DWTS dancer’s NZ dreams turn into nightmare
He says ballroom dancing boss never paid him properly; the boss says he didn’t do the work. Steve Kilgallon reports.
They had travelled the world as elite level ballroom dancers, but New Zealand was where Garrett and Jill Gibbons had always wanted to settle.
When they emigrated here from the United States, Garrett even picked up a side gig on the Dancing With the Stars TV show as dance partner to controversial Destiny Church founder Hannah Tamaki. However, he says Destiny had to provide the family with food parcels to survive after the Gibbonses discovered their $97,000-a-year jobs were a mirage.
They allege the dance-school owner who sponsored their visas, Kingsley Gainsford, only told them the real deal when they arrived last January: there was no guaranteed wage, they had to find their own clients, and they had to hand half of everything they earned to him. Burning through their savings, they lasted just over four months in New Zealand before fleeing back to America.
Gainsford denies any wrongdoing, saying he was ‘‘hugely disappointed’’ by the Gibbonses. They were paid so little, he claims, because they simply declined to do the work. ‘‘This couple could have had a wonderful life in New Zealand . . . they had every opportunity to make a life for themselves here and it honestly got to the stage where we said ‘well, they are just here for a holiday for six months’.
‘‘I feel totally burned and they are still burning me – they are trying to disgrace me and I am just so disappointed, we had high hopes for them.’’
Garrett Gibbons says it’s taken the couple a year to speak up because Gainsford – the presidentchairman of the NZ Ballroom Dancing Council – is such an influential figure in the ballroom dancing world he worried that complaining could sabotage his dance career. ‘‘This guy,’’ he says, ‘‘has sucked so much life and joy out of us.’’
‘‘We had been wanting to move to New Zealand for a long time,’’ says Garrett Gibbons. ‘‘We’d always had it on the radar to look for a job.’’
A friend put them in contact with Gainsford, who owned the North Shore Dance Centre, a studio in Glenfield, Auckland.
Gainsford was a big name in ballroom dancing: a former multiple national champion and he organises the Kiwi Classic, one of the biggest dates on the calendar, and as well as leading the NZ Ballroom Dance Council, is a vicepresident of the Asia Pacific Dance Council and NZ delegate to the World Dance Council.
Gibbons says Gainsford told him he was looking for a married couple to take on a management/ teaching role with a view to eventually succeeding him and his wife, Angela.
‘‘I’m 40, so we are less interested in spending all day on our feet dancing – so that was perfect,’’ says Gibbons. ‘‘We were coming in from the perspective that they would hand the keys over to me and my wife, and they would be involved a little bit.’’
Garrett says multiple emails and video calls, and even a twoweek visit to Auckland in March 2019 ‘‘all checked out, it felt right’’.
Gainsford offered the couple jobs, and wrote a glowing letter of support to Immigration New Zealand, calling Gibbons an ‘‘internationally acclaimed’’ teacher expert in two styles that no one in New Zealand was qualified to teach: ‘‘New Zealand has never had a teacher of this calibre live and train others here.’’
The Gibbonses were granted fiveyear essential skills visas, which remain valid until 2026 (Garrett Gibbons can laugh about how ‘‘comical’’ it is that ballroom dance teachers are on New Zealand’s skills shortages list).
They sold their house in Seattle, almost all their possessions, and with their children in tow, rented a home from one of Gainsford’s relatives on the North Shore.
The initial welcome was warm. The Gibbonses took a couple of days to sightsee. ‘‘We were like ‘this is the best life’,’’ says Garrett. ‘‘And then we show up to day one of work, and we sit down, and he says in a cheerful but a very clear way that everything we have discussed is off the table, here’s what it actually is.’’
‘‘We show up to day one of work, and we sit down, and he says in a cheerful but a very clear way that everything we have discussed is off the table.’’ Garrett Gibbons
The only thing the Gibbonses and Gainsford agree on now is the couple were never paid according to their contracts. Seen by the Sunday Star-Times, they state that each would be paid $50 an hour for a guaranteed 37.5 hour work week.
The Star-Times asked experienced employment lawyer David Fleming if there was any way around this. ‘‘The starting point is that employment agreements mean what they say,’’ Fleming
says. ‘‘If under the terms of their agreement, an employee is contractually guaranteed 37.5 hours work, they are entitled to be paid for that.’’
Their payslips tell a different story. Gibbons reckoned he averaged about $460 a week, and his wife $200, way below minimum wage. The timesheets he submitted shows how little they worked: in the week of February 18-25, he clocked 6.5 hours, his wife six hours.
Asked why the Gibbonses never received their promised salary, Gainsford says bluntly: ‘‘Because they didn’t work. Because they were busy having a holiday . . . . I was always very sure I paid them the hours they actually turned up.’’
He claims they were too busy travelling, came into the studio ‘‘the minimum time possible’’, and that during lockdown, Garrett was working on a full-time remote US contract and didn’t want to return to the studio, while Jill Gibbons turned down $5000 of proof-reading he had lined up. The Gibbonses deny all these claims.
They say there simply wasn’t the work they had been promised.
Garrett says Gainsford’s claims the studio was overflowing with students were a ‘‘total fabrication’’. On arrival, he was given a single 82-year-old client, he says. ‘‘We had to sign forms saying we were guaranteed a minimum of 37.5 hours a week to make it happen – and that was on the employer,’’ Garrett says.
He says he was repeatedly assured before departure their wages were guaranteed and had explained he wasn’t interested in what the dance world calls the ‘Arthur Murray model’, where instructors pay the studio a $10 or $15 ‘floor fee’ per student and take the rest: ‘‘You just couldn’t do it that way – it’s hard as a foreigner to break into the local market.’’
But, he says, that was exactly the deal: no guaranteed work, and whatever clients the Gibbonses attracted, Gainsford would take half. He says when he challenged it, he was told a single call to Immigration could cancel the family’s visas. ‘‘It became very quickly apparent it wasn’t anything like we had agreed,’’ says Jill Gibbons, ‘‘and it wasn’t anything like what we could live off.’’
But they tried, Jill says: because there were so few students, she began working on long-term projects and student recruitment. But she was asked to itemise her hours, and told nonteaching time would not be paid for. An email from Gainsford says ‘‘our operation works loosely on the Arthur Murray System. Work that is not bill-a-bill to clients is kept to a minimum . . . ’’ Gainsford – who admits to using the Murray system – says that is because he saw no evidence of the work they were billing from home.
‘‘I wanted them in the studio, doing something productive. They were never in the studio – they were always going to the beach or going travelling. We honestly sympathised with them, we said, ‘we realise you have four children. . . we appreciate it is summer ...’ but there comes a time when we wanted them in the studio doing things.’’
For the Gibbonses, there was a painful realisation it was all unsustainable. They say another instructor told them the arrangement would never work and they should go home before they ran out of money.
On March 20, Jill Gibbons and Gainsford exchanged emails. Gainsford’s email claims a ‘‘mutual agreement’’ their hours increase gradually to suit family life, notes he doesn’t want ‘‘excessive non-income hours’’, that the Gibbonses are ‘‘disengaged’’ and ‘‘nothing would make him happier’’ if they work full-time. Jill’s reply stresses they are ‘‘very interested’’ in increased hours but there ‘‘weren’t nearly enough students right now’’ and asks if they can fill their weeks up with administrative tasks.
At a meeting, Jill Gibbons says she implored Gainsford to stick to their contracted terms. She says he told her the contract had been simply to satisfy Immigration. . ‘‘I said ‘your model doesn’t work, it’s not fair, and it’s not what we agreed to’. He didn’t care.’’
Gainsford disagrees. ‘‘They couldn’t have worked 37.5 hours a week, bottom line, the way they operated, they didn’t organise a babysitter for the children [they deny this] and there was no attempt to do that – they couldn’t physically have done a 37.5 hour week ... they weren’t interested and weren’t making themselves available.’’
One glimpse of daylight was the part-time sideline, organised by Gainsford, on Dancing with the Stars, for which Garrett was initially matched with Tamaki then when she was dropped after a public outcry, with Lotto presenter Sonia Gray - before the Covid lockdown saw the show cancelled.
During lockdown, Destiny asked Garrett to teach online dance lessons for a church group. ‘‘We got to talking, and realised he hadn’t been paid [by the Dance Centre],’’ says Tamaki, who described Gibbons as a ‘‘beautiful person’’.
‘‘So we decided that we would give him a koha, and delivered food parcels to him. He told us he had nothing . . . he had young children, and that to us just wasn’t right.’’
Kingsley Gainsford may have seen the end coming – on April 29, last year, he sent Garrett an email asking if he was thinking of
returning home.
By now, Gibbons had sought legal advice. He says lawyers told him he had a strong case, but also of the slow pace of the Employment Relations Authority. He realised that Covid would prevent them finding new jobs, and they decided to cut their losses.
At the end of May, they told Gainsford they were leaving immediately.
In an email responding to their resignation, Gainsford says he is ‘‘sure that together we could have worked out a plan to ensure a substantial and permanent increase in your hours’’.
He writes: ‘‘It would be appreciated if, when talking to our clients or on social media, you did not base your departure on the level of teaching you completed, given your start with NSDC was February and the Pandemic was on the radar. That is neither fair on us, NSDC or yourselves.’’
Gainsford says now he is happy they quit. ‘‘Quite honestly, I was glad they were moving on – they had become such a drain on me and my wife. It has made me think twice before ever sponsoring, or attempting to bring anyone, out to New Zealand again. I feel that we were used.’’
After three weeks in Airbnb properties trying to get a flight back to the pandemic-stricken US, the Gibbons family finally left the country in June last year.
‘‘Hearing his voice at this point would be enough to send me into an anxiety attack,’’ Garrett Gibbons says now. ‘‘My heart would go racing if I ever even saw the names of the people he was associated with.’’
Gibbons says he’s spent the past 12 months ‘‘trying to block out’’ the experience. But promotion in his new job, in Austin, Texas, and buying a new home there has persuaded him it’s safe to speak up – and he says, to prevent Gainsford doing it again.
The family reckon they probably lost about $100,000 on the whole venture, but says Garrett, ‘‘we’re not ‘‘expecting to see a dime from him’’.
The Gibbons family would still love to come back to New Zealand one day.
‘‘It’s paradise,’’ says Jill Gibbons. ‘‘I love New Zealand. I’ve lived in a number of places across the US and Europe, and I haven’t found a place I love as much as I loved New Zealand. We would love to come back . . . but I don’t know if that’s going to be a possibility for us now.’’