‘Blindsided, betrayed and broken’: Radio star’s raw interview about why husband walked out
Radio personality and mum of two Emily Jade O’Keeffe says she was ‘blindsided’ by her husband’s decision to end their marriage, revealing shocking details about the break-up including that he struggled with her fame.
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Emily Jade O’Keeffe’s life was perfect. She knows it seems unrealistic, but to her it was.
She was reminded of it every day she came home from recording her Gold Coast Hot Tomato breakfast radio show to her fairytale white home, her handsome, ambitious husband and her two children, a girl and a boy, who joyfully completed their family after a five-year IVF battle.
But she didn’t know the extent that for her husband, Gerard Murtagh, it wasn’t.
And when she came home from her shift this particular Thursday morning, on November 19 last year, and sat down with her partner of 16 years at the dining table, he told her he wasn’t happy, he had found a place to live and he’d be moving there in a week.
It was that moment, as for so many who have endured divorce, that O’Keeffe’s life violently split in two – before and after – her dream life caving in around her and giving way to reality.
“I was crushed. I was enraged. I felt everything, and some parts I can’t remember,” O’Keeffe, 44, says, sitting down at the same circular dining table six months later.
“We’d been doing marriage counselling for 18 months. I can’t say it was out of the blue but it was still out of the blue because I actually thought we were doing really well.”
Among the many things raised in counselling, including the trauma of IVF, was the discomfort Murtagh felt at being the partner of someone with such a high profile.
“He hid what was truly going on in him very well so I was blindsided in that there was deeper stuff going on with him. And he’s sharing it now.”
In disbelief she told Murtagh they needed to take separate cars to the funeral they were due to attend that afternoon for their friend’s late father, and getting into her own, she cried out to God.
“Please help me understand,” she recalls saying.
“I’m trying so hard, we have the most perfect life, I love him so much, I love my family, I grew up very poor, one of five, I’m in the home of my dreams, I’m in the job of my dreams, I just don’t understand it.”
Walking numbly into church for the funeral, O’Keeffe turned over the service card handed to her and read the proverb, “Trust in the Lord, don’t try to understand, I will straighten your path”.
“That brought me a great deal of peace, just in that moment,” she says.
“The sermon was beautiful and talked about what a husband he was and a father and I thought, ‘Gerard actually hasn’t been those things for a long time; I shouldn’t be settling’ and that was a part of the process of me going ‘trust in the Lord, don’t try to understand it’.”
At her request, Murtagh left their family home in Ashmore, in the Gold Coast’s inner suburbs, two days later, and moved into his new beachside apartment.
Through the next few months O’Keeffe felt the grief in her bones and tried, but has been unable, to shield her two children from it.
It stole her appetite and she lost 10kg by the time she announced the separation publicly in January.
She and Murtagh are navigating a new life as a separated family and she is slowly figuring out how to construct a new perfect life on her own.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. Honestly I felt at times I was going to die, the pain was so much, but it gets better. And everyone told me that,” O’Keeffe says, her voice breaking.
“My bones were hurting, I would ache at night, you can’t sleep.
“While you are walking around numb you are also feeling everything and it’s a wave and it keeps crashing and crashing.”
She adds: “Someone said to me, eventually the waves are not as many and eventually they are light lapping waves and then eventually you’re sitting on a beach with your feet in the water and it’s peaceful.”
O’Keeffe has a hugely successful 25-year career in radio, starting in Tasmania, where after graduating with a performing arts degree from the University of Tasmania, she landed her first job as a night programmer on 7LA (now LAFM).
At 22, she moved to Toowoomba to be part of the breakfast team launching CFM, which was followed by a stint presenting Channel 9’s kids TV show Download.
Her first time at the Gold Coast’s Hot Tomato was at the launch of the station in 2003, she then moved to Brisbane to help launch of Nova radio, and after that teamed up with Ian Skippen on their popular Triple M breakfast show for three years.
On her return to Hot Tomato eight years ago, she quickly helped the team reach No.1 and she remains at the top-rating breakfast show, alongside co-hosts Paul Gale and David Christopher.
Despite her high profile, she didn’t get into radio for fame; rather she enjoyed how listeners took comfort in the candid way she shared her life on air and as a Christian, she began to look at it as her sermon, her way to serve her community.
So when she welcomes me into her home six months after she and Murtagh separated, she’s determined to not gloss over any part of it.
“A lot of people would say you’re so strong and I would say … you’re hearing me on air or seeing me in the street but privately it was a real battle for me,” O’Keeffe says, having not missed a day of work since November.
A custom-made doormat with the words, “Welcome to the Murtagh’s” still greets visitors at the entrance to her stunning two-storey home. We sit with cups of tea at the dining table, next to a spotless kitchen with beautiful french doors giving way to a picture-perfect kids’ backyard with manicured lawns and a rope swing.
While immaculately stylish, this is a family home, one full of memories, where a school bag is dropped at the end of a day and dinners are shared and talked over.
Murtagh has dropped their daughter Millie, 9, home from school alongside brother Teddy, who turns three later this month.
A miniature poodle named Roxie, which O’Keeffe was given by chance by a friend in April, happily jumps about under the table.
“Six months down the track it’s certainly not what I thought my life would look like, but we’ve got a dog, my job has been amazing, the kids are going OK, Millie’s in therapy which has been really good, we found a great child psychologist for her, I’ve got a couple of great therapists and I’m starting to see the light again,” O’Keeffe smiles.
O’Keeffe is in rehearsals for her role as Tanya,a three-time divorcee, in Matt Ward’s upcoming Gold Coast production of Mamma Mia!.
The role was one of a number of “little miracles” O’Keeffe describes since the separation as she struggled to adjust to life as a single mother.
“Because I stayed in the house and I’m the main carer of the children and my job stayed the same, you feel this great depth of loneliness that your partner isn’t there even though you’re living exactly the same life, so my therapist challenged me to find something that was different, that I didn’t do within the marriage and the family unit to help me rediscover me.”
O’Keeffe inherited a love of performing from her father Phil, 64, who was a keen amateur theatre performer.
She was born in Gatton, west of Brisbane, but as she was growing up, the family moved around the country with Phil’s work as an agricultural specialist.
They lived in Cowra in New South Wales, Bathurst in Victoria and later Devonport in Tasmania where O’Keeffe finished high school.
While the family did not have a lot of money, she had a happy childhood with mother Lorraine, 63, and four younger brothers Christopher, 42, Jono, 40, Michael, 34, and Sam, 32.
To settle into a new town, the family would always join the local church and theatre group. The kids would take on small roles – the munchkins in Wizard of Oz or an orphan in Annie – and it inspired O’Keeffe to study performing arts.
But she put her acting ambitions aside when she married Murtagh and began trying for a family.
She says serving her family was her priority as a Christian and she loved being married, but this stone was left unturned.
The day after that therapy session in March, Ward sent an email to Hot Tomato’s promotions manager, offering O’Keeffe the role of Tanya.
“I was like ‘God you’re amazing’ – all those little miracles right at exactly the moment of despair,” she says.
“It’s Millie’s absolute favourite musical that she and I had been watching … and so for it to even be that musical … she was thrilled. She’s walking around saying my lines and helping me with them.”
Her parents, friends, babysitters, and Murtagh are on standby to support O’Keeffe during the pre-production and season of Mamma Mia!, which runs at The Star from June 19 to July 11, but importantly, Millie will be with her in rehearsals and side of stage.
O’Keeffe says one of the hardest things has been not being able to hide her heartbreak from her daughter.
“There’s a lot of hurt and betrayal you can’t shield a child from that much,” O’Keeffe says.
“I’m not that strong … I couldn’t put up that much of a barrier between my pain and mothering, it seeped out, it poured out.
“That’s been one of the heartbreaking moments among the many heartbreaking moments ... sitting with Millie’s therapist and she said to me, ‘Millie is too afraid to cry because you’re crying a lot and she doesn’t want to cry in front of you because she doesn’t want to make you cry any more. She wants you to be happy’,” O’Keeffe stammers.
She says the musical role is a step towards being happy again.
O’Keeffe married her first husband at 22 and theyseparated two years later.
It was messy and she carried regrets from that relationship.
But by the time she met Murtagh in 2004 she felt an immediate spark.
“I learnt from those experiences and I knew he was the one for me,” she says.
She was working at Hot Tomato and he, at 20, was eight years her junior when they both attended a fundraiser for his former high school, The Southport School.
They tied the knot at Saint Mary’s Anglican Church near the Kangaroo Point cliffs four years later – the first of five wedding ceremonies they would celebrate over the next decade.
The following year they were married by Elvis in Las Vegas, they had a Hindu blessing in Bali and for their 10th wedding anniversary Murtagh surprised O’Keeffe at Teddy’s christening by proposing again in front of their friends and family.
After Millie but before Teddy was born in June, 2018, the couple had endured a five-year battle to conceive, involving three rounds of IVF, 32 embryo transfers, and one heartbreaking miscarriage.
So, it shocked O’Keeffe that a few months after their son’s christening Murtagh, who restores homes through his company MouldMen, disclosed to her that he was struggling.
“He went off to seek some help and he came back and said ‘No we need to do marriage counselling’ and I said ‘OK, I’ll do anything for you, I love you, I’ll do anything for us, anything for our family’,” O’Keeffe recalls.
“Teddy was only little, he was seven or eight months … I just thought, we finally have everything we’ve ever dreamt of, I actually don’t understand what’s happening.”
They tried three different counsellors during the next 18 months and spoke at length about the trauma of IVF and losing embryos and pregnancies, and while she can’t speak at length about Murtagh’s struggles, she felt she understood what he was going through.
“I was on board for healing and helping, and I love therapy … so I was quite naive in thinking that things were choofing along really well.”
O’Keeffe admits Murtagh having already secured a place to live caught her off guard.
“He sat me down right at this table and just said I’m not happy and I can’t keep putting you through all of this, I found somewhere to live and I’m leaving,” O’Keeffe says.
“I knew he wasn’t quite happy in himself or the marriage and … I offered him many outs and he didn’t take them and then one day he did.”
Reflecting on the 18 months, she adds: “I felt unloved for a couple of years; I didn’t even realise I was feeling unloved, I was so focused on trying to save it.
“Marriages go through ups and downs, and I just thought this was a down I had to get through. It wasn’t until he left and everyone came to support me and I thought, oh I’d forgotten, this is love.”
After the funeral that day, Murtagh didn’t come home until O’Keeffe was leaving for work the next morning for her breakfast radio shift.
She immediately told her co-hosts, who had already helped her through her IVF battle, but declined an offer of time off during the final two weeks of the radio calendar.
“I actually didn’t want a lot of quiet time in the beginning because I thought if I do I’ll crumble,” she says.
She and Murtagh had an emergency session with their marriage counsellor that day, where she begged him to stay, at least until Christmas, but he was resolute, and so she told him, “If you don’t want to be here you actually have to go”.
Her parents, who had recently relocated to the Gold Coast, moved in to help her care for the children.
But soon after, she rented a property near their Rainbow Bay home, at the southern end of the city, for a few weeks “just so we had a break and weren’t sitting in the house with the echoes of him everywhere, in every corner”.
On Christmas Day, Murtagh arrived at the rental to open presents and join them for breakfast and when he left O’Keeffe concedes: “I was hysterical.”
She had cancelled the bookings for their planned family road trip around Tasmania timed to coincide with her brother’s wedding.
She still went with the kids and stayed with friends and during that month-long holiday, for the first time contemplated the divorce.
“I’m not going to lie, the first month it was nasty and angry and there were things flying everywhere but then as we’ve calmed down and got over the hurt more and more each day, he’s made it very clear that he wants the kids to have exactly the same life they had when he was in the house,” she says.
O’Keeffe announced the separation on January15, writing a candid social media post in which she shared her utter devastation.
She had returned from Tasmania to messages and calls from listeners wondering where Murtagh was and she began to feel uneasy about hiding it.
“I thought I’m actually going to be brave and say, this is the worst thing I’ve ever gone through, I really loved him and did everything I could to save it … and I have lost babies and I thought that would break me but this completely broke me,” she says.
She put her phone away and spent the weekend with her friends and the kids.
When she opened up Instagram on Monday she was inundated with messages from women in similar positions thanking her for her honesty.
She says the experience and a book she was gifted, called Breakup Bootcamp, has given her the idea of doing retreats for women going through similar heartbreak and “get together all the people who have helped heal me”.
Since the separation, O’Keeffe has visited a psychic, who told her a dog would come into her life, she went to a marriage counsellor and a trauma therapist, read countless books, tried acupuncture, massage, and trauma yoga.
“This break-up is going to make me stronger, it’s going to make Gerard stronger, it’s going to make our kids resilient,” she says.
“I don’t want it to have happened, and I wish it never happened, but it has and I have to make something out of it.”
O’Keeffe says she took solace in every piece of literature that affirmed she was normal.
But she felt her insides churn whenever anyone complimented her shrinking figure.
“It’s such a strange headspace because a part of you really needs those compliments,” she says.
“My self-esteem was so very low, I felt that he was leaving me because I was unattractive, he didn’t like me for me anymore, I wasn’t doing things right.”
She adds: “I’ve worked in an industry for 25 years where you have to get ratings so therefore you are ruled by program directors saying you need to be more like this, say more things like this, sometimes even look like this … so I’m very good at adapting and changing and I was trying to do that to save my marriage and when I couldn’t save it I took the blame on.”
It was in therapy she shed the guilt of feeling she could have prevented the outcome and over time she slept more, and one day, staring at a cheese platter, surrounded by friends, she felt hungry again.
“And it was one day. I can’t explain it. Something clicked and I just wanted to eat the whole cheese platter,” she says with a laugh.
“So I sat there and I ate it and I was like, ‘oh I’m starting to get better’.”
O’Keeffe was already established in her media career when she met Murtagh and she admits they both struggled with their identities in the relationship – him being the partner of a person with a profile, and her being someone outside a mother and a wife.
“He felt that he was losing his identity to my career and that was, I guess, part of the problem. We’d go out to functions and it’s ‘Emily Jade O’Keeffe and guest’ and that was hard,” she says.
“There’s a lot of women in my role, other women in radio, if you look at Jackie O, Meshel Laurie, even more local stars, it’s really hard for our partners to be comfortable with the level
of attention.”
But O’Keeffe, too, had given up her theatre ambitions and put aside a half-written book when they started a family. It was old friends who helped her realise she had lost who she was.
“As a mother you don’t realise that you’re losing your identity; it just happens because your children need you, and that is that time of your life, and you’re totally OK with that because you love them so much, and I love seeing them grow and I can’t wait to see what they are going to be, but you forget to be you,” she says.
“And also I was trying to help Gerard flourish.”
Her parents have been married 45 years and O’Keeffe is devastated her children won’t have the united home she did growing up, but she’s determined to build a happy relationship
as co-parents.
She is still adjusting to her new life and the fear of being alone is with her every day.
“It doesn’t go away,” she says.
“Then there’s the fear of moving on, I’m not ready for that.”
She isn’t certain what little miracle will pop up for her next.
“I just keep making choices that bring happiness. After not realising we were unhappy, I am going to choose happiness every step of the way,” she says beginning to feel those waves of grief no longer crashing but lapping gently at her feet.
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