Emily Jade O’Keeffe reveals run-ins with male creeps on road to radio stardom

Queensland radio identity Emily Jade O’Keeffe has detailedthe shocking sexual advancements she’s been subjected to over her career from male media creeps. Read her interview.

Emily Jade O'Keeffe. Picture: Luke Marsden

Many Aussies wake up to Emily Jade O’Keeffe each morning,as the Queensland identity co-hosts her top-rating breakfast show Hot Tomato with co-host Paul Galey.

But in her most raw and revealing interview to date, she opens up on her rise through the radio and media ranks – and the at-times confronting, abusive and sexually inappropriate advances she’s had to put up with and overcome along the way.

In no particular order, but during decades in the game, the breakfast star opens up on being told to dress inappropriately by a colleague so he could “check out your ass” (management took his side), being asked for a sexual favour to secure a role, and being told by a senior male colleague to go to dinner with a major male advertiser who then made sexual advances towards her.

Euphemistically, she says: “I’ve had an interesting time with male colleagues.”

But she also wants it known that, while the shocking incidents have been truly awful, the number of good men and mentors have far outweighed the bad.

“I’ve had a lot of wonderful ones that have supported me and a few along the way that have been inappropriate. My generation of women definitely had to navigate men with ill intentions. When you find one who believes in you, you’re very lucky.”

She ticks off some good ones: SeaFM’s Rod Bryce (“he believed in me”), Dan Bradley (“he was a good man”), Hot Tomato’s Hans Torv and Graham Miles (“two kind men, caring, fatherly figures”).

“But I’m looking forward to the time where you don’t need a good guy in your corner, you just need a good person - male or female. When you have a good guy in your corner, it’s certainly a lot easier.”

Unfortunately for this well-known star, she has plenty of stories - never shared before until now - about the times when she had the opposite of a good guy for a colleague or in a superior role.

Hot Tomato star Emily Jade O'Keeffe. Picture: Luke Marsden.

THE TRACKSUIT INCIDENT

In one role she recalls wearing “comfy” tracksuit pants to work prompting a male colleague to say: “Don’t wear tracksuit pants again – I can’t check out your ass.”

O’Keeffe alerted her boss who she claims sent an email to all staff saying employees should not wear tracksuit pants to work.

“I know it seems so silly now but it really affected me because I went out on a limb to stand up for myself and then was told not to wear tracksuit pants. It made working with him really tricky because obviously I’d gone and complained. Sorry, I’m getting shaky thinking about him.”

THE LIFT INCIDENT

Worse, she reveals when going for a job interview, a manager propositioned her for a sexual favour to get the role.

“He said he’d walk me to the car, stopped and straddled me in the lift. He said ‘If you give me a head job right now in this lift I’ll get you a job on air’. I laughingly push him away and said ‘You must be joking’. He said ‘I’m absolutely not joking’.

“He sent me messages every day saying he knew where I lived and if he just came by before or after work and I did what he asked I would get the job at that particular radio station.

“I then discovered he did it to a lot of women and if we had all had the courage to speak at the time we could have gotten rid of him but everybody was secretly holding the burden of how he’d been treating them. I wish I done something but I was too scared.

“They never sacked him, they just kept moving him.”

EXILE OVERSEAS

She switched to TV for a while before deciding to return to radio but says the manager who propositioned her was the “gateway” back.

“I opted to go overseas because I didn’t think I had another choice. I’d seen other women stand up against other men and then not have their job anymore. I felt powerless, so I went overseas.” She went to England, worked in a school teaching drama and when on a school camp in a rural area “fell in love with a farmer” and lived and worked on a farm whilst doing work at a small radio station nearby.

She recalls a schoolfriend who shared similar ambitions but as a journalist coming to visit: “He’s got photos of me in gumboots and overalls, hair not done, no makeup.”

He told her “I don’t know who you are, who is this person?’. “I was like ‘It’s in me, it’s just a different side of me. I had a donkey called Ernie, I helped birth twin sheep one night called Bart and Lisa, they followed me everywhere. I planted a herb garden and one night they ate it. I was so furious. It was a dairy farm, we’d make cheese - gloucestershire cheese. It was good. I had time out.”

Eventually she was offered a way back to fulfil her radio dreams on the Gold Coast: “Hot Tomato contacted me overseas - two kind men, Hans Torv and Graham Miles, offered me this position. They were kind, caring, fatherly figures.”

THE ‘FED TO THE WOLF’ INCIDENT

“I’ve got another example when I was asked to go to dinner with a client,” she recalls of the time a senior colleague asked her to take a big advertiser visiting from out-of-town.

The client quickly moved their after-hours conversation towards sex, asking to sleep with her and offering her an apartment and a car. “He says ‘I’ll take you as my lover, you’re very beautiful, exactly the type of person me and my wealth needs to be with.” I just said ‘it’s a very kind offer but no thank you, I’m going to go now’.”

The next day she confronted her senior colleague who had set the dinner up, quizzing him on why he would send a female staffer in their 20s to such a dinner without coming too.

“I walked straight into his office and said ‘What the f--- was that?’ He pleaded innocence, saying ‘I had no idea he’d do that, I didn’t know it was going to go that way - we were just doing some business and he said he’d liked to take you out to dinner’.

“I said ‘You just fed me to the wolf, like a lamb’.” She lasted six more months in the job - he didn’t renew her contract.

THE TV SHOW OFFER THAT WASN’T ONE INCIDENT

Before her radio career started, she recalls being flown to Sydney by a male TV executive on the promise of experience on a show.

She was in her late teens at university in Tasmania at the time and the executive offered her a spot to stay - “I’ve got a house”.

“It wasn’t a house - it was a one-bedroom apartment and he wanted me to sleep in his bed. I said ‘I’m going to sleep on the couch thank you’.”

“I had to wake up the next day, went to work with him on this particular show and he palmed me off to make up, holding up a light. That night he had a crack again like ‘you can sleep here if you like’.

“I rang my dad, my dad knew somebody in Sydney and he went ‘I’m getting someone to come and get you straight away’.”

Emily Jade O’Keeffe back in 2009.

Reflecting on the incidents, she says they are at the hands of a minority of males in the industry, with the majority being supportive.

“When I talk about the lift incident, it surprised me. I’ve been in radio for 20 years and it’s three or four times that’s happened - in between all those there have been great people so I prefer to look at the good people than the bad. I don’t want the good men to feel like we’re bagging them out.

“The ‘Me Too’ movement has made it a safer space for women. I would encourage anybody that’s been treated inappropriately to speak up or just leave the situation, don’t put up with it.

“I’m out of the danger zone of men taking advantage with their power. But in the other danger zone of starting to age. The media can be quite ageist. But I think the world is changing and we’re seeing more and more people my age and above keeping their jobs.”

Then there are just straight up different standards for male announcers compared to female, she explains.

“When pregnant, I was being told in listener advisory boards men don’t want to hear you’re pregnant. So don’t talk about your pregnancy on air or don’t talk about your children, men get sick of it. As a woman on radio I get scrutinised more. I say ‘s---’ on air, someone will complain. Galey says ‘s---’ and no one will. The other day I said ‘d---head’ and in the same show Galey said the same word. I get the complaint, he doesn’t and you think ‘why is that?’.

“I could talk about my kids and people complain. Galey or whatever male counterpart I’m with talks about his kids and it’s ‘Isn’t it lovely - he talks about his kids’.”

Emily Jade O'Keeffe on her graduation.

She feels with some justification like she’s been a trailblazer for women in the sector.

When she started at Hot Tomato, it wasn’t number one and on-air talent was very “male-dominated” before Moyra Major started on the afternoon drive show and O’Keeffe won a breakfast slot.

“We turned the tables and it become No. 1. Businesses need women because women, especially in the media, need to feel represented and to have a women’s voice talking to them and for them. The station went to No. 1 when they put true, strong, females in the two most important shows.”

Now the station has an “amazing” female newsreader, a “headstrong, bulldog, fantastic” female producer “and then there’s me”.

“And there’s three guys we work alongside so it’s balanced. When I started there were more men, now I’m one of four great women. So it’s a good time to be in media.”

Her success these days is a full circle moment when she reflects on the dreams of a young girl with plenty of ambition - and she hopes other young women coming through aspire to the same.

“I discovered moving house about a decade ago in a diary I had written about my goals to do breakfast radio on the Gold Coast. I was so specific. I worked in Brisbane for eight years thinking that was the pinnacle but realistically I just wanted to live on the Gold Coast on the beach – so write your goals down.

“In my radio career I alway support women the most. I have beautiful friendships, mentors, and women who have raised me up, guided me, supported me. That’s also part of the reason why there’s now so many women in the media because we know we’ve created a safe space so all those terrible stories I’ve told you about, now we’ve combated that, more women have worked harder to be in that space and create a space that is safe for young women to come and get into the media now.”

HOT TOMATO IS A MEDIA PARTNER FOR THE GOLD COAST BULLETIN WOMEN OF THE YEAR AWARDS BY HARVEY NORMAN