No ‘me’ in Roast Busters apology
If you watched the video interview with Roast Busters ringleader Joseph Parker on the telly on Monday night, there are a couple of other, less widely viewed, bits of content you should probably catch for context.
They star the same Joseph Parker, though now he’s calling himself Hohepa. In one video, on the Patreon crowdfunding website, he pleads for cash to launch a music career. He refers obliquely to the scandal in which he and his mates victimised and humiliated underage girls by having group sex with them, filming it, and putting it online to boast about it. Five victims laid formal complaints.
And in a rambling, sometimes incoherent podcast, in which he burps and stops to scratch his ‘‘nuts’’, he laughs about Roast Busters and calls it a ‘‘performance act’’ that gave him access to ‘‘all kinds of sinful treats’’.
He says in the podcast that it is ‘‘kinda crazy, kinda cool’’ to be talking about Roast Busters.
Now, as a reporter for 30 years, I have a pretty strong stomach. But at that point I had to make a dash for the toilet. By all means have a listen, but here are some of the ‘‘highlights’’ from his podcast:
❚ Of the reaction to the scandal, he says: ‘‘They kind of took it in a very serious matter [sic] and that changed the entire trajectory of the Roast Busters and changed it into something it wasn’t . . . obviously destroyed its original meaning.’’ Whatever that was.
❚ ‘‘It was such a traumatic thing for me experiencing that much pressure, that much public notoriety, it was a lot of pressure on me, and very traumatic.’’
❚ He has also been thinking about ‘‘how much it has affected my life and how much it is stopping me, has been stopping me from a success, from moving forward in my life and moving towards the place I want to be’’.
❚ ‘‘I don’t know how something so small has been hindering me from filling out the shoes I know I have built for me.’’
❚ ‘‘I didn’t really care, honestly, what I was famous for, I just wanted to be known, but I didn’t know how badly [the] negative side of fame could affect you.’’
And so it goes on. I thought about trying to count the number of times he says I, me, my – but it’s hundreds. The important thing to know is that not once does he mention the victims. Not one single time.
His focus is entirely on how this ‘‘performance’’ that took place five years ago is hindering his rise to fame.
‘‘As a teenager I made some decisions that I thought would be able to catapult me into a career doing the things that I love,’’ he says in the Patreon video.
‘‘All it did was showed me the people that I’d hurt, and left me with a stain on my reputation that’ll be there for life.’’
Reputation appears to be a preoccupation of Parker’s. In Monday night’s interview on Newshub, he tells reporter Karen Rutherford he removed the Roast Busters video – in which he bragged about underage sex – from Facebook because he ‘‘already knew that wasn’t the reputation I wanted to be remembered for. That wasn’t the impact I wanted to have on the world’’.
I, me, my. When Rutherford asks him what he would say to the young women he humiliated, he seems unable to apologise, and stops mid-sentence. We have seen this kind of thing before, notably in former broadcaster Tony Veitch’s repeated attempts to justify the unjustifiable.
This really should go without saying, but to be clear: plenty of young people have made mistakes. No-one should be stripped of the chance for a future, and that includes the career they’re passionate about, if they have made a concrete effort to make amends. That’s a very important ‘‘if’’.
It’s hard to see how Parker has done that. He does not take the opportunity to apologise to his victims, and he offers no explanation of what he has done to atone, learn and grow. He really wants that music career, though.
There are also untruths in his interview that went unchallenged. He says police decided not to press charges for a reason, that they ‘‘came to the conclusion that they did for a reason’’.
This is a subtle rewriting of history; you might now assume a thorough and careful investigation was carried out, and a regretful decision made by police not to take the case forward.
In fact, the IPCA ruled the case had been bungled by police, who failed to undertake basic investigative tasks, and had let the victims down.
Parker also manages to slide right past the issue of what he’s actually done to prove he’s now a better man. He claims to be, but there’s no evidence offered. He claims to have tried to contact the young women, but the claim is left unexamined. We have to take his word for that.
In his crowdfunding video, he looks beseechingly into the camera and promises he wants to be ‘‘the best person’’ he can be, and that the vehicle he’s chosen to make that happen is ‘‘music and entertainment’’. It’s all very vague and aspirational, and he does not say what he intends to do to ‘‘impact as many people as I can for the better’’.
Parker has had five years to think about what he did. His podcast shows he’s spent most of that time thinking about himself. He has carefully chosen this moment to come forward, and it seems clearly linked to his wish to launch a music career.
He says he wants to make Roast Busters ‘‘really, really small in my life, where it’s not even a thing’’.
Maybe he’ll get his wish. But it’s unlikely the victims, whom he won’t even mention, will be able to get the same wish.