Bikie WAG turned comic opens up about her colourful life, surprising career change

When Nikki knocked on the door of a bikie clubhouse for a strip gig she’d been booked for, she wasn’t expecting what happened next.

When Nikki Justice knocked on the door of the Coffin Cheaters bikie clubhouse for a strip gig she’d been booked for, she wasn’t expecting to find love.

“In my head, all the bikie’s I’d been around were these old, fat, scary men,” she told Gary Jubelin’sI Catch Killers podcast this week.

“And the guy who answered the door didn’t look like that at all. He was younger, in his early thirties, and I suppose I was a little surprised that he wasn’t this big dirty bikie that I was expecting.”

The 39-year-old has turned her colourful past - the daughter of a drug-dealer who went on to marry into a bikie gang - into a career in standup comedy, quipping that when it comes to trauma, “if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry”.

Nikki - who describes herself as “the Ray Gun of stripping - seriously, I was so bad at it,” had initially not wanted to accept the gig at the clubhouse, but was happily surprised by what she saw. She didn’t realise it then, but she’d just met the man she’d marry - a card-carrying member of an outlaw motorcycle gang.

Nikki Justice has opened up about how she found herselves married to a card-carrying member of an outlaw motorcycle gang. Picture: Instagram

“We hit it off quite quickly,” she reflects, “and we were living together a few weeks later.”

“I think at first I found the whole bikie thing exciting,” she admits, “when they’d go on the runs, or any time there was a funeral, there would be hundreds of bikes, and there was something exciting about being part of that procession.”

And while initially, the carefree Nikki and her bikie beau relished their party lifestyle, it wasn’t long before things changed.

“Within seven months of being together, I was pregnant,” she says.

Nikki, who has since left the heels and pole behind to pursue a career in stand-up comedy, draws a lot of comedic inspiration from her life as a bikie wag. She paints a picture of a club run “more like a footy club”, where “family nights” were the norm and the occasional topless waitress would play temporary nanny to Nikki’s kids.

“I had to work, and I’d left my kids with their dad. I walked into the clubhouse and my little, two-year-old son was being bounced on the knee of this stripper,” she laughs.

“I know she had her boobs out and her boobs were just bouncing up and down and she’s got my kid and I’m like … oh. This is cool.”

“Did you consider what being the partner or wife of a bikie might entail?” asks Jubelin, to which Nikki replies: “I don’t think I really did until I was already in it.”

And just what did being a bikie wag entail?

“All of a sudden [after the pregnancy] instead of us being young and partying, I was in a serious relationship and we were settling down and having kids,” she reflects, “and that’s when I realised - oh, this is gonna be hard. Because I settled down and stopped partying, and he didn’t.”

“And you know that old adage,” says Jubelin, “the club comes first.”

“And I HATE that saying,” Nikkie responds, “and you hear it all the time. It’s something that gets said a lot, and it would be upsetting, but I think that if there was a family emergency or something, most of the guys in the club would want their members to go and sort that emergency.”

Nikki Justice is now dating ex-drug dealer Andrew Hamilton. The pair are both comedians. Picture: Dean Martin

Nikki says that while most of the other bikies in the club were “lovely” some could definitely test her patience.

“There were definitely some that I despised,” she admits, “there’s some members that would be sleazy and you’d be like, ‘how can you be sleazy? I’m your friend’s wife!”

For Nikki, getting her head around the double standard was always a struggle. “They go on about loyalty and respect, and it’s like, well, that’s not loyal or respectful [to make advances at another member’s wife]. “You just kind of have to laugh it off.”

Nikki says some of the most difficult challenges came when she discovered what some members had done in their pasts.

“There were some members who I knew had done some really bad things and I didn’t respect or like that,” she explains.

“So it was definitely hard knowing that you were around some people who went against your own moral values. You kind of just had to swallow things sometimes and suppress it, I guess,” she continues.

“But there were good and bad. It’s like in any industry, I think there’s good and bad. Even in the police force, there are good cops and bad cops. Most of them were good people in a moral sense, apart from the little crimes they might commit here and there.”

And while initially the ‘bad boy’ allure of her bikie beau, along with the excitement of being part of the club, kept things interesting, she says becoming a mum quickly led the shine to wear off.

Justice opened up about the brutal hierarchy among the women in the bikie club. Picture: Instagram

“I had this idea in my head of what a happy family was gonna be like when I had one,” she explains. “I was trying so hard to make it like that. But it is really hard when your partner’s a bikie and he isn’t prioritising your family the way that you want him to.”

Although, she admits, the club she found herself part of was quite the family affair. “We used to have family nights,” she explains.”They’d have a monthly thing where each month a different member would be in charge of bringing in all the food and we’d have a family night where the kids and everyone would all come. Those parties, at least earlier, would be kid-friendly,” she continues.

“They wouldn’t bring the strippers out till later.”

There was a hierarchy among the women in the club too, says Nikki, albeit a brutal one.

“A lot of the wives didn’t like the strippers,” says Nikki, “and because when I met my ex-husband I was the stripper, it took a while for them to warm up to me, because I was the enemy. It was b***y - it was very b***y.”

But ‘bitchy’ was the least of the grim realities for some women associated with the club.

“The derogatory term is ‘moles’, but there was a hierarchy among the moles too,” says Nikki.

“There were women called ‘onions’ - women who would sleep with the bikies but didn’t ‘belong’ to anyone in particular, and were just kind of passed around.”

“Was there a sense of menace in the air?” Jubelin asks.

“Oh yes,” Nikki replies.

“Almost every party would end with someone getting punched. And I used to worry, because my brother used to hang around, and I was always worried he was the one who was going to get punched.”

And while Nikki has since split from her ex-husband and left the club life behind her for a career in stand-up comedy, she admits that she was, on occasion, part of the drama.

“I slapped a stripper with a thong once,” she chuckles. “A foot thong. She’d stolen it from me, so she deserved it.”

Originally published as Bikie WAG turned comic opens up about her colourful life, surprising career change