After all, nobody needed to hear from the Roastbusters ever again. When the story broke a few years ago, it was genuinely newsworthy, exposing some A-grade toxic masculinity in a group of young men, who openly bragged of sexual assaults.
It got some good discussion going about the way this country raises its young men, and the way our young women are treated, and it was definitely worth covering at the time, if only because these little smirking shits and anyone who might emulate them needed to be shown that this bullshit was not acceptable, in any way.
And then, thankfully, they all faded away. Nobody needed to see those munters or their stupid videos anymore, and it was something of a relief to see them all fade away into obscurity.
But reporters who break stories like this never really let them go, and Karen Rutherford - a respected local journo who has covered a lot of good stories over the past 20 years – certainly didn't. So you can't really blame her for taking the bait when the lead Roastbuster returned with the offer of an exclusive interview.
But it was nothing but bait, because this shithead wasn't interested in putting wrongs right, he just wanted to use the one piece of notoriety he had in life to garner more fame and attention. He had a music career he was desperately trying to kickstart (a stunningly mediocre music video had received tens of hits after a year online) and was using the one thing he was known for to get back into the public consciousness.
Newshub and Rutherford, to their credit, didn't fully give their interviewee what he wanted, and his efforts to get a free intercontinental flight out of it was completely rejected. But he still got to have his say, and in a stunningly narcissistic piece of theatre, he told everybody how he had learned from his mistakes and become a better person and nobody fucking cares, dude. Once a date rapist, always a date rapist.
It was fairly painful to watch for anybody not directly involved in the case, so we can only imagine how rough it was for the victims, watching this arsehole going for some kind of public redemption he never deserved.
But Newshub couldn't resist the lure of the exclusive, and seemed a bit surprised by the extreme backlash that followed. The exclusive report was heavily promoted, and while it might have got the ratings, the organisation lost a shit-tonne of credibility as a smart news source.
It didn't take them long to realise – the news chief quickly wrote a fairly grovelling editorial on why they felt the need to go for the interview, an argument that was bought by exactly nobody. And after leading their first bulletin with a long report, the second half on the next day was relegated until after the first ad break, and angled heavily on the 'aren't you just being a dick?' side of things.
But it was all too late, and Newshub had given him the platform, and brought him back into the public sphere where he desperately wanted to be.
The only worthwhile thing to come out of the whole mess is that there has been some more good discussion on why this dude was given such an opportunity in the first place, although even that boils down to the fact that he didn't fucking deserve it.
He got what he wanted, and Newshub thought they got something out of it as well. But all it was was just another dodgy exclusive, rehashing old shit that should have stayed buried.
- Katherine Grant
(P.S. While we're here, we don't need any more stories about the bullshit whipped up by old, dumb men like Don Brash and Brian Tamaki at this time of year either, and we're not wasting another column on them. They have nothing to say and no new ideas, so we should all just ignore them until they fade away into ash, like Dracula caught out in the sun. Fuck 'em.)
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