Amber Harrison has last laugh landing plum position
HER clandestine affair with Channel Seven’s CEO cost her her job, her home and would have robbed a lesser person of their sanity but two years later, Amber Harrison is doing very well.
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HER clandestine affair with Channel Seven’s CEO cost her her job, her home and would have robbed a lesser person of their sanity but two years after going public with the story of her eye-popping 18-month tryst, former Seven West EA Amber Harrison is doing very nicely, thank you, having moved into a management role with a corporate placement company.
It is two years this month since Harrison sat down with this writer to spill the beans on her 18-month affair with the married head of the Seven Network Tim Worner.
For three years, from mid 2014 until November 2017 - Harrison was sunk in suffocating litigation with Seven over allegations of breach of contract, fraud and contempt of court, all because she refused to go quietly and obediently after her affair, and the matter of some missing money, were discovered.
With her reputation in tatters, Harrison was written off by many as unemployable when out of the blue arrived a recruitment executive who saw something epic and heroic in the EA’s refusal to be destroyed by strong-arm legal tactics.
Today Harrison calls Kylie Hammond “an angel”.
Hammond is chair, CEO and founder of Director Institute: Next Generation Directors, a company that mentors women and men for executive board level placements.
While refusing to name her successful mentorees, of which Harrison could now be one, Hammond claims there aren’t too many publically listed companies in Australia who haven’t benefited directly or indirectly from her guidance and tutelage. In one 12 month period alone, states her website, she placed over 2500 people on Australian boards and tutored 500 senior executives.
A corporate headhunter for 20 years, Hammond sets high standards for her board level trainees and was stunned when she read in media despatches in February 2017 that former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, a seasoned and serial board director, had called Harrison a thief on social media.
“Initially I was just going to reach out to Amber and offer her my support, and then when she was publically branded a thief, I became genuinely concerned for her welfare,” Hammond told this column.
“I thought they were doing a very good impression of being corporate bullies – all for the simple reason she refused to do what they wanted; apologise and go away. I became fascinated by their unwillingness to settle the matter, which they could have done simply at any time. Instead they were hell bent on her destruction.”
That same month a concerned Hammond flew from Sydney, her hometown, to Melbourne to have coffee with Harrison who moved in with family in Melbourne after losing her job at Seven in Sydney in 2014.
What she found at the cafe that day was not an emotional and psychological wreck, Harrison pale and bloated as pictures of her during the arduous court battle depicted, but a likeable, positive, incredibly resilient woman; “an inspiring woman,” she said last week, precisely the sort of person she hoped to employ and mentor.
By the end of that day, a seriously impressed Hammond had offered Harrison a job.
By July 2017, Harrison, who had been unemployed for three years, was back at work. The new job at Hammmond’s Director Institute has seen Harrison elevated into management ranks from her previous role as an EA, executive assistant.
“There’s really nothing she doesn’t know how to do,” said Hammond, who continues to be impressed almost 18 months after employing Harrison.
For Harrison the job and pay packet could not have come at a better time.
In October 2016, one month before she and I first met to discuss her affair with Worner, the unmarried and childless Harrison became carer to a young boy, Cody.
Cody is the son of one of Harrison’s relatives who, unable to care for him, was set to hand the then four-year-old over to foster parents when Harrison stepped in and offered to become “mum” to him.
The first pangs of maternal desperation, of being unable to provide for Cody, were what ultimately prompted Harrison to finally accept this writer’s invitation to sit down and talk in November 2016, she said.
Payments from an earlier abandoned settlement with Seven had come to an end and the new mother, exhausted by the process of dealing with the company, which had paid her part of an agreed settlement sum but reneged on an original offer of a job, was ready to destroy the joint.
What followed in the Federal Court she now describes as “brutal” but through it all Cody kept her sane.
“If I hadn’t had to get up and make sandwiches and pick him up from school and look after him, I might not have survived it, but I had to survive it for him,” she said on Friday.
“I have an addictive personality. I could easily have just crawled into bed and taken antidepressants and never gotten up again but I had the best reason to go on.”
The 41-year-old also threw herself into a fitness program that helped her channel focus her addictive nature.
Despite Seven’s gag orders, Harrison has recently ventured onto Instagram where among her 308 followers last week were senior former Seven Network staffer Mark Llewellyn, ex Seven litigants Amy and Sophie Taeuber and Talitha Cummins , 60 Minutes executive producer Kirsty Thomson, the Nine Network’s Nine’s Director of News Darren Wick, politician Derryn Hinch and Australia’s favourite rocker, Jimmy Barnes.
In recent weeks Harrison’s followers have been entertained by her posts from Cabo, Mexico, where she kicked back on a welcome two-week holiday, where she was looking and sounding like her old self in photos and video posts.
Hammond sees a big future for the apparently indestructible Harrison.
“She has a bright future. There’s no limit to what she’s capable of. She’s highly skilled. Someone doesn’t work for board level executives without being a cut above,” Hammond said, pointing out that Harrison has exactly the sort of qualities that make a great board director.
“Her intelligence and resilience make her a standout. There is nothing a woman as tough and smart as Amber could not achieve.”