Mel Greig is lying on a massage table with hot stones on her back.
The room she’s in is dimly lit and smells of scented oil.
As the stones warm her body, her shoulders loosen and she slowly begins to relax.
But then the masseuse recognises her.
“She said, ‘I know who you are. You’re the nurse killer. I can’t believe I’m massaging a killer,'” recalls Mel.
For the rest of the hour, Mel lies still as the massage turns into an interrogation.
“And I got home. And I turn on the TV. And it was the Bondi killer, the stabbings. And I’m like, I’m not that. I’m not a killer. I didn’t kill that nurse,” she says, through tears.
Mel Grieg lives under the shadow of a prank phone call gone wrong.
In 2012, she and her 2Day FM co-host Michael Christian posed as royalty and obtained private medical information from a hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton was a patient.
The fallout from the call’s broadcast led to the suicide of a nurse, and saw Mel labelled as a “killer”.
But Rhys Holleran, who was CEO of Southern Cross Austereo — 2Day FM’s parent company — and Mel’s boss at the time, says she should not be blamed for the nurse’s death.
“The presenters concerned didn’t do anything wrong. They have done exactly what was required of them,” he says, in his first interview on the subject since leaving the company.
Instead, Holleran says 2Day FM’s willingness to push broadcast boundaries and its internal review procedures were responsible for the call going to air.
The prank call that shocked the world
On December 3, 2012, news broke that Kate Middleton was admitted to King Edward VII Hospital for severe morning sickness.
Mel, who was co-host of the Hot30 Countdown, a hugely popular radio show that broadcast across Australia, knew they needed to find a creative way to cover the story.
“We were taught to think outside the box,” she says now.
“We were encouraged: ‘Always keep pushing. And if you go too far, we’ll pull it back.'”
She says the Hot 30 Countdown team — her co-host, producers, content directors — gathered into their daily editorial meeting to discuss how they would proceed.
She suggested reading out tweets from celebrities wishing Middleton well.
But another person in the meeting wanted to take it up a notch.
“Someone suggested that we pretend to be the royal family calling through, and the aim was to be hung up on as quickly as we could be,” Mel remembers.
The call, which was being pre-recorded in anticipation of that night’s program, began at 4:25pm.
A nurse answered. Mel, who was pretending to be Queen Elizabeth, spoke first.
“I said, ‘Can I speak to my granddaughter Kate?'” recalls Mel.
They were patched through in seconds.
In recordings of the call, you can hear the hold music in the background, and Mel and Michael whispering in disbelief.
“If this has worked, this is the easiest prank call we’ve ever made,” Christian muses.
A few seconds pass, and a second woman picks up and identifies herself as a nurse.
Mel, still pretending to be the Queen, asks how her granddaughter Kate is doing.
Unexpectedly, the nurse starts replying, offering real medical updates on Kate’s morning sickness.
This can’t be real?!
The call felt so unbelievable that Mel remembers thinking she was being pranked by her own team.
“We’re listening to it and we’re like, is this real? Are we actually talking to the nurse?” she recalls.
In response, the hosts amped up their impersonations.
(AAP: Southern Cross Austereo, supplied)
Their two producers began barking like the royal corgis.
The fake Queen and Prince began bickering about how the Queen would get a ride to the hospital.
The call ends with a “thank you”, a “goodbye”, and a burst of laughter from the two hosts.
The Hot30 Countdown team were blown away by their scoop, but after the call ended, Mel was unsure how to broadcast the audio.
She was worried if the call went to air unedited, the nurses involved could lose their jobs with the hospital.
Mel says she sent an email to her team requesting their voices be dubbed over prior to broadcast.
After that, she and her co-host handed the recording off to be approved by senior staff and went about their day recording other programs.
But at 9pm that night, the call went to air with the nurses’ real voices.
It immediately grabbed the attention of the world.
Many were outraged at the station for pranking a hospital and invading the privacy of a patient. Others, including Conan O’Brien and Prince Charles, jumped to join in on the laughter.
Days later, however, news broke that Jacintha Saldhana, the first nurse who answered the prank call, had died by suicide.
Despite only being on the call for a few seconds, Saldhana felt responsible for accepting the call and patching it through.
Saldhana, 46, was a wife and mother of two teenage children.
She left behind several suicide notes, one of which named the two radio hosts, Mel and Michael, and stated their prank call as the reason for her taking her life.
Station under the spotlight
At the time the call went to air, 2Day FM was well-known for pushing the limits on what was acceptable to broadcast.
In the years before the scandal, it had aired several segments that incited listener outrage.
One included a derogatory on-air rant from Kyle Sandilands about a female journalist.
Another instance saw a 14-year-old girl, who was hooked up to a lie detector at the request of her mother, reveal live-on-air that she had been raped.
“We do generally teach people and encourage them [presenters] to make noise,” says former Southern Cross Austereo CEO, Rhys Holleran.
“And I think some people have tried to make the link over time, that it’s the nature of radio trying to create noise that maybe creates the culture that sees [things like the prank call] happen.”
Because of these incidents, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) had placed an additional license condition on 2Day FM.
According to a 2014 ACMA report on the royal prank call, part of this condition required 2Day FM to employ content monitors for any program involving Kyle Sandilands, including the Hot30 Countdown. The station was required to follow this additional condition for five years starting May 16, 2012.
These content monitors were required to remove material they thought was not appropriate for broadcast.
“The content monitor will have a set of headphones on, be listening to the content, they’ll be reasonably trained in content issues with regard to the codes of practice, and they’ll cut the show off if they need to,” explains Holleran.
How did the call make it to air?
The content monitor reviewed the prank call after it was recorded and did not deem it inappropriate.
While prank calls were commonplace at the time, the ACMA code of practice required the program to call back identifiable people on the call, inform them of the prank, and obtain the subject’s expressed consent to broadcast their words.
In a radio interview at the time, Holleran stated the station called the hospital back “no less than five times” to obtain consent to play the call.
The 2014 ACMA report confirms the station never received consent from hospital staff to broadcast the prank.
“I would think that people would get permission, and I would also think that the sort of call that went to air wouldn’t go to air now,” says Holleran.
Despite the lack of consent and Mel’s note requesting the nurses’ voices be dubbed over, 2Day FM chose not to disguise their voices. In their reply to ACMA, the station stated they believed neither nurse could be identified.
Rhys Holleran believes these circumstances vindicate the two radio hosts.
“They had it [the phone call] checked off by the necessary people within the organisation and it was cleared for broadcast,” he says.
“So yes, there’s at least two people that have ticked this off and they’re quite senior within the organisation in terms of their knowledge of the law and [the] Broadcasting Act.”
Mel can’t comment on the specifics of 2Day FM’s internal processes, but says she relied on the company’s guardrails at the time.
“We trusted that system, that no matter what we would do, we could do our job openly, honestly, have fun and know that there was a process in place if something went too far that someone would catch it.”
Michael Christian did not respond to Background Briefing’s request for an interview.
Following the prank call, the station conducted an internal review of its processes and found 2DayFM followed all necessary protocol.
Despite the finding, Holleran says the call and its aftermath have stuck with him over the years.
“I have always felt completely and utterly responsible for this,” he says. “I was the leader of the team and it was my job, and I never thought otherwise.”
He says he has experienced mental health difficulties as a result of this call’s tragic outcomes.
“When I say anxiety, I mean fair dinkum, full-on anxiety,” he explains.
“It’s the death of another person. It’s just not something that ever sits well with you. In many ways, this interview itself is quite a triggering event for me. I still have very deep feelings about the whole thing.”
The ‘Emotional Female’
Mel still feels the burden of this call’s reputation.
“Had I expected to be the face of what happened? No, but I was ‘The Emotional Female’ which I still am to this day,” Mel says with complicated pride.
In interviews the two hosts gave at the time, Mel appeared visibly shocked and remorseful about the call and the impact it had on the Saldhana family.
“There is nothing that can make me feel worse than what I feel right now and for what I feel for the family,” she said in a 2012 interview with Today Tonight.
Years after Jacintha’s death, Mel flew herself to London to attend the British Police’s coroner’s inquest to apologise directly to the Saldhana family.
“I looked the family in the eye when I spoke to them and I apologised. And I know I connected with Jacinthia’s daughter in that moment,” she says.
Mel chose to leave 2DayFM following the call.
Later, she tried to get back into radio, but found the experience too difficult.
“I had a lot of trauma to deal with,” she says.
She was ultimately diagnosed with delayed PTSD from the call and its aftermath.
“I just never found that break where it was normality again,” she says.
Moving past the ‘nurse killer’ label
It has now been more than a decade since the prank call was broadcast.
In those years, Mel has worked hard to rebuild her life in the wake of such notoriety.
She now lives a quiet life in a sleepy neighbourhood with her curly white moodle, Mia.
She finds beauty in the simple things — in meal planning and grocery shopping, in walks along the beach and a job she cares about, and in dressing Mia up like Elsa.
She sees moments like the confrontation in the massage parlour as opportunities for growth.
“It’s another understanding of how to get through pain, of seeing the situation for what it is,” she says.
“Every time something would happen, I would grieve, but I would know how to move forward, so it all helped. Every situation helped.”
This story comes from ABC’s Background Briefing program. Follow the podcast on the ABC listen app.
RN in your inbox
Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter.
Posted , updated