WHEN troubled singer and celebrity, Debra Byrne, came home to find her house burgled in September, 1997, she thought things couldn’t get worse.
She was wrong.
Stolen from her inner suburban home was the usual berley for burglars – video player, television, computer and cordless phone. But also missing was a private video of Byrne taken with her then lover, a little-known Melbourne musician called Chris Bekker.
For days she worried, knowing that if the adult video fell into the wrong hands, her career, already damaged by her well-documented bouts of ill-health and depression, could be further tarnished.
After more then twenty years in the business she knew the combination of sex and stardom would make the video hot property should anybody be unscrupulous enough to copy and sell it.
But while most burglary victims never see their goods again, the singer was one of the ‘lucky’ ones. Within three days she received a call from police that the burglar had been caught and her possessions recovered. Her relief turned to suspicion as police promptly returned all items except the video tape. For five days she repeatedly rang the police asking for her property. ‘They said they wanted fingerprints from it but that surprised me because the burglar was pleading guilty,’ she said.
It turned out she had been burgled by a so-called friend, a fellow patient she had met while undergoing treatment at the Heatherton Clinic.
Byrne, the mother of two teenage girls, knew the sexually explicit video had the potential not just to embarrass herself and her family – but to re-ignite showbusiness rumours that she was out of control.
Her worries slowly began to dissipate when police finally returned the tape. But, almost eight months later, she received a call from her then manager, Steve Copeland. He had heard rumours that she had appeared in a pornographic video being privately pirated. ‘It took me three days to get my head out the door. I shed a few tears back then,’ Ms Byrne was to recall of that moment.
‘This was a private video. It was not to be made public. I haven’t broken any laws and I haven’t hurt anyone, but I’ve become the victim.’
She complained, and the police Ethical Standards Department began investigating whether police had copied the video when they had possession of the stolen property.
Regardless of the formal investigation, it had been an open secret in police circles the tape had been copied. At first only a few police had seen the one pirated copy. The plan was that it was to remain in a ‘safe circle’ and kept for a laugh, but eventually another copy was made, and then another.
Within months it became freely available and had been seen by large numbers of detectives. Then it moved out of police hands, and the group ‘in the know’ became larger still. Copies ended up with members of AFL football clubs, fire brigade officers and several high-profile media identities of the sort known by their first names.
Football commentators on one radio station began to make thinly-veiled references to the tape and to the singer. One of the biggest stars in television, a man easily stung by intrusions into his own dubious private life, breathlessly described the tape as ‘broadcast quality’ and one radio identity asked any listeners who had seen the tape to drop a copy off at the station. Ethical standards investigators found two copies of the tape, proving it had been pirated. Soon after the investigation began the message went out on the remarkably efficient police bush telegraph system: ‘dump the tape.’
The official line was that there was no proof police had copied the tape, but privately they admitted it could have been no-one else.
Ethical Standards Department investigators told the singer it was unlikely they would ever find the police officer who originally copied the tape. This didn’t mean they were not trying and that there was a cover-up; it meant they couldn’t get the proof to find the culprit.
The tape had been in a busy station where more than fifty police could have had access to it. Without a confession this investigation was heading nowhere. And a voluntary confession was considered about as likely as finding the $3000 of charity money stolen from the Prahran police station safe in late 1998, but that’s another story.
Byrne faced the humiliating truth that there could be hundreds of copies made of the tape. ‘You look to the police to trust them and then this happens,’ she said.
The performer whose personal problems have always attracted keen public interest had to face yet another hurdle: how to deal with people who may have sat at home and watched her in her most intimate moments, courtesy of an illegally copied video.
Understandably, she feels betrayed by police who distributed the tape, and nervous about the effects on how she is perceived.
‘When I am out somewhere like the bank and I see someone looking at me I wonder whether they are staring because I am well known, or because they have seen the video.’
Byrne, who is in her early forties, was forced to tell her daughters, aged eighteen and sixteen, that their mother was in a private video that was gaining unwelcomed public notoriety. ‘I was very proud of them. They said “you’ve done nothing wrong; it’s the people who copied it who should be ashamed”.’
Word of the tape’s existence inevitably leaked to the mainstream media. One published story said there was an internal investigation into police pirating a tape involving a celebrity. The paparazzi started to circle, wanting to ‘out’ the star.
Soon, New Idea, once a middle-of-the-road magazine that had developed the sex and celebrity edge to compete in the increasingly cut-throat women’s magazine market, was at her door, offering $20,000 for the exclusive.
According to the singer the magazine included the promise that ‘as women we will treat this sympathetically.’ It was well known that she was short of money, so to New Idea $20,000 must have seemed a fair price for national shame and humiliation.
‘I have financial problems, but I wouldn’t stoop to that,’ she was to say. ‘They told me they would be sympathetic but all they want to do is sell copies with this sort of trash.’
Having refused to do an interview she gave the magazine the name of the ethical standards policeman handling the case. For about two weeks there was silence. More in hope than expectation, she thought the story might die.
She tried to kid herself the people with the tape would get bored and if she just got on with life everything would go back to being as normal as it ever gets for a celebrity.
But when she went to perform at a charity function for the Royal Children’s Hospital and a New Idea journalist and photographer turned up she said she realised they were going to ‘do her over’.
Days later she rang her former boyfriend – the man in the tape, Chris Bekker – to break the terrible news that they could be about to be exposed. She felt terrible that a man with no independent celebrity status could be embarrassed because of his relationship with her.
But Bekker, apparently, had no such concerns. Having been knocked back by the ‘star’ New Idea went to the next best source – the support act.
When he told her he’d sold the story for $10,000 she felt so ill she could hardly breathe. She said he showed her a transcript of the story that would be on news-stands around Australia within days.
The day before the magazine appeared, New Idea took out newspaper advertisements trumpeting ‘STAR IN STOLEN LOVE VIDEO OUTRAGE.’ Alongside a picture of Byrne it said ‘The full story of Debra Byrne’s heartache, exclusive to New Idea.’
The story was cunningly crafted to appear as if she was telling the story. Quotes were placed over pictures of Byrne although they were from the Bekker. Pictures of nonentities don’t move magazines, even if they are prepared to betray friends to sell tawdry stories. The article spoke of the ‘outrage’ of the tape being made public. Nowhere did it say that the woman on whose behalf they were so outraged had actually knocked back $20,000 to tell her story.
‘I don’t want to be known as the bloke in the Debra Byrne video,’ Bekker told New Idea. ‘The fact that people are making money out of this is disgusting,’ he said, apparently without a hint of irony.
‘It’s just another tragic event in her life,’ he said.
Byrne spoke to The Age newspaper in Melbourne days before New Idea hit the streets. If the story was to come out, she reasoned, she wanted it on her terms. She wanted to expose the invasion of privacy and to stop the magazine profiting by touting an ‘exclusive’ story on her private life.
‘New Idea will make a big story out of this and then move on, leaving me to pick up the pieces,’ she said bitterly.
For an entertainer struggling to regain momentum in her career, the pirating of the video was another body-blow.
‘It’s been the worst year of my life, but I think its toughened me up. I feel like I could handle anything. The next few weeks are going to be hard but I’m not going to hide away.
‘This is not a real story about an entertainer but they’ll run it even though they must know it could damage my family.
‘I’ve been betrayed three times. By the person who burgled me when I tried to help them, by the police, and by the man who sold his story.’
She said the only way to stop magazines intruding into people’s private lives and causing distress was for decent people to stop buying them.
‘They’re filled with rubbish. We’d all be better off without them.’
On the Monday New Idea was published, radio 3AW’s top-rating breakfast announcers, Dean Banks and Ross Stevenson, spoke to the magazine’s editorial director, who rejoices in the name Bunty Avieson.
AVIESON: ‘Chris Bekker, Debra Byrne’s boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, the man who appears in the video with Debra, chose to speak out on behalf of them both. After we printed the situation changed and Debra decided that she did want to speak.’
BANKS: ‘Did you originally offer her money?’
AVIESON: ‘Those things we try to keep private despite what we see in The Age this morning.’
BANKS: ‘The Age says New Idea offered her $20,000 to tell all.’
AVIESON: ‘We were talking to her lawyers and Debra spoke to us, but she decided not to go and do the full story at the time. But she has since changed her mind.’
BANKS: ‘Presumably Mr Bekker then put his hand up and said “look, I’ll tell the story, give me a cheque”.’
AVIESON: ‘Well, Mr Bekker has been having phone calls from all across Australia saying, “I believe you’re in a video I’ve just seen” from friends. He’s read about it in newspapers and heard about it on radio. He felt that the way he wanted to approach it was to come out and say ‘stop all watching it, stop all talking about it.’ There’s peculiar stories about what’s in the video and from what I understand and from what he says it’s not that peculiar. But he wanted to come out and speak about it to say it was done out of love and it is not something either of them are ashamed about and they feel quite betrayed and they are keen for the police investigation to pursue the matter’
STEVENSON: ‘Did you pay him $10,000 for the story?’
AVIESON: ‘That’s something I wouldn’t go into.’
STEVENSON: ‘Did you pay him for the story?’
AVIESON: ‘Yes.’
STEVENSON: ‘Do you have any idea as to whether he is intending to give half to Debra Byrne?’
AVIESON: ‘I have no idea what their relationship between them is.’
DEBRA Byrne was to receive letters and phone calls from strangers supporting her and some readers contacted New Idea to express their disgust. But it has often been said that you can’t go broke underestimating the public’s taste. Even while the police internal inquiry was continuing, the vice squad raided a series of Melbourne sex shops and seized about twenty pirated copies of the tape. They were selling for $40 a pop.