SUZY’S DARKEST DAYS
Why the Puraz poster girl was forced to flee NZ
amily is everything to Suzy Heazlewood. As she glances around her cosy Auckland home, there’s a full house – including a couple of cats, several guitars and a pot of herbal tea on the go.
“It makes me shudder to think I was so close to losing all of this,” says the 52-year-old mum-of-four, her eyes bright with tears as she looks at her lively brood.
Just seven years ago, the former poster girl for Puraz – a collagen capsule designed to help your skin look younger – was the subject of vicious public and internet bullying that drove her to a place so bleak, even now she struggles to make sense of it.
In an emotionally charged interview, the vilified household personality spills to Woman’s
Day about the near-tragic start to Christmas Day in 2012, her bold efforts to rebuild a tattered career and how she’s channelling heartache into a charity for bullied children.
Suzy says things hit rock bottom when, instead of waking to presents and Yuletide cheer, she found herself running along a road in the early-morning darkness, having decided to end her life after being targeted in an ongoing hate campaign. The taunts from women – who mocked and ridiculed
her both online and in person for claiming, as the face of Puraz, that she looked 10 years younger – burned in her mind. She could still feel the rough hands that had shoved her as she’d tried to watch her husband, former Mockers guitarist Dean, and his band at what was meant to be a fun, festive Christmas Eve gig.
It was only when Dean, frantic with worry, found his wife hiding behind a fence as he scoured the area in pouring rain with the car headlights on that Suzy was pulled back from her suicidal brink.
“It still terrifies me to think what might have happened if I hadn’t seen her at that moment,” tells Dean, 60.
TVhost’shelp
Weeks later, Suzy and Dean moved to Australia to get away from the toxic attacks. It was the right decision.
Across the Tasman, Suzy gradually repaired her selfesteem with the help of the late New Zealand model and TV presenter Charlotte Dawson, who tragically committed suicide a couple of years later in 2014.
“Charlotte was originally meant to be the Puraz face,” tells Suzy. “When she heard I was being bullied online, she wrote to me, telling me to stay strong, and stay active in mind, body and soul. I always try to take that advice. It breaks my heart that she let those same people get to her.”
But every time Suzy flew back to Aotearoa, the taunts would start again. “Even the sniffer-dog lady at the airport,” she recalls. “I heard her say really loudly, ‘Oh, look, there’s the creepy lady that thinks she looks 10 years younger!’”
Suzy, who still splits her time between Australia and NZ, says she couldn’t have got through those dark times without Dean and her kids.
The music-loving couple met at a West Auckland music bar when former postie Suzy – who had her first son Anthony at 19 – was a single mum and Dean was playing in a band, following his departure from the Mockers.
“I must’ve been 22,” she tells, “and I saw this guy playing guitar. I thought, ‘He’s so cute, but he’s far too young for me.’ He looked about 18, but I later learned he was in fact 30!”
Luckily, a mutual friend introduced the shy pair.
“I remember telling him straight away that I was a single mum and my son was my life,” recalls Suzy. “His reaction was great. He had come from a blended family himself, so he understood me instantly.”
It wasn’t long before the smitten couple and Anthony, then two, became a happy family. Twins Jimmy and Samantha, now 28, followed soon after, then two years later, youngest son Paddy, 26, was born.
Music is still a key part of the couple’s life, as it is for musician and actor Jimmy, and Paddy, who helps Dean run the family surveying business.
“Paddy in particular showed a flair for guitar from an early age,” says Dean proudly. “But Jimmy was a surprise – he showed no interest until he was 18 and then he started writing these beautiful songs.”
It was Jimmy, whose latest role was in Kiwi movie In Dark
Places, who drafted Suzy’s resignation letter from Puraz in March 2013. “It was almost in some respects like the kids became the parents,” tells Suzy.
Jimmy adds, “It seems so far away now. At the time, it was really hard, but it just made us all closer.”
On the bottle!
The pair are each other’s biggest cheerleaders. Suzy recently visited Jimmy in Los Angeles, where he lives part-time, attending acting classes, working on his music and promoting the US branch of her affordable skincare range Suzy H, which she started with help from an Australian scientist.
“Women are paying so much for crap products,” asserts Suzy. “My face is on every bottle, not because I think I look good, but because I will not hide any more – it is my stand against the bullies.”
Jimmy’s twin sister, new mum and naturopath Sam, also enjoys a close bond with her mother. “She’s my best girlfriend,” smiles Suzy fondly.
Mother and daughter even worked side by side as posties at one point, but Sam – who also did a stint as a nanny in London – eventually decided to train as a naturopath after Anthony, now 32, and Paddy developed autoimmune diseases.
Suzy also suffers from a rare autoimmune condition, ankylosing spondylitis, which at one point left her wheelchairbound and near-paralysed. Now on stabilising medication, she says she still has flare-ups, but the physical ailments pale in comparison with her previous mental anguish.
These days, though, the ghosts of her past are far enough away that she is able to look at the positive lessons and she also runs her own charity, Suzy H Child Advocate Antibullying Foundation.
“Teens need to be around young people who can help them, not people with degrees,” says Suzy passionately. “I want emotional intelligence to be taught in schools. This country has some embarrassing statistics when it comes to bullying and mental health issues.”
As for the haters? “You’re always going to get people who say, ‘Oh, no, she’s back,’” laughs Suzy. “But I no longer care. People can call me any name under the sun and it’s water off a duck’s back. Thanks to my family, I’ve grown another layer of skin – and I’m here to stay!”