Exclusive: John Campbell asks Golriz Ghahraman why she threw it all away

Before her sentencing for shoplifting charges former Green MP Golriz Ghahraman sat down with John Campbell for an exclusive, in-depth interview. There was "no joy" in stealing expensive clothes, she claimed, "just shame".

Watch John Campbell’s full interview with Golriz Ghahraman on our brand new home for News on TVNZ+

Warning: this story contains sexually violent and violent language that may be disturbing to some readers.

“The self-sabotage was to get out," Golriz Ghahraman says.

She is in one of those empty rooms inside TVNZ with no discernible purpose.

There are four cameras filming us talk, perhaps even more than were filming her at Auckland clothing boutique Scotties. Those bewildering days, last December, when she shoplifted herself out of a job, out of Parliament, and into the kind of infamy that wildfires through the conversations of an entire country.

Did you hear?

Golriz Ghahraman?

WTF?

Which is the first question I ask her: What were you doing?

“I’m as baffled as anyone”, she replies. “I just know what it feels like, which is deeply shameful and distressing.”

She uses the word “shame” repeatedly throughout the interview. I can’t recall the last time a politician I was interviewing used that word against themselves. But then, she is not a politician anymore. She resigned from Parliament on January 16.

In March, she pleaded guilty to four charges of theft. Two at Scotties. One at Wellington’s Cre8iveworx. One at Auckland’s Standard Issue. All high-end luxury stores. Total retail value, just under $9000.

“What the hell was I doing?”

This time she’s asking herself. It’s a question she’s been asking since she did the shoplifting, since before she was caught (“I wasn’t unaware that I was doing something bad”), and somehow, even, since before she began doing it, as if she knew she was heading towards some kind of self-destruction, and the only question was what form would it take?

“You know, people think, like, this came out and that’s the crisis, but I was already in crisis. I was already in that world of sort of self-loathing... that kind of that place you sit where you're so low on yourself that it makes sense to kind of harm yourself as well.”

Self-loathing, harming herself. How did she get there?

Why did a two-and-a-bit term politician, the Green Party’s foreign affairs, defence, and justice spokesperson, with a Master of International Human Rights Law (with distinction) from Oxford University, sabotage herself into ignominy and unemployment?

“It wasn’t to get a little bit of joy, because there was no joy… It was just shame, shame, the whole time," she says. "But it was like, you’re this person… I think it was something tangible. That I could point to, to go, there’s something wrong with you.”

This is where some people get confused, impatient, even angry.

RNZ’s Mediawatch catalogued how the media promulgated the idea that Ghahraman was playing “the mental health card” to excuse her shoplifting. Steve Braunias wrote about this, too. “There was no tolerance for Ghahraman’s claims of mental health, no acceptance.”

The sense was that the mental health card was a soft out. A convenience. The dog eating her homework.

“Yeah," Ghahraman says, looking wearily familiar with that response. “I think it's important to stop and go, I've never used it as an excuse for the shoplifting because I admitted that and I've, you know, pleaded guilty to it. And that's as it should be. I should, and I have, taken responsibility for that. So I've never said because, you know, I had poor mental health that I should get away with something.

“But I also want to just stop and say that we never are getting away with something when we bring up our mental health. It's the hardest thing in the world. You know, I wish I could just apologise for the shoplifting, and plead guilty, and not have to also talk about this other very personal thing that the world doesn't treat very kindly.”

After the interview, the two camera operators observed how controlled she’d seemed. As if considering herself from afar.

But my typing is so slow that I had to keep pausing as I transcribed the interview, and in almost every frozen frame Ghahraman’s eyes contain a kind of distress. A sad and saddening shock.

How did she get to this?

How did whatever was happening to Golriz Ghahraman lead to her stealing expensive clothes?

“With time and processing, I can put it into the context of a long period of being in quite a dark place, and trying to be strong, constantly. Be strong, turn up, be strong. Feeling not strong. And then doing that spiral of, you're not good enough. There is something wrong with you. Why aren't you strong enough?”

And here’s where she says that crucial line, “The self-sabotage was to get out."

She continues, "If I'd actually sat down and processed the fact that I needed to get out, I would have done things differently and that is my great regret. Like, to have actually caused other people stress and harm, because I couldn't stop and go, ‘well, actually, if there's something wrong with you, get help or quit’, which is what I should have done.”

This won’t make sense to some people. And it may make others irate. The "mental health card" again.

In the Auckland District Court, on Monday afternoon, Defence lawyer Annabel Cresswell and Crown solicitor, Alysha McClintock, went back and forth on how much mental health diminished Ghahraman's culpability.

Inevitably, duly, the defence argued more, the Crown argued less.

"This is somebody in mental health crisis," Cresswell asserted, speaking of the "threats of violence and abuse that have led her to this point".

"She's endured high levels of violent language and imagery targeting her for over six years, and during that time threats have increased."

McClintock was less moved. "The prior online abuse that she suffered is apparent. And Your Honour can take that into account," she said. But, and the but was a dark cloud of scepticism, "for a mental illness to reduce the culpability of the offending, it must be causative in the sense that the illness materially contributed to it, so that the appellant has less moral fault."

Ghahraman, sat among family, friends and supporters at the back of the Court, listening to herself being talked about. Looking at the floor, as the words rained down. For her. Against her. The surroundings aside, it must have felt like a normal, abnormal day.

Ghahraman has a diagnosis now. “Extremely severe post-traumatic stress disorder," she tells me. It stems, she says, from two places. “One for me is the violence of my early childhood in Iran... the Islamic regime was in one of its most violent periods in the 1980s when I was born and of course that was... You see the absolute sea of amputees now in the footage from Palestine and we were seeing that coming back from the front lines... I have memories of all of that, with big chunks missing as the report also acknowledges.”

The "report", is by a registered clinical psychologist. It was presented by her lawyer as part of Ghahraman's sentencing submissions. While the District Court suppressed it as a whole document, it was frequently referred to by both lawyers, and by Ghahraman herself in her interview with me.

So, nine years of living in a violent country was one source of the PTSD. “And then the other bit,” Ghahraman says, “is politics.” Being a politician in New Zealand.

The two sources of trauma are strangely intertwined. Golriz Ghahraman, whose childhood was shaped by violence and oppression in Iran, appears to make some people in New Zealand violently angry by the act of having been born elsewhere.

"Go back to your own country if you don't like it", one Facebook comment demanded, "and I hope they shoot you".

All of this is a matter of public record. In May 2019, as was widely reported (although not nearly as widely as her shoplifting), the threats of death and violence she was receiving had become so numerous and so serious that Ghahraman was given a Parliamentary Service security escort.

She was a first-term MP. Personal security is usually reserved for a small number of very senior politicians, and the prime minister. That Ghahraman was also receiving it made people more angry. The hate begat more hate.

“She is a f@&king waste of taxpayers money!”, read one post on Facebook, in evidence provided to the Court by Ghahraman’s lawyer. “The only other misfit with a bodyguard is Cindy! They should have told her to “shut the f@& up, don’t cause trouble, and people won’t wanna kill you stupid retard. F@&k off back to Lebanon bitch!”

So, the desire to kill her was a proportionate response to the provocation. And the provocation was not shutting “the f@& up”. The provocation was being Golriz Ghahraman, the first "refugee” MP in New Zealand’s history.

“When you speak with confidence”, Ghahraman says, “if we bring our own voices, and we behave like we, dare I say it, are entitled to be there, that’s when the anger really, really comes… We’re allowed to stand in the background and be at our cultural festivals… but it’s the new voice, that’s unheard, that kicks it off.”

A letter from Danny Stevens, former communications director for the Green Party, is included in the defence team’s sentencing submissions to the Court. “The severity of the abuse directed at Ms Ghahraman was eye-watering. On a daily basis she was battling a rising tide of misogynistic abuse,” including, “rape and death threats”.

In May 2019, the Herald reported that the female staff who monitored Ghahraman’s emails and social media had been moved into different roles, “because sexist abuse has become so relentless and so toxic”.

“I now know,” Golriz Ghahraman tells me, “that I was in what they call ‘fight or flight mode’, which you’re meant to be in for a couple of minutes at a time, but I just stayed for six years of it. And you do numb yourself, you do kind of push it down… but it’s gotta come out somewhere.”

During her most infamous theft, in the Ponsonby store that sells Dries van Noten, Issey Miyake, Comme des Garçons, labels that most people can’t afford, or even pronounce, where you can pay $6995 for a black dress, Golriz Ghahraman circled the floor for many minutes. The prospective shoplifter looking so much like a prospective shoplifter that it was “absurd” she says.

Was the stealing really, as she suggests, an outward expression of low self esteem? The self-destructive impact of internalising toxic abuse?

“I certainly was telling myself ‘I'm sh**’ in my head. I certainly was very angry at myself and disappointed at myself for feeling not okay. And increasingly feeling weak.”

The weakness was the difficulty of carrying on. Of being in parliament as Golriz Ghahraman. But how could a woman celebrated as our first refugee MP quit?

Even the early coverage of her election into Parliament contained the sense of a laboratory test. Like peeking over the fence at a strange, new neighbour. How would she go?

“When Golriz Ghahraman last week stepped into the Beehive… along with her came her Twitter feed”, The Guardian wrote, in October 2017.

You can see her, smiling out from a photo beneath a headline that refers to her as being a target of both “love” and “loathing”. She’d been an MP for less than a month. “My Twitter feed is going into the national archive, it will be interesting for others to see what happens when, for the first time a Middle-Eastern woman, a refugee, ran for parliament here,” Ghahraman said at the time. “Both the support and the attacks.”

I ask her, “If you were a young, brown woman, a young woman from your background, would you go into Parliament now?

She doesn’t hesitate. “No. I wouldn’t do it. I think there’s better things to do for our communities. That’s a terrible thing to say. That’s a terrible thing to say. You know, I didn’t break the glass ceiling. It’s like, the shards are still in my face. I just went up against it, really hard.”

In Ghahraman’s 2020 memoir, Know Your Place, there’s a sentence that contains an almost frightening prescience. Ghahraman is remembering how her parents left everything behind to flee Iran. And she writes: “No one tells you how warped life has to get before you realise you have to leave forever.”

How warped does life have to get to before you self-sabotage your reputation and your career?

Her lawyer answers this. Or at least, letters and reports submitted to the Court by her lawyer do.

One report is by an expert in “the field of online harassment and threats, disinformation and violent extremism”. The author’s name has been suppressed by the Court to avoid precisely the kind of threats Ghahraman received.

Since 2017, the expert writes, Ghahraman has received “death threats, threats of physical harm and intimidation, stalking, and threats of sexual violence including specific and detailed rape threats.

“Vulgar and violent language and imagery targets her as a woman, as a child refugee, as a migrant, as a woman of colour. Known individuals repeatedly make death and rape threats; some of these known individuals include high-profile members of New Zealand’s white supremacist communities.”

This has been happening for years. Ghahraman even refers to it in her maiden speech to parliament, back in 2017.

“I (also) want to acknowledge those who tell me every day that I don't belong here, that I should go home where I came from, that I should have been left to die, or that I have no right to criticise any politician in this country or take part in public life because this isn't my home. Some of them call for rifles to be loaded. It gets frightening.”

I raise this with her. How, for most MPs, a maiden speech sows seeds they wish to see grow. Hopeful. Declaratory. A kind of promissory note to their own future. But her maiden speech contained loaded rifles.

And for Ghahraman, 2017 was just the beginning. The threats of death and of sexual and physical violence would get darker and more frequent. “They were increasing over 2021, 2022, 2023. They were by people known to police already, which is to say known extremists or who have some violent background.”

They included people who knew where she lived and who let her know that.

“I just remember starting to become more and more fearful. Starting to scan rooms when I came in, scan the street as I walked outside, you know, every stage you step on… you're just always unsafe with these increasingly graphic threats… And you do numb yourself and you do kind of push it down… But it's got to come out somewhere.”

In Scotties?

This, the shoplifting, is the confounding factor. The strange and inconvenient narrative.

“I should have left,” Ghahraman says, meaning public life, politics. “But by the same token, do we want that?”

Do we? We know that “loathing” hasn’t only been directed at Golriz Ghahraman.

In 2022, Professor Susanna Every-Palmer, Dr Oliver Hansby and Dr Justin Barry-Walsh from the Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago, and Mental Health, Addiction and Intellectual Disability Services, Te Whatu Ora Health, conducted a survey of all New Zealand’s parliamentarians, receiving completed responses from 54 MPs – 20 men and 34 women.

Twenty-two percent of the women had received threats of sexual violence. None of the men had. That’s a gender disparity so profound it speaks directly and explicitly of a violent misogyny.

Fifteen percent of the men and 34 percent of the women had received death threats.

The Report concludes, “Harassment of parliamentarians is an escalating issue. Online threats and misogyny are increasingly apparent. This harassment has significant psychosocial costs for victims, their family and staff, and for democratic processes.”

Last week, I called current and former MPs to ask them about being the recipients of harassment and threats. None wanted to go on the record, and who can blame them? Speaking about it means receiving more of it. Although one former MP, and I will tell her story in the coming weeks, bravely texted me back to say she’s decided she will speak to me, on-the-record, about the toll it takes.

One MP, who is now out of Parliament, told me what it’s like when it stops. “I realised I’d started sleeping better.”

Another MP said she’d thought she’d been dealing with it reasonably well, until people close to her told her that in the process of “cauterising” herself against it, she’d begun to cut herself off from everyone. Curling up.

And Golriz Ghahraman?

From the expert report submitted to the court by her lawyer: “Ms Ghahraman has, in many senses, been the canary in the coal mine. She has experienced harassment, threats, and online violence since she entered Parliament in 2017… targeting her for over six years, and during that time, the threats have increased, become more graphic and more personal, and have been downplayed despite their significance.”

“We all know that racism exists,” Golriz Ghahraman says, “but the sheer volume of it and the level of violence was not something that I expected. And at first I’d had that response of, this is fine, you get to fight it. You get to speak back… and I thought, okay, I'm gonna stand up against this, but it just keeps coming, and it keeps coming, and it's violent.”

Still, shoplifting as a response?

Some shoplifting that comes before the courts is the result of poverty and hunger. Kids to dress and feed. As a young reporter at RNZ, I sat in Wellington's District Courts and watched the sad parade of shoplifters passing through. Defence lawyers, sometimes perfunctory and distracted, would offer some form of mitigation in terms of economic deprivation, or drug and alcohol addictions, or hunger.

Golriz Ghahraman wasn’t any of that. “But that's what self sabotage looks like," she tells me. “It's not like you want to get away with it.

“I would describe what I was feeling in those months as extreme distress, helplessness, and anxiety which grew to a level that felt scary,” she said, in her affidavit, presented to the Court.

“Though I was more and more aware that something felt very wrong and that I was not coping well mentally, I felt ashamed of these feelings. My internal response was to feel angry at myself for ‘being a failure’ or ‘weak’, undeserving of the respect and trust I received from supporters.”

Which brings us back to where we started. “The self-sabotage was to get out.”

I raise with Ghahraman the horrific misogyny directed at Jacinda Ardern, who quit Parliament, without shoplifting. (And it may be that the “loathing” she was subjected to played no part in her decision to quit, though it’s hard to believe it didn’t.)

“Yeah, that will always be my greatest regret,” Ghahraman says, “that I didn't understand my own mental state far enough in advance to kind of back away…

“I'm not excusing it at all, and I wouldn't… I don't think I could feel worse… It was just such a stupid way to behave.”

I ask her if she feels able to read aloud some of the threats she’s received. They’re the apparently milder public threats, not the private ones, taken both from social media and the comments sections of news sites, and they’re included in her sentencing submission to the Court, so she’s seen them . But as she says the words, as she quotes a few of the times people have wished her dead, it feels like the coal mine is a terrible place to be.

“She would not be missed should a mishap happen. Most NZrs would rejoice”, says a man called Rob.

Rejoice at her being dead.

“That kind of stuff was just endless,” Ghahraman tells me.

“I would love to shove my big fat thick sausage down your exhaust,” writes Kiefer.

She reads them all out; it's a fraction of what she's seen.

How do you survive that? What next?

Ghahraman is re-entering the world, step by step, supported by family and friends. She has been having intensive therapy. She says learning to accept kindness. Some of that has possibly come from unexpected sources. Mike King has been incredibly kind. The Speaker, Gerry Brownlee, too.

She’s been talking to the Green Party about their own support, or lack of it, should the party’s MPs find themselves under similar stress.

Her defence team’s submissions contain a letter from former Green MP Denise Roche: “It is virtually impossible to ask for help. Within the competitive environment of parliament, and within the Green Party caucus of MPs, to admit to any unwellness is to admit to weakness and there is little compassion from other Green MPs or the Greens parliamentary staff for an MP who is not seen to be pulling their weight.”

I ask Ghahraman about the most hopeful section of her maiden speech. A joyful celebration of the message her story so demonstrably contains, in which she talks about New Zealand being a country in which a nine-year-old refugee girl from the Middle East could grow up and become an MP. That sense of inclusion. Of possibility. Of love.

And then, the very antithesis of that. How the same woman experienced racist and misogynistic hatred and threats.

Which New Zealand do we live in?

Golriz Ghahraman answers as if she can’t stop thinking about this. Our two selves. And where this is leading us.

“The way that we start to address this, the way that we secure our democracy, is to hold both truths. New Zealand is a place where a nine-year-old girl from the Middle East, the so-called Muslim world, a child asylum seeker, can, did, grow up to enter Parliament. But, when she did, New Zealand is also the place where there were daily threats of rape and death against her. If we don’t hold both truths, we can’t fix it.”

In his letter to the Court in support of Ghahraman, former Green Party communications director, Danny Stevens, writes: "It is hard to imagine getting up every single day to go to work not knowing whether the death threat you've just received from someone hiding behind an anonymous social media account is real or not."

Gharaman entered Parliament with passion and hope almost seven years ago. The threats started and they didn't stop.

Today, she will be sentenced for a "stupid" crime that has left her regretting she didn't leave politics before her judgement and sense left her.

"A person of her standing and in her role has certain standards expected of them," said the Crown's McClintock in the Auckland District Court on Monday afternoon.

"Standing".

Golriz Ghahraman is slowly getting up again. Life after politics. Life after shoplifting.

Watch John Campbell’s full interview with Golriz Ghahraman on our brand new home for News on TVNZ+