Michelle Leslie: ‘I’ve been judged by everyone in Australia’
It has been 13 years since Michelle Leslie was thrust into the spotlight after being arrested on drug charges in Bali. And for the first time in a long time, she’s ready to talk about “surviving her darkest days”.
Stellar
Don't miss out on the headlines from Stellar. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Emily Ratajkowski: ‘Why do people focus on what I’m wearing?’
- Carrie Bickmore: ‘I don’t take anything for granted’
A lot can happen in one night. And a lot can also happen in 13 years.
What happened to Michelle Leslie during the course of a fateful August 2005 evening in Bali — when the Australian model was arrested and charged with carrying two suspected ecstasy tablets in her handbag — landed her in the middle of a media maelstrom.
The resulting opprobrium was fast and furious; whether it was fair became a topic that got turned over endlessly, fanned by Leslie’s willingness to front the media with a string of questionable defences that only helped exaggerate her notoriety.
Lessons were learnt, a jail term was served, opinions were hardened. And eventually, Leslie decided it would be best if she simply shut her mouth. It has been a long time since Leslie spoke to the media of her own volition. Save for a few comments about her 2012 wedding to now-ex husband Adam Zammit, she has stayed quiet about the business ventures, personal achievements and romances that have kept her busy since she withdrew from public life. And it has suited her just fine.
“I really like my privacy,” Leslie tells Stellar. “And I was really just loving doing my work without having to be judged by anyone but my clients after feeling, you know, like maybe I’ve been judged by every single person over every single back fence in Australia at some stage. Whether that was true or false, it was the truth in my head. My anxiety just wouldn’t allow me to proactively seek public attention. And I didn’t want that to change.”
Leslie is something of a shapeshifter, both in conversation and real life. Though the country knew her professionally thanks to appearances on 2000’s Search For A Supermodel, and stints with Myer, Antz Pantz and Crystelle lingerie, after Bali the gigs dried up. She tried designing clothes for dogs. She raised money for a Cambodian children’s charity. And she studied interior design and decoration, the catalyst for launching her successful business of 10 years, Michelle Leslie Design.
MORE STELLAR:
How this young designer is changing the face of fashion
Melissa McCarthy is fed up with ‘shiny and bland’ women
It was a career development, the 37-year-old insists, that did not come out of nowhere. During her childhood in Adelaide, she says, “I developed a love for building, for figuring out the machination of things. I used to totter under the car with my brother, pretending we were, you know, building a Ferrari when it was in fact a Datsun 180B.”
Leslie’s mother Violeta was a nurse and one of 12 siblings. Along with all of her sisters, each named after a flower, she emigrated with her new husband Albert, an Australian Olympic basketball player she met during his layover in her native Philippines ahead of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
“I was surrounded and raised by Spanish-Filipino women,” Leslie says, laughing in reflection. “All love karaoke, as you know. You can tell what my Christmas sounded like, right?
“And I learnt incredible patience as a child because I was always choosing to wear corduroy pants — a real tomboy — and my mum loved putting me into really pink, frou-frou dresses. Again, she’s Spanish-Filipino. The ultimate thing is to have the most gorgeous little girl, all dressed up. If you’d lit a match near me as a child, I would have caught on fire.”
She grabs her phone and pulls up a picture. “That was my childhood. Can you even cope?” In the frame is Leslie, about four years old, standing in a garden in a frilly dress, not looking amused.
Modelling happened, anyway. By the time she was a teenager, “I was wearing ripped stockings, Doc Martens and Nirvana T-shirts.” Albert decided it was time for deportment school. “I learnt how to eat with the correct cutlery during a fancy dinner, walk with a book on my head and how to get out of a sports car without flashing my knickers,” Leslie says. Her diction remains impeccable, even when she is asked to look back on the period in her life that will continue to define her, even though she’s long since moved on.
After Leslie’s arrest, she gave a tearful press conference protesting her innocence. But it was later developments — such as accusations she spent upwards of $600,000 to bribe her way out of a 15-year jail term and change lab drug-test results; blaming a friend for placing the pills in her handbag and, most controversially, claiming a conversion to Islam and wearing an Islamic hijab in order to protect herself from being raped in prison — that earned tut-tuts from the public.
Asked about that period now, Leslie tells Stellar: “It was what it was. I look back and can’t believe I managed to get through some of those moments. It was a hell of a time. And it takes work and a lot of time and energy to get past the trauma of it. Everybody has a story and just because mine was public doesn’t make it any more or less traumatic, or any better or worse, than anyone else’s.
“I survived my darkest days, and I’m super proud of that girl. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to assess it correctly, given I was the person at the heart of it all. It would all be wild stabs at what could or couldn’t have changed. True, false, incorrect... people said a lot of things. And everyone is entitled to their own opinion — and they have them!”
Leslie says her past hasn’t prevented her from winning clients — and if a potential project partner seemed suspicious, “I would just steer clear of them.” If anything, her good looks and statuesque figure have occasionally been an impediment as she sought to make inroads into the male-dominated construction industry.
“I can have a real laugh with them now,” she says, “but when I first started and worked alongside some tradesmen, they were like — you know, real Australian accents — ‘Bloody hell, Shell, when you first got on site... Oh my god. We were totally in judgement of you.’ But now they’ve built up some sites with me and they know. I don’t mind that people judge me and if once they get to know me their assessment changes, I’m fine with that.”
Posing for Stellar, Leslie is clad in head-to-toe designer clothing, but insists, “During the week I live on building sites, looking at plans and building interiors. It’s not abnormal for me to come home with concrete dust in my hair and paint on my clothes — and I love it.”
Home is in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, but it is also on the outskirts of Newcastle, where Leslie spends time with her beau, former Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns. He’s the ex-partner of her one-time best friend Louise van der Vorst, who was a bridesmaid at Leslie’s wedding in 2012. (Leslie and PR guru Zammit split in 2014.)
She has had a few high-profile relationships that went kaput, but Leslie says, “I don’t think I’ve been unlucky in love at all. The path you’re leading in life leads you to the right person.” The only time she bristles during her chat with Stellar is when asked if she maintains contact with her exes. “Do we really have to talk about this?” she asks.
Still, she is willing to entertain the question of what she could have done differently. “Hindsight is so wonderful — and we could be here for a really long time answering that question,” she says. “There are incredible learnings from all of it — the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful. I think I’ve managed to find the place where I am really happy.” She laughs. “It just took me a minute.”
There’s a band with a diamond on her left ring finger, so another question lingers in the air, and must be asked: do she and Johns have any happy news they would like to share? Leslie shrinks into herself with a tentative grin before answering with a simple, “No. We’re super happy, really happy.”
But a ring on that finger surely means something? “We just want to keep our private life to ourselves,” Leslie demurs.
But, she confirms, a family could someday be on the cards, although she and Johns are not actively trying to start one. They like to host dinners, binge-watch TV shows like Animal Kingdom and Power and take long walks in the bush near Johns’s house.
“You can’t see any houses, you can’t hear any people. And you just go, ‘F*ck all that stress and stuff, sometimes it really doesn’t matter. How good’s this?’” she says. And, as someone who spends her days designing places for other people to live in, would she like to create her own dream home one day?
“For sure — on a farm,” she grins. “With no neighbours.”