Roxy Jacenko quickly rose to become a ubiquitous part of the Sydney social set.
GOSSIP columnist Annette Sharp has spent almost two decades reporting on the adventures and misadventures of Sydney’s social set.
In a new book, Sharp chronicles the rise of that set’s most prominent and polarising publicists: PR maven Roxy Jacenko.
In this extract from Blonde Ambition: Roxy Jacenko Unfiltered, Sharp lifts the lid on the formative years that saw Jacenko hone her grit, determination and love of money to become a rich, powerful and successful PR maven; and the incident that exposed the rift in her family to the public.
BECOMING ROXY
AS FAR back as anyone could remember, Roxy had always had money. Her father would tell the story of putting his hand in his pocket to ask his plucky teenage daughter if she needed money only to be told “no”— she had her own.
Roxy had always been motivated to make her own and was proud of that in the Jacenko household, where money and wealth were discussed over dinner.
She was raised to be a self-sufficient and independent soul, an only child until age ten, rattling around in a huge mansion, making the long 45-minute solo commute across the Harbour Bridge from Hunters Hill on the leafy north shore to Rose Bay in Sydney’s east in a taxi each day to attend her prestigious private school.
By the time she was working at McDonald’s at age fourteen, Roxy’s independence had grown fierce.
Making money at a young age had made her feel validated and she would make it her mission to make more. She didn’t want to be one of those people who lived on handouts from their parents. Those people annoyed her — just as they annoyed her self-made parents.
Making her own money at a young age made Jacenko feel ‘validated’, Sharp writes. Picture: Channel 9Source:Channel 9
She had accumulated many rich friends — in fact she had made a point of surrounding herself with extremely wealthy people. Her boyfriends had gotten richer, her best friend Jessica Ingham was considered an heiress, a number of employees at Sweaty Betty had come from privileged eastern suburbs families. It was clear money mattered.
One of Roxy’s favourite expressions was “money talks”.
“She really doesn’t care how smart you were,” said a former ‘Betty’ (what her staff were known as) who left the company feeling burned and burnt out. “She used to say: ‘Do you want to be driving a Holden or a Ferrari?’”
Roxy felt the same about air travel. Why travel commercially when you could travel privately? While working on The Celebrity Apprentice she told a colleague: “I’ve never flown commercial in Australia. I always fly private.”
At age thirty-two, she had never been to the Qantas Club lounge at the domestic terminal, something the children of the rich routinely took for granted. “Is all that food free?” she asked her travelling companion, gesturing towards the petit fours on her first Qantas Club sojourn on the Channel’s Nine account. Her companion took it to mean Roxy had never considered there might be small luxuries to be had flying commercially.
Jacenko has a fire love of high-end designer outfits, but learned from her other how to haggle for a better price. Picture: Craig WilsonSource:News Corp Australia
MONEY MATTERS
Despite her lavish style, Roxy knew how to save money. As a child, she learned from her mother how to haggle to get a better price.
She was conservative with staff wages at Sweaty Betty, yet was obsessed with pursuing her dream to own both residential and commercial property like her parents: “I wouldn’t be a smart business person if I didn’t continue to look at how to grow the investments I have,” she would tell The Daily Telegraph. “I have residential, now it’s time to up the ante and go for a commercial property.”
“I always found it hard to listen to her say she grew up with nothing,” said another former Betty.
“Well she didn’t. She grew up in Woollahra and on the waterfront at Hunters Hill. Everyone that she loved came from money. Her relationship with them depended on how much their family was worth.”
Her own family had been worth a fortune until the bitter divorce between her parents saw the family’s wealth greatly eroded. Between them, Nick and Doreen Jacenko had, from 1980 to 2010, built an impressive empire.
In conjunction with their factory in Sri Lanka and thriving Capitol Clothing business that generated upwards of $13 million a year, their combined wealth at the time their marriage was foundering in 2011 might easily have matched the estimated $40 million estate BRW magazine attached to her husband Oliver Curtis’s family in 2008.
When their marriage finally ended in 2013 — a few months after Roxy’s star had peaked on The Celebrity Apprentice — the Jacenko’s estate included the waterfront house in Vaucluse that sold in 2014 for $15.6 million and commercial properties in Beaconsfield, Alexandria and Ultimo conservatively worth $15 to $20 million.
Roxy’s happiest childhood years had been spent in the home Nick and Doreen had built on two side-by-side waterfront blocks of land in Hunters Hill. As they started their marriage, the couple had to work at compromise: Unable to agree on whether to have an indoor or outdoor pool, they had one of each.
Jacenko with her mother, Doreen. Picture: Christian GillesSource:News Corp Australia
FAMILY TORN APART
Fast forward 30-plus years and now Roxy’s parents couldn’t agree on their divorce settlement.
The pair had been duelling over their estate for three years by the time Oliver Curtis went to jail in June 2016.
Beautiful trophies and toys, accumulated over almost 40 years, had been lost in a hostile private war that had taken its effect on both Doreen and Nick, and dissolved the assets of the headstrong pair each day. It looked as though the settlement might still have years to run.
With Doreen in his corner it had taken the best part of a decade to tie up the loose ends from his first marriage. With her off-side, it would likely take longer to finalise the end of his second. She was a tough opponent.
The situation made Roxy angry. That first decade in a largely empty Hunters Hill mansion had seen Roxy forge close relationships with her parents. They had always been her best friends and best enemies.
When her parents fought during Roxy’s childhood, the socially precocious child had learned to pick a side. Though she was like the mother who had sharpened her edges, she had always been a daddy’s girl.
“We were so close,” said Nick. She clearly still thought of herself as daddy’s girl when, in 2013, Nick started his relationship with fashion designer Lisa Ho.
Roxy, said sources, became convinced Ho, who had survived her own financial crisis, would displace her in her father’s life. Her second Jazzy Lou book seemed to imitate life.
Like Nick, Jazzy’s father would take up with a new woman, a fashion designer called Tessa Blow. Nick described the book, which he hadn’t read but had heard about, as “far-fetched”— “I would have expected vindictiveness to be in there,” he said in 2014.
Roxy would express to the Bettys her belief Ho could end up with her inheritance. The idea became a new obsession. From September 2013, Roxy had her father banned from the Sweaty Betty premises — in a building he owned. Roxy would tell her staff it was “because he chose the fashion designer over our family”.
Because it was her nature to fight — “war mode is her milieu”, said one observer — Roxy would fight and fight hard. Because her father and his new love were out of favour, her mother Doreen was back in. This was Roxy’s default. She would become her mother’s self-appointed aide-de-camp on the divorce battleground.
“Separately the women were mercurial. Together, Nick had more than met his match,” said one who feared for all.
Nick would say that as the settlement negotiation drew on, his wife and daughter banded together to keep him from accessing his money. As settlements were drafted and disposed of, Doreen offered Nick, sixty-six, an allowance and told him he’d be “dead in five years” so should have no need of a settlement.
Lisa Ho and Nick Jacenko. Picture: SuppliedSource:Supplied
RIFT DEEPENS
ROXY hadn’t spoken to her father for the best part of a year by the time her second child was born in 2014. As a consequence, Nick had never met his 2-year-old grandson Hunter when he bumped into Roxy and Doreen on a leafy Woollahra street one day in May 2016, three days after Curtis’s insider trading trial began.
He would allege he was attacked by his daughter and then by his ex-wife.
Nick and Ho, fifty-five, would file a police report after the random meeting on salubrious Moncur Street at 6pm on Saturday 14 May — Mother’s Day eve.
Roxy’s father would tell The Daily Telegraph that without provocation his 36-year-old daughter grabbed him by the neck of his T-shirt and struck him around the head and chest about twenty times while hurling abuse at him.
Ho, who was walking hand-in-hand with her new fiance as they scoped Woollahra’s restaurant belt for some dinner, would confirm that after allegedly unleashing a flurry of blows upon her father, Roxy would turn her attention on the designer.
She allegedly grabbed Ho by a scarf she was wearing around her neck, reeled her in and struck the mother of three repeatedly with “a closed fist” to the head and neck. As Ho became the focus of Roxy’s attack, her mother Doreen allegedly knocked his glasses from his face as she hit him about the head. Doreen then allegedly pushed Ho from behind.
Police confirmed the couple filed reports at Paddington police station at about 7pm that same night and that police were investigating the matter.
“[Roxy] was screaming ‘You should be ashamed of yourself’ over and over,” Nick stated. He added he didn’t know what his daughter was referring to.
“She was also yelling ‘How was New Zealand?’ We had just returned from a trip and she must have been tracking us via social media or my credit cards. She knew we’d been away and it annoyed her.”
Curtis beseeched the couple to “just keep walking”.
Roxy and husband Oliver Curtis, who is currently in jail after being found guilty of insider trading. Source: InstagramSource:Instagram
“I asked Oli to tell Roxy to let go of my scarf so we could move on. I told him ‘I can’t move — she has hold of my scarf’.”
Nick and Ho told The Daily Telegraph they wanted to go public with details of the incident in the hope it would jog the memories of witnesses who might come forward so the couple could proceed legally with the matter. They were contemplating taking out Apprehended Violence Orders.
Through lawyers, Roxy would vehemently deny the claims. She later told the MailOnline: “There is no basis for these allegations. I can only attribute such comments to a sad quest for public notoriety by my father Nick Jacenko and Lisa Ho.”
Family sources maintained the outburst was borne of Doreen and Nick’s protracted divorce settlement that had ruined their business and robbed them both of their incomes.
As a result of their marriage ending, the Capitol factory in Sri Lanka had been closed, Nick would say by Doreen, and 400 staff dismissed in one day.
Roxy and her daughter, Pixie Curtis, whom Roxy has made into a social media star. Source: Instagram.Source:Instagram
Nick believed Doreen feared he and Ho would fire up production at the Sri Lanka factory on a new collection of ‘Lisa Ho’ branded garments. Doreen had put caveats on their commercial properties; construction work on the couple’s new harbourside Vaucluse house had stalled and would not be completed under their ownership.
A much-prized million-dollar Aquariva wooden speedboat, which had been Nick’s motivation for buying the block in Vaucluse, for he enjoyed the idea of a boatshed, would fall into ruin after it was moved from its protective shed — and hidden in what would become its watery grave further up the Parramatta River.
The beautiful and fragile craft should have been stored dry and wrapped in covers.
This incident was not Roxy’s first encounter with Ho. Soon after Ho began her relationship with Nick in 2013, the designer had been verballed by Roxy while handing out Voluntary Euthanasia Party pamphlets at Double Bay Public School on 7 September, the day of the federal election.
Roxy, Ho would say, confronted her at the polling booth and started taunting her as she distributed pamphlets asking if, following a stellar fashion career in which she had dressed the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Kate Bosworth, Elle Macpherson, Miranda Kerr and Ivanka Trump, the voluntary work at the polling booth was her new job.
“It was mean girl stuff,” said a witness. “It came out of nowhere and was savage.”
The well-heeled voters of Double Bay would look away from the nasty domestic disturbance that day — just as the prosperous diners of Woollahra would two years on.
Editor’s note: No charges have ever been laid in relation to the May 2016 incident.
The cover of ‘Blonde Ambition: Roxy Jacenko Unfiltered’ by Annette Sharp.Source:Supplied
This is an edited extract from Blonde Ambition: Roxy Jacenko Unfiltered by Annette Sharp (MUP, RRP $32.99, ebook $14.99), out now. The Blonde Ambition audiobook will be available from Audible from November 25.
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