Georgia Love breaks her silence on controversial Instagram posts

Former Channel 7 news presenter Georgia Love has addressed the media outcry after sharing a number of divisive posts on Instagram, saying ‘people need to be kinder. And that includes me.’

If anyone knows about the power of words and pictures, it’s Georgia Love. A journalist before she became a reality TV star on The Bachelorette, Love enjoyed telling stories with care and compassion. But in the span of a year, life as an influencer with husband Lee Elliott put the presenter under scrutiny so severe, it threatened to derail her carefully cultivated career. In an interview with Stellar, Love returns her focus to family, charity and how she plans to continue honouring her beloved late mother.

There have been many moments during the past six years when Georgia Love longed to have her mother by her side.

The day she finally exchanged vows with Lee Elliott at a picturesque Tasmanian winery, a wedding that had previously been cancelled twice due to the pandemic. The day Love claims she “became a proper grown-up” and purchased her first house in Melbourne. And, of course, the days when she had landed in the eye of the storm over questionable posts she had shared to her social media accounts.

“I wasn’t good for quite a while and have been dealing with that ever since,” Love says of the furore, her voice choked with emotion. “And it’s really hard not to have your number-one support person [there to help you], who is your mum.

“But my number-one support person now is Lee,” she tells Stellar. “And he’s been incredible. I’m very grateful to have him, [as well as the] support from everyone who knows and loves me. But those times are always really difficult. It’s the same in the really happy times, too, like the wedding.

“It’s those peaks and troughs and pivotal times in your life, be they good or bad, that you really want your mum.”

Georgia Love braces herself for “inevitable waves of sadness.” Picture: Cameron Grayson.

On so many occasions, grief has snuck up on Love, who lost her “happy, fun and positive” mother Belinda to pancreatic cancer in 2016. Not long ago, Love was visiting a family friend who had just had a new baby and she had to stop herself from texting her mother a happy snap of the new arrival.

“Probably the hardest part will be if we do decide to have kids,” Love says. “She really wanted to be a nanna.”

At Christmas, birthdays and, worst of all, Mother’s Day, Love braces herself for inevitable waves of sadness. “I think that they’re going to be hard for the rest of my life,” she says.

“It’s a hard reality to come to terms with, even going into our [sixth] Mother’s Day without her. The past five years, it really has been my least favourite time of the whole year and I’ve kind of put my head under the blankets and ignored the day as much as I could.”

This year, however, will be a little different. “I’m going down to Hobart with two girlfriends – one of whom has also lost her mum. Her tradition is that she always likes to do a hike on Mother’s Day and go up a mountain somewhere so she can feel closer to her mum,” she says.

“So we’re going to go up Mount Wellington. That’s so special to me, because I lived there [in Tasmania] for so long.”

Love is also eager to bring some “lightness and positivity” back to Mother’s Day by raising money for the Pancare Foundation, a charity that supports those battling upper gastrointestinal cancers, such as pancreatic.

With the backing of her sister Katie, Love is donating $10 from every pair of satin purple pyjamas sold in her Georgia Elliott sleepwear line to Pancare.

“It’s a very unsexy kind of cancer, which sounds like a silly thing to say,” she concedes.

“But the survival rate is so low that people don’t like talking about it. If we’re talking about it more, people might put more money into help, and that goes into vital research and that’s how we’re going to be able to find a cure – or at least increase the survival rate by being able to find the cancer earlier.”

Georgia Love is donating $10 from every pair of satin purple pyjamas sold in her Georgia Elliott sleepwear line to Pancare. Picture: Ali Rasoul

Her own mother died less than six months after she was diagnosed, and just 24 hours after Love’s season finale of The Bachelorette aired in 2016. Being catapulted straight into planning her mother’s funeral so soon after a TV audience watched her choose Elliott, she says, strengthened their commitment.

“I wasn’t the person who he met [on TV] because I was going through grief, and people are different when they’re going through that,” she explains.

“The fact that we got through that at all, let alone that we are still very happy and in love, makes our relationship so strong.”

Elliott’s family also quickly rallied around Love, especially his own mum Marina. “My mother-in-law is one of the best people on the entire Earth, which is a sentence not many people say,” Love admits with a hearty laugh.

“I’m incredibly lucky. All of Lee’s family are just beautiful. They’ve been so wonderful since day one. His whole family came to Mum’s funeral and most of them hadn’t met me, and none of them had met Mum.

“And this probably sounds a bit airy-fairy, but in another one of those strange universe things, my mother-in-law and my mother had the same birthday.

“So even though that day is always a bit sad for me, I still get to celebrate a mum

on September 8, which is really beautiful. It feels almost like a passing of the baton.”

Georgia Love: “I’m a boring old married woman.” Picture: @georgiealove on Instagram

Elliott was also a rock for Love last September when she shared an Instagram story (and another of her posts from 2013 soon resurfaced) that thrust her into the headlines and saw her accused of racism – the posts featured imagery of Asian restaurants and the implication that cats and dogs were on the menu.

While she in no way tries to excuse what she did, Love – who subsequently left her job at Seven Network – tells Stellar that people in situations like hers “should be able to say sorry, show they are sorry, and move on. The way the world is at the moment isn’t allowing that to happen.

“If we have a world where nobody is making any mistakes, then show me behind the curtain… because that’s just not possible.”

Love believes the ongoing stress of the pandemic has been partly to blame for the increased viciousness of social media trolling, and claims people have become “very angry and unforgiving.

“The past two years have been so hard for so many people, and I think the one thing I’m disappointed with is that people seem to have lost their empathy and understanding of people being humans. Everyone expects everyone to do everything right all the time.”

Love and Elliott found themselves in hot water again recently when they were among a group of global influencers who travelled to Saudi Arabia to promote tourism to the region – and shared their trip to social media – despite the country’s track record for human rights abuses.

The couple emphasised they didn’t endorse the Saudi government’s actions, but believed people should be free to experience different countries and cultures.

Ultimately, Love says, she tuned out a lot of the criticism. “Reading anonymous people’s nasty words wasn’t going to help anything,” she says.

Georgia Love features in this Sunday’s Stellar.

Now working in public relations with, she emphasises, a focus on positive and uplifting stories, Love’s recent experiences with fame and its attendant scrutiny have left her questioning its cost. She may have met the love of her life on The Bachelorette, but these days she would think twice about signing up for more reality TV.

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t do a dating show again now that I’m a boring old married woman,” she says with a laugh.

“I feel like anyone with any kind of profile is just sitting in wait until someone finds something that they’ve done wrong. We all need to be a bit kinder to each other. And that includes me.

“It’s everyone in the world. Everyone. I just wish people would stop and think about what they’re saying.”

To support the Pancare Foundation, buy purple Georgia Elliott PJs at georgiaelliott.com.au.