Alexi Baker: The truth about Hollywood Hugh Marks, working at Nine and me

‘I’m not a victim.’ Alexi Baker smiles as she says it, which is remarkable given the weekend she’s just had.

‘Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a shrinking violet … I don’t want anyone to think I’m a victim,’ says Alexi Baker of her relationship with departing Nine CEO Hugh Marks. Picture: Jane Dempster

“I’m not a victim.”

That’s Alexi Baker talking. And she’s smiling as she says it, which is pretty remarkable given the weekend she’s just had.

Her partner, Hugh Marks, was forced to quit as chief executive of the $4.2bn Nine media company after his relationship with her — a so-called “subordinate” — became the subject of a story in one of his own newspapers.

Baker found herself being chased down the street by photographers. But look, she gets it.

“People are just doing their jobs,” she says. “I worked for a media company. I know how it works. People are interested.

“I’m not annoyed. Well, I am annoyed about the things that have been printed that are wrong. But I’m not thinking this is the end of my career.

“I am going to have a great career. I have a lot of ambition, and I’m not embarrassed about that. I’m proud of everything I achieved at Nine, and now I’m thinking about the next step.”

Baker says she’s happy to talk about the relationship with Marks — how it started, and why she, and then he, had to quit — because she can see a false narrative taking hold.

That narrative goes something like this: Hugh Marks is a blokey-bloke from the macho Nine culture, where everyone is a bit of a pants man. He had been having sex with underlings; Baker is merely the latest, and when people found out, she lost her job, because it’s always the woman who loses her job, except that he’s now lost his job, too, because Nine made the mistake of merging with the woke Fairfax press, which outed his peccadillos last Saturday, because #metoo.

That’s the narrative.

“And it’s so wrong,” says Baker.

Alexi Baker, talking about her relationship with Hugh Marks. Picture: Jane Dempster

The actual story, she says, is this: she started at Nine when it was a pure TV company in 2011. Marks was already there but didn’t become CEO until 2015.

Together they worked on some monster deals — Nine has in the past five years merged with Fairfax; there’s been a deal with Macquarie Radio; cricket was dropped for tennis; NRL was nailed down, and so on — and while both were once married, they each in time became single.

Baker’s short marriage to an investment banker ended about five years ago (her former husband has children with his new partner, so that relationship is ancient history) and Marks’s marriage to wife Gayle, with whom he has four children, aged 14 and up, broke up about a year ago.

In May, he was photographed enjoying a picnic in the park with his EA, Jane Routledge.

Gossip started to fly: were they having an affair? He denied it.

Does Baker believe him?

“He’s said publicly it isn’t true, and I’ll let his statement be my statement,” she says.

She won’t put an exact date on when they started seeing each other because, she says, what date should she pick? First coffee? First stroll by the beach? First kiss?

She gets that these details were once nobody’s and are now everybody’s business. The #metoo movement has made it so.

Just last week, a federal minister was accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a member of his staff. Both were married, but she has made a formal complaint, saying she felt “discarded” by the Liberal Party when it ended.

Departing CEO of Nine Hugh Marks in North Sydney on Sunday. Picture: Jane Dempster

Nine is a public company; there is shareholder money at stake when a sex scandal breaks.

The company is required to provide a safe workplace. It does not have a formal “bonk ban” but it — like all modern companies — surely understands that there is a natural power imbalance between the CEO and his staff that makes a sexual relationship between them at best unwise; at worst toxic to culture, or even abusive.

But what is a company to do when two adults — Baker is 38, Marks is 54 — meet at work and want to have a relationship? “It’s tricky,” Baker says. “The reality is, particularly as you get older, spending a lot of time a work, people will meet and form relationships. That’s what happened.”

How did it happen? “Well, Hugh and I did a lot of big deals together — the Macquarie Radio deal, the NRL — and a lot of those deals are now complete. And he knew that I felt I had run out of things to do at Nine.”

They spent some time talking about what the next step in her career might be, which evolved into a conversation about what she wanted for her future “and the ¬relationship formed from there”.

She agrees that people were surprised: she’s in her 30s, and has no children; she lives in the trendy inner-city apartment, drives a sporty car, favours Louboutin heels; he’s in his 50s, divorced with four kids and called Hollywood Hugh in an ironic way because he’s a bit of a dork.

But, she says, “when there is some chemistry, I think you both feel it”. That said, it’s all still “pretty new”. How new? For example, has she met his kids?

“Not all of them,” she replies.

Alexi Baker. Picture: Jane Dempster.

She was amused to see a report at the weekend that she was “discussing baby plans” with Marks, saying: “We can say for sure it’s way too early for that talk. And look, the timing, in the pandemic, was, you know, not ideal.”

Yes, she understood that one of them would have to quit. But why does it always seem to be the woman? She says it made sense, because “I was already looking around for the next challenge”.

“And it’s not as simple for him to go because he’s got a much broader set of responsibilities, it’s not a quick and easy thing. We wanted to give the relationship some space and time, to see if it would develop. And since I was ready to quit, I quit.”

Did they think about maybe going to the board to say: look, we are in a relationship but it’s consensual, and we’d both like to stay on? “No, because, as I said, I was ready to go. And I knew he wouldn’t be far behind me … because the big deals are all done for him, too.”

So Baker left on September 30. And here’s where the story gets tricky. At the AGM on Thursday, chairman Peter Costello was asked a pointed question about Marks’s personal relationship not with Baker but with his EA. The former federal treasurer said he didn’t believe there had been any wrongdoing. But it seems he, and maybe also the board, knew by this stage that Marks was in a relationship with a different staffer: Baker.

At the same time, they were asking shareholders to approve a salary bonus for Marks, which may in time add up to $5m. That deal was approved — Nine is performing far better than expected during the pandemic, with earnings up 30 per cent — but it seems not everyone was happy about it.

The story of Marks’s relationship with Baker broke in The Sydney Morning Herald just two days later. So now the board had a problem. Having one of the CEO’s relationships in the papers was one thing. To have two?

Add to that the fact that Nine papers have been reporting all year on #metoo scandals, involving the former High Court judge Dyson Heydon, for example. They couldn’t really ignore this. A board hook-up was arranged. By Saturday afternoon Marks had quit.

Baker agrees he probably had to go “because the pressure was getting ridiculous, and it was only going to get worse. And I understand people’s interest in it”.

She doesn’t know precisely when each board member was told about the relationship “because I wasn’t there. I was already gone”.

She doesn’t support a blanket “bonk ban” as introduced by Malcolm Turnbull for cabinet ministers because the fact is, people do meet at work.

“The best approach is a flexible one,” she says. “Every situation will be different, because of the company and the people involved. In my situation, I think anyone who knows me knows I’m not a shrinking violet. That’s why I’m here … I don’t want anyone to think I’m a victim. I never felt like a junior staffer. I’d have said we were colleagues. And I always felt respected, including by the board.”

She understands that CEO-staffer relationships are frowned upon not only because of the danger to those in them but because other staff might feel that the boss’s partner is getting some sort of preferential treatment. “And that is one of the reasons why you leave,” she says. “So there isn’t a perceived, or an actual, conflict of interest. That is why we tried to make considered, thoughtful decisions about what to do. And, yes, I read that I had a meteoric rise. I worked there for 10 years, long hours, many weekends, and before that I was in investment banking. It didn’t feel like a meteoric rise. It felt like hard work.”

But what of women who find themselves being hit on, or harassed, by their superiors?

“I get that,” she says. “I can say, in my case, I didn’t do anything I didn’t want to do. And now I want to go out and continue my career, find a business to run, a place where maybe I can one day be CEO.”

And when it comes time for her to set the rules? “I hope I will take a pragmatic approach,” she says. “Relationships happen, they should be disclosed, and then you think: OK, what options do we have?’”

In the meantime, she is not taking a backward step: she comes to the interview with The Australian directly from a job interview. “People have been great,” she says. Nobody has made her feel toxic. “It’s been uncomfortable, having it play out in public. But again, I’m not a victim here. I’m highly skilled professional and I have the right to a career and a life, and I won’t be apologetic about that.

“With my friends and family, it hasn’t been: oh no, what’s all this about? They’re just happy that I’m happy.”