Steve Jackson interviews socialite Tziporah Malkah about nudity, drugs and life post-Packers
Tziporah Malkah readily admits she has exploited her fame as much as she has been exploited by it, and insists that after all she has been through, she deserves to tell the unadulterated story of her public life. But her world can be disconcerting for the uninitiated.
This story was first published in 2019.
It is Christmas Eve and Tziporah Malkah is strutting around her tiny inner-city apartment in nothing but her “bunny underwear”, belting out show tunes at the top of her lungs and intermittently screaming: “Kate Fischer is dead.”
The one-time supermodel is on edge, having just opened up about the simmering sexual tension she shared with former Nine proprietor Kerry Packer, the debilitating sexual assaults she suffered as a teen, and her hard-won relationship with her high-profile mother, Pru Goward.
While she cannot be placated, Malkah’s bizarre outburst will come as no surprise to her neighbours. “Oh shut up, will you,” the unpredictable 46-year-old hisses, taking a long swig from her oversized glass of sauvignon blanc.
“The police are going to be here soon anyway.”
Officers from Kings Cross station a block away have become almost nightly visitors to her shambolic apartment in recent weeks, urged on by family and friends’ increasing concerns about her seemingly unravelling mental state. Their distress is understandable, given Malkah’s bouts of erratic behaviour, two AVO charges and progressively disturbing social media posts — many of which feature interactions with police and paramedics. She has agreed to be interviewed because she wants to lay those concerns to rest. “I’m not insane,” she says from the outset. “I’m a psychopath — but I’m not insane.”
She openly concedes she is damaged, though. “Who wouldn’t be?” she asks.
She explains she has ridden a celebrity rollercoaster most of her life, and watched her star fade twice: first in 1998, following her split from billionaire fiance James Packer, and again this year after her brief resurgence flickered out following a slimmed-down photoshoot in the pages of a woman’s magazine.
She readily admits she has exploited her fame as much as she has been exploited by it, and insists that after all she has been through, she deserves to tell the unadulterated story of her public life and the impact that it has had on her.
Entering Malkah’s world can be disconcerting for the uninitiated — and it is hard to tell when she is being serious. Whenever queried, she huffs and maintains she is simply pushing the boundaries of what people perceive as normal.
“I’m not cookie-cutter; I’m challenging,” she says. “I challenge everything. I’m challenging ideas about beauty, and sexuality, and humanity, and people, and men, penis, vagina, women. People say, ‘Don’t post any more on Instagram’. Argh! You tell me not to do it, I do it more.
“They tell me it makes it look like I have mental health issues; well, there’s nothing wrong with me. The only issue I have is hearing that, it’s irritating.
“I have always been like this, but now people can see it on Instagram. It is a calculated move — I have gotten that many views on those videos I should be making thousands of dollars a week.
“My Mum is probably the reason (the police keep coming to check on me) … but I have no mental health issues. I mean, I’m a Jew, isn’t that crazy enough?”
Halcyon days
She concedes “crazy” is just about the only word that accurately describes the direction in which her life has spiralled since her halcyon days as one of the nation’s supermodels in the 1990s, when she was better known by her birth name, Kate Fischer, and a fixture of both top-end magazines and trashy tabloids.
Back then, she was on a trajectory that led to her modelling around the world and sharing the silver screen with Hugh Grant, Portia de Rossi and Elle Macpherson in the 1994 film Sirens.
She also became engaged to James Packer after a three-year courtship — before their relationship imploded and she disappeared from view for more than a decade.
“It was sex that ended things for me,” she explains. “It was actually all about sex.”
As a sex symbol from the age of 13, when she won Dolly magazine’s Covergirl of the Year competition in 1987, sex and sexuality have played a defining role in her life — for better and for worse.
The Packers
She blames the intense, and mutual, sexual tension she shared with her one-time future father-in-law for ultimately destroying her relationship with his son.
The couple had started dating at the peak of her powers in 1993, moving together into an apartment he bought for them in Bondi, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, before splitting after two years of engagement in 1998.
“Kerry was so jealous I was with James,” she says. “Kerry wanted me and I wanted him too. He was 6’1” and his hands were massive, of course, and he had these penetrating eyes.
“He was amazing and I loved him. We engaged each other intellectually and flirted a lot.
“Kerry and I never touched each other. Not really. We would only hug — but the chemistry was intense. People would watch us in the private Channel 9 box at the Roosters (rugby league) games.
“In the end, I proved too challenging even for Kerry. He told James, ‘Son, you don’t need to go home to that every night.’ ”
Despite misgivings about their break-up and the passage of time, Malkah says she still feels an enduring connection with the younger Packer, who spent his Christmas in the ski resort of Aspen this year, and thinks about him often.
“For a while, I thought our relationship was something different than what it was,” she laments. “We didn’t really love each other romantically. We loved each other because I was unusual. All the other girls he’d dated were pretty dumb girls. I was the opposite of that. He also had a father who was very dominating and I used to feel the same way about my mother. Sometimes we’d just lie in bed sobbing together, because Pru would have called me and bullied me, and Kerry would have bullied James for four hours until he cried.
“In the end, I said, ‘I’m not marrying a credit card.’
“I got our house and I came back for a second bite of the pie eight years later and I got another $2m out of him. That’s all gone now, of course. I could have got more. The career I could have had, I could have been Cameron Diaz, but he threw a long shadow. I still care about him a lot and worry about his health. He doesn’t look in a good way. People should never feel sorry for me; they should feel sorry for James. He needs everyone’s prayers. He’s poorer than I am and I am a week behind in my rent.”
It is at this point that Malkah spontaneously bursts into Hebrew, asking “HaKadosh Baruch Hu” (The Holy One, Blessed Be He) to protect Packer. It will become a regular theme throughout the evening, along with talk about sex, a topic she likes to discuss at length and reverts to whenever the conversation dies down.
Men, sex and rape
She can rattle off the names of dozens of celebrities — Australian and international — she has shared her sheets with, but her experiences have not always been positive.
“It’s a strange thing for me, sex,” she says. “Because from an early age I was abused.
“For years I wished I was normal. Every girl wanted to be me but I wanted to be every girl.
“The modelling and everything else was fine. But every man I met wanted me to be their claim to fame. I’ve f..ked over 100 of them but they all wanted to have sex with Kate Fischer, not with me; they want to have sex with an icon. It’s disgusting. But it’s the fact that I let men rape me and enjoyed it, that’s what has hurt my soul the most. I was a powerless little girl and I hated myself. I was ashamed. I used to slap myself: ‘You stupid f..king idiot, how could you be so revolting.’ ”
Malkah lists the occasions she was raped, in vivid detail. She clearly delineates between those attacks and instances in which she says she was seriously sexually assaulted, including at the hands of a well-known movie executive who remains powerful in Hollywood to this day, when she was just 16.
The details and dates are difficult to verify, and some of her allegations are intensely disturbing. She says she was first raped as a pre-pubescent child by someone close to her, and by yet another man she had trusted as recently as two months ago.
“I don’t blame anyone for anything that has happened to me,” she says. “I have survived it. Actually, I hate the word ‘survived’. I’m actually a winner. I have won.”
Asked what she has lost, however, and a glimmer of fragility washes across her face. “Me. For a long time,” she says. “It took me until I was 35 to know myself. That’s when I changed my name to Tziporah. Now I don’t give a f..k what anyone else thinks.”
One true love
She says that for most of her life, there has been only one man she has loved: Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren, best remembered for his portrayal of Soviet boxer Ivan Drago in the 1985 film Rocky IV, whom she met while working in Tokyo as a teenager.
“I was in a nightclub because that’s what you did when you were a model in Tokyo,” she says.
“I saw him coming in and I walked past him and gave a look and he grabbed my shoulders and he says, ‘Hey, come sit by me.’ We started talking and next thing we’re in his hotel room.
“I was obsessed with him for 10 years. I used to cry myself to sleep over him. He called my house in Australia one day while my mother was home and she said, ‘I know who you are. Don’t call her ever again.’ He never did.”
Goward is a former ABC journalist and Liberal Party MP and cabinet minister in NSW. Malkah says while they have endured a sometimes rocky relationship, she will forever be indebted to the woman who raised her.
“She was a great mum to my sisters — but, for me, she was perfect,” she says. “She made me be interesting, not just pretty.”
The legacy of Malkah’s modelling career is not so easily defined. She says she spent decades starving herself to maintain the slimline physique demanded by the industry. “At the same time your diet is made up of cocaine and chocolate laxatives and speed because you know you have to be a certain weight,” she says.
“Thank god ice wasn’t around in the 90s or I’d be dead.”
Even now, among the used wine glasses on her coffee table, there is a smattering of Dextroamphetamine tablets and a bottle of amyl nitrite, and Malkah freely admits drugs remain very much a part of her daily life.
“I need to self-medicate to deal with the anxiety,” she says, shrugging. “I drink alcohol, which I shouldn’t, and I love a cone and amyl — but it goes off quickly if you leave the lid open. I love GHB but nobody will give it to me.”
While she remains conscious of her weight, she says she is more comfortable in her skin now, at 46, than at the peak of her modelling career.
Life after James
After her failed relationship with Packer, she spent about a decade in Los Angeles, before she disappeared off the radar. Rumours persisted for years she had moved to a kibbutz in Israel; something she assures is “untrue”.
Instead, in 2016, she was photographed checking her mailbox in Toorak, in Melbourne’s east, while working as an aged-care nurse, draped in a bedsheet and almost entirely unrecognisable at about 120kg. The pictures, splashed across the pages of a woman’s magazine, propelled her back into the spotlight and on to Ten’s reality show I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! the next year.
She has since lost 50kg, a feat she credits largely to surgery and hypnotherapy, and picked up two AVOs against her — one taken out by a former lover, another by a former housemate. “When I was young, I thought I’d be dead by now,” she says. “I thought I would be part of the Jesus club, 33 and out. Probably through suicide. It’s tragic, absolutely tragic, I can’t believe I used to think that way. I wish I loved myself a bit more then, but I hated myself until quite recently. So it probably all worked out for the best.”
The day after the interview, Malkah messages a little before 7am. It is Christmas Day and she feels invigorated. She is heading to Martin Place in Sydney’s CBD to feed the homeless and has even come up with a headline she would like to suggest for the story, though it reads more like an epitaph: “Adored and reviled equally.”
On Boxing Day, she checks in again. This time things are not so uplifting. “I’m going to hospital,” she texts. “I’m very very sick. Alcohol poisoning. Can you please call my aunt. I’m OK, just drained. Went to police station 3 times last night. They came here too. I have to get away … I need to move out of the Cross.”
By 4am on Friday she is messaging to say she has done something bad and will probably be arrested in the next couple of hours.
That doesn’t happen but, in the manic world of Tziporah Malkah, anything is possible.
There are precious few guarantees in life, she says.
There is only one thing she knows for sure: whatever happens from here, she is no longer the wide-eyed starlet the nation first fell in love with, and she never will be again.
“Haven’t you been listening?” she asks quietly. “Kate Fischer is dead. I killed her.”