece of legislation [about workplace law] – everything I could lay my hands on. In the end, they offered me changed shifts at difficult times in the hope that I’d resign, but I was adamant that I wanted my original job back.”
Yet Network Ten was determined. It put Tracey on a Sunday shift until midnight and rostered her for a 7am Monday start. “A friend put me up overnight on Sunday in her apartment and Jason brought Taj into me to breastfeed every four hours,” she says. “I tried to make it work, to make the best of the situation. The breastfeeding often happened in the make-up chair as I was getting my hair done.”
Ten months later, Tracey became pregnant again. “I took a shorter maternity leave because there were no medical complications and after my daughter Grace was born, I was called back early for a new bulletin they said needed my gravitas,” says Tracey. “I thought, ‘Great, I’m welcome back.’ But that wasn’t what was happening. They were trying to separate my leave from the point where I was going to be ‘boned’, so it didn’t look like they were firing a woman on maternity leave. Suddenly, I was a boil that had to be lanced, a repugnant growth on the business that was no longer required.”
“I’m proud I made my point”
In the end, Tracey was fired when her News Director sent an email to her agent telling her that her services would no longer be required after 14 years. “It was just appalling,” says Tracey. I was being hung out to dry.”
It was then she drew her line in the sand. “Someone had to take a stand,” she says. “I had two choices. I could write a press release saying I was leaving for family reasons, which was a lie, or I could take it to the Federal Court and begin a campaign about the way women are treated in the workplace. To me, it was a no-brainer. Mum had always taught me to fight for my rights and now was the opportunity.”
At the same time, she was suffering from mastitis and postnatal depression. In the end, with a media campaign under way, Network Ten offered Tracey a rumoured $250,000 to settle out of court.
“My family was really worried about me,” she says. “I was crying at the drop of a hat, which is not like me at all. They asked, ‘What’s more important – your health, or your family and your mental health? Maybe it’s time to rebuild your life.’ In the end, I decided to settle, but I’m also proud that I had made my point.”
Today, Tracey is a successful freelancer for media outlets, including the ABC and Fairfax Media, as well as the National Convener for Women in Media, which advocates for women working in all facets of the media.
“Standing up for yourself is a good thing,” she says. “It changes you, makes you stronger. I hope what
I did has made it easier for others to stand up for themselves.
“I’ve always been a glass half full kind of gal. I am optimistic about how things are changing in the industry. Things are much better for women now. Moreover, there are plenty more female bosses. Not all the blokes are bad, either – some are great – but there are still enough out there to cause problems. My advice for women – just say, ‘No, I won’t let this happen’.”