Ria Hall is a chart-topping singer and former TV presenter who was a victim of domestic violence earlier this year. She spoke to Yvonne Tahana for Marae about the horror of the attack and her subsequent shock at then seeing her former partner taking a prominent speaking role at the Koroneihana.
The assault happened early on a Tuesday morning when children needed to be sorted for their day.
Ria Hall and her former partner Eruera Keepa were at her Bay of Plenty home when a short verbal dispute erupted, ending up with him holding her up off the ground by her neck.
Keepa had seen a message on Hall's phone from another man and the pair began to argue, according to the police statement of facts that went before a court.
The police report said Keepa reached out to grab Hall by the scruff of the neck. He then frogmarched her before letting go. Hall fell to the ground.
The violence that April morning had played out in a bedroom as a young child watched on.
"I was incredibly afraid," Hall told TVNZ’s Marae programme. "I couldn't believe that the person that I had loved, gave whakapapa to, would treat me like this in my own home."
Hall adds, her voice catching: "When someone grabs you by the neck, they don't want you to breathe basically. They want to cut your air circulation off." This was the only moment in the interview when the Kiwi singer, Te Matatini soloist and mother of three broke, her vulnerability and hurt evident.
For more on this story, see Marae on TVNZ1 at 10.30am on Sunday or watch it on TVNZ+
And while the assault was awful enough in itself, in September Hall's distress was compounded when Keepa was given a prominent role in one of Māoridom's most significant events of 2025, the Koroneihana, or coronation anniversary, for the Māori Queen.
Weeks earlier Keepa had pleaded guilty in the Tauranga District court to common assault and breaching a protection order. He was sentenced to six months of supervision, ordered to complete a stop violence programme and to pay $1000 reparation for emotional harm. The court removed his name suppression at that hearing in August.
At the time there was no public reporting on the outcome of the case, during which Judge Christina Cook had noted that a previous assault had occurred five years ago.
"It is of concern that this incident has occurred again given the history," she said. "The fact that there is volatility within your relationship does not exclude or explain your behaviour on this occasion and it must have been very frightening for the victim and also for your children."
'Completely whirlwind'
The judge’s words bring home the reality of the former relationship. From the outside it had at one time seemed Hall and Keepa made sense. Both are talented, smart, creative, natural do-ers.
Keepa was a Matatini performer, a champion body builder and helmed an important and celebrated grassroots hauora campaign for women, Smear Your Mea, after a whānau tragedy.
"It was completely whirlwind,” Hall says of their relationship. “Caught me off guard. All of the romantic kind of connotations that you might appreciate from, you know, meeting someone and building a connection. I thought I had found my person, the person that I would, you know, live happily ever after together."
But behind doors the relationship was complicated. There were multiple police callouts over the years.
Beautiful tamariki were born.
And five years ago there was the earlier assault conviction against Keepa. Then, in 2022, Hall was granted a final protection order.
She says: "You know there's a degree of responsibility that I have to take too because I had continued to put faith in him that he would come around, that he would act in good faith for our tamariki, that he would... I gave him too much grace. I gave him too much space."
Hall says the pair were not together when April’s assault happened and hadn't been for years.
The court sentencing might then have been seen as a line in the sand, the end of an ugly incident in a relationship that had long run its course.
But what happened just a few weeks afterwards had Hall asking questions about how Māoridom reckons with family harm.
Keepa was at Koroneihana on September 4, the annual event being particularly special because it was Te Arikinui Kuini Nga Wai Hono i te Po, the Māori Queen's first as leader of the movement. Tens of thousands had come to Tūrangawaewae to help commemorate and celebrate.
Many thousands more watched online and that's where Hall saw Keepa stand to represent his Tau Ihu side.
The southern tribes had come bearing a gift, formally presenting a whale jawbone to the Queen.
Keepa had been on the board of his iwi Ngāti Rārua, a position the rūnanga told Marae he'd resigned from earlier in the year. It's not clear when.
'No one did anything about it'
Hall said she was devastated.
"There were people there that knew that he had just been recently convicted of assault. I was disappointed when no one did anything about it. I was disappointed that tikanga wasn't used as the correct forum in that moment to sort that out."
Here she’s referring to occasions when waiata and other more physical means have been used to remove speakers.
"It said to me, to a degree, that our people accept this as normative behaviour. Our people are willing to put the abuse of a woman... at the back in order to let someone to speak on the pae.
“I felt very isolated all over again, traumatised all over again. That was unacceptable from my perspective."
Marae wanted to ask Ngāti Rārua whether the tribe knew of Keepa's conviction for common assault and breaching a protection order and about the appropriateness of his role at the Koroneihana.
But in a statement the iwi said: "Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Rārua (TRoNR) confirms that the individual referenced resigned from all roles with TRoNR earlier in the year. At the time, as far as we were aware, the individual was subject to court-ordered name suppression. TRoNR has not received any official notification from the court that the suppression has lapsed."
It would not be standard practice for the court to notify any convicted person's iwi of an offence, and there wasn't a suppression on file at the time of Koroneihana.
Written apology and personal visit
Marae has since learned that a written apology from Tau Ihu has been sent to Hall. In it, iwi chairs from the region said their mandated speaker was unable to attend at the very last minute and Keepa "took it upon himself to stand".
The apology added: "We should have intervened to stop this, but we did not. For that, and for the distress this must have caused you, we are deeply sorry."
Marae also understands that just a few days ago, Tau Ihu representatives came to Tauranga to meet in person to address the harm, gifting Hall a taonga.
Still, for now, she's hoping for a process where Keepa's whānau and her own can come together in Tauranga Moana, where she’s from, to sort through the issues.
"He deserves to live a good life. I want him to live a good life. As hard as it is to admit that, I want him to be everything that he can be because he's a real talented person,” Hall says.
"He's a real talented person and if he can take full accountability and really face some hard truths as to how he's acted..., man I think he could get to a really powerful place."
In a statement Keepa said he would not be "sharing private details about my past relationship with the other parent now or in the future, out of protection for our tamariki”.
He added: "My focus remains on building a respectful and healthy co-parenting relationship so that our tamariki can grow up surrounded by the aroha and support of their siblings and both of their whānau."
For more on this story, see Marae on TVNZ1 at 10.30am on Sunday or watch it on TVNZ+
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