‘It’s my kink’: Abbie reveals reality of open relationship

In a candid interview, Abbie Chatfield reveals what happened when a stranger told her she needed to get a ‘real job’ – and how it led to her big break.

In the fickle world of fame, reality TV rejects are expected to fade back into obscurity. Then there’s Abbie Chatfield.

Feisty, foul-mouthed and full of opinions, the 27-year-old parlayed a public romantic rebuff on The Bachelor into an astonishing second act as an “It” girl with a growing multimedia empire, financial security and prominence as an unabashed champion for young Australian women who care about social change and sexual gratification in equal measure.

And she isn’t taking any of it for granted. As she tells Stellar, “I’m still excited about everything”.

Mention the name Abbie Chatfield to any woman under the age of 35 and she is likely to yelp with delight. Ask a man and there’s a good chance he’ll have no clue who she is.

“Men have no idea who I am,” says Chatfield, who goes on to tell Stellar an anecdote about how, while at a party last year with the guy she was dating, another man asked what she did for work.

“I’ve got a podcast,” she told him. In turn, he replied that podcasting was hardly a real job and more of a hobby.

Her date interjected: “I think you’ll find she earns more in a quarter than you did all year.”

Twelve months on, Chatfield could well be earning more in a week, what with a sought-after judging role on The Masked Singer Australia, a nightly radio spot, her own fashion line, a gig as the host of Love Island Australia Afterparty, a TV pilot, multiple commercial deals and her own brand of vibrator – the sales of which paid for a deposit on her first house.

It’s an extraordinary trajectory for a woman who just three years ago had her heart broken on national TV when, after she made the final two on The Bachelor Australia, astrophysicist Matt Agnew chose somebody else.

In the make-them-then-break-them world of reality television, that should have been the last we heard of her, particularly after she was publicly shamed and relentlessly trolled by critics who regarded her as hypersexualised.

But like everything else in this fast-moving century, fame has been disrupted. Which

is why this tenacious, street-smart, potty-mouthed so-called reality TV reject has redefined not only what it means to be an “It” girl, but also how to get there.

“I have no idea what the formula is or was,” says Chatfield who, to be fair, backed up her dating show dismissal by winning last year’s edition of I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!

“It’s been fast and overwhelming and I do feel like a fish out of water a little bit.

“On The Masked Singer I sit there with my water bottle thinking, What the f*ck? Why am I sitting next to a Spice Girl and how did all this happen?

“It’s been a lot very quickly and I’m very grateful. But it also makes me think that it can very easily be taken away.”

Abbie Chatfield: ‘I do feel like a fish out of water a little bit’. Picture: Daniel Nadel

Chatfield, 27, is a new brand of celebrity, a self-made operator who seems to treat the opportunities offered by conventional media less like a springboard and more like stepping stones in the building of a layered and arguably more sustainable career.

Which is not to say she doesn’t respect the high-profile roles or give them her all. Rather, the young star’s emerging brand is dependent less on what she does than who she is.

As she poses for her photoshoot with Stellar, Chatfield comes off as both an ingénue and a seasoned pro. Chatty and eager to please, she is also nonplussed when the stylist slips a hand inside her jacket to adjust her naked breasts.

Afterwards, as she sits with her feet tucked up on a chair sipping on a Coke, she reveals that one of the upsides of being recently diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is it makes it easy to jump from project to project.

“I’m still excited about everything,” she admits.

“Everyone thinks I spend months plotting and planning everything, but I’ll just get a call saying, ‘Do you want to do this?’ I was a property analyst before this, so if I get asked to create a TV pilot, I’m just like, ‘F*ck yeah!

“On social [media] I’m very much known, but I’m a bit of a gamble for the old networks that have been around forever. I’m very lucky the mainstream media is taking a chance on me.”

Chatfield was still up at midnight working ahead of her morning shoot and interview with Stellar – the combination of The Masked Singer, her Hit Network radio show Hot Nights With Abbie Chatfield, a popular podcast, and promoting her pilot TV show Abbie Chats on 10Play means she hasn’t taken a day off in weeks.

While she admits she’s having trouble sleeping and her libido has fallen off a cliff, Chatfield also insists she doesn’t mind the grind, pointing out that as the daughter of a single mum she’s worked hard since she was 14 and held down a full-time job while also studying full-time at university.

“I had a week off where I only had radio – and the podcast, obviously – but I was so f*cking bored,” she explains.

“I’ve always done lots of sh*t. People say it’s maybe because I’m trying to avoid my feelings. Or that I’m a workaholic.”

Emotionally avoidant is not a description her podcast listeners are likely to use.

Indeed, they tune in to the twice-weekly episodes of It’s A Lot With Abbie Chatfield

for her voluble mix of topical opinion, Zeitgeist commentary and personal revelations and reflections.

In any week she could be speaking about politics, Indigenous issues, offset accounts, the death of her dog or why she and her boyfriend, Konrad Bień-Stephen, have an open relationship.

Indeed, shortly before our interview she informed her listeners that she had finally slept with someone else.

“It was good,” says Chatfield, who declines to name her lover and points out that she and Bień-Stephen, a contestant on last year’s The Bachelorette, have a “one-time” rule which restricts either of them from sleeping with another partner more than once.

While fans sent her messages concerned that Bień-Stephen was forcing her into the arrangement, she says it was her choice and points out that Bień-Stephen recently told her that after sleeping with someone else he was happy to discover he didn’t love her any less – or want to be with that person again.

Asked if she feels jealous when her boyfriend of nine months tells her he’s had sex with another woman, she replies that it is actually her sexual fantasy.

“I’ve never been upset or threatened by someone [I’m in a relationship with] sleeping with someone else,” she explains. “It’s my kink. I just never really valued monogamy that much.”

‘I just never really valued monogamy that much’. Picture: Daniel Nadel

When Stellar queries what makes their relationship work, she laughs. “It sounds awful, but I don’t really see him all that much, maybe two days a week. I don’t know if it’s scarcity, but he’s very good at communicating, and so am I.”

As she knocks back weight loss deals (“I only do things I align myself with”) and abandons nights out because she’s ambushed by fans (“I have a five-person rule, then I go home”), it’s clear Chatfield has turned her life around since the harrowing days after her dismissal on The Bachelor.

She was in such a distressed state after being positioned as “the villain” that her worried mum was checking on her in the middle of the night.

In an intimate scene with Agnew, she’d openly declared she wanted to have sex with him, which only contributed to the shaming and abuse from online trolls.

“It’s hard to imagine how dark that place was for me,” she says. “Unfortunately, people need to hate someone to enjoy a TV show.

“I mean, it wasn’t the best edit for me, but it’s done. And it gave me a platform to speak about things like slut shaming.”

While she was heartbroken at the time, Chatfield contacted Agnew after the show and says they are now great friends.

“We hung out a few times, had dinner – I made very bad gnocchi – and the sexual tension doesn’t exist anymore. He’s so smart and so hot and I admire him, but neither of us feels anything.

“I idealised him in the house because I put him on a pedestal and needed validation.”

Last year, Chatfield – whose mum Laura, a teacher, raised her and her sister Jolie in Brisbane – marked Father’s Day by posting a picture of herself with her arm outstretched around her non-existent father.

He left when she was a baby and she says that while it upset her when she was younger, she now uses humour to deal with his absence – just as she does with the other hard things that happen in her life.

“If you can’t laugh about your dad leaving, what can you laugh about?” she asks. “What else are you going to do – sit in a room and cry for the rest of your life?”

She sees a therapist, but also discharges her thoughts and emotions through her podcast.

She’s always been argumentative, she tells Stellar, revealing how in Year 9 she debated with her teacher that sex workers shouldn’t be shamed.

While her young audience clamours for her opinions on everything from vaccination to abortion and politics, a Sky News panel dubbed her “sinister” after she divulged her strong anti-Liberal views on social media.

“[People] thought I wanted to kill Boomers, but I was just saying they would die out and that eventually Labor will take the position of the Liberals and the Greens will take the position of Labor,” she explains.

In a sea of often vacuous influencers, Chatfield’s decision to embrace boldness, authenticity and body positivity is winning over women who are tired of expectations they should look and sound “nice”. She now embraces body neutrality.

‘I’d like to be a mini Osher [Günsberg]’. Picture: Daniel Nadel

“I used to wake up every day between the ages of 13 and 24 and analyse my body,” she says.

“I don’t think about it anymore. Maybe it’s a confidence thing, growing up and not giving a shit what anyone else thinks. It’s quite a relief.”

Likewise, she believes her generation will solve problems: “During the three years I have been in the media people have changed their minds a lot about how they see me, or trans people or different perspectives. The youth of our population has a more mutable energy.”

As for adjustments she has made, one has been an effort to tone down the expletives while filming family-friendly television

“I don’t swear on radio,” she protests, laughing. But she confides that while appearing on I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, producers were constantly telling her to stop swearing, and quips: “I’d be like, ‘Oh, f*ck, sorry.’”

Her busy schedule has left Chatfield missing catch-ups with old friends – “they’re really, really important for making me feel normal” – and would like to spend more time in the cottage she bought in Byron Bay.

After being paid $90 a day on The Bachelor, she’s had the last laugh, using the proceeds of sales of the orange Vush x Abbie vibrator, which she collaborated on, to buy the property.

“They reordered them three times, but I don’t know how many I sold,” she says.

“I don’t know what I earn; I could be getting scammed left, right and centre. Thank God I have good managers, if I had arseholes I could be taken advantage of.”

As for her future, Chatfield doesn’t plan, but hopes to build on her multi-platformed career.

“Ideally, in 10 years I’d like to be a mini Osher [Günsberg],” she says. “He’s talented, professional, smart and everyone loves him.”

Abbie Chatfield stars on the cover of this Sunday’s Stellar. Picture: Daniel Nadel

For now, she’s content to watch and learn from her fellow Masked Singer judges Dave Hughes, Chrissie Swan and Mel B.

“As long as I keep being myself, hopefully things will remain as they are. Because they’re pretty good right now.”

The Masked Singer premieres at 7.30pm on Sunday, August 7 on Network 10.

Originally published as ‘It’s my kink’: Abbie reveals reality of open relationship