Mia Freedman's crack-up began on the third morning of a summer holiday at Byron Bay, on the NSW North Coast. As she climbed out of bed, she felt a twinge in her lower abdomen. Ovarian cancer, she decided immediately. She was going to die. How would she break the terrible news to her family? Over the next couple of weeks, while she went through the motions of decorating a Christmas tree and taking her children to the beach, she was overwhelmed by an emotion she now describes as "frantic dread". Her heart raced. Her gut churned. She pictured her funeral in vivid detail.
It turned out she was suffering from a mental illness, not a physical one. "How would you feel," her therapist asked a few weeks after the onset of the symptoms, "if I said you'd had a nervous breakdown?"
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Freedman, 43, is a digital media entrepreneur. The founder of the Mamamia Women's Network, she publishes four websites aimed at female audiences and says she employs 100 full-time staff - twice as many as a year ago. She is also a writer, specialising in a confessional style of journalism: she has told the world about everything from her miscarriage and her fear of flying to her inability to put anything in an oven without burning it. "I'm a heart-on-my-sleeve girl in every way," she says.
Still, Freedman kept the nervous breakdown up her sleeve for five years. "I'm finally ready to talk about my anxiety," she declared at the start of a long piece in March. The impression given to readers was that she had been waiting until she felt strong enough to tackle such a difficult subject. And that was no doubt true. But the article's publication was timed to coincide with the launch of her newest website, Debrief Daily.
![Always on: A day in the office at Mamamia HQ in Sydney.](/web/20170512132413im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/h/v/a/y/f/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.ghwbcv.png/1435386337704.jpg)
The same day, News Corp Australia launched its own women's site, RendezView, which made less of a splash than might have been expected. Freedman's revelations drew attention away from her competitor as effectively as if she had grabbed a megaphone and shouted, "Look over here, a crazy lady!" Candid and canny.
Getting noticed has never been difficult for Freedman. In her 20s, she was the wunderkind editor of the glossy women's magazine Cosmopolitan. In her 30s, she became a widely read newspaper columnist and briefly, disastrously, a television executive. She regularly appears on TV talk shows, where she enlivens debate by seemingly blurting out whatever comes into her head. "She's a raw voice in the media landscape," says Lisa Wilkinson, co-host of the Nine network's Today. "You know you're going to get an absolutely honest version of what she thinks."
The current Cosmopolitan editor, Bronwyn McCahon, was a teenager living in Brisbane when she saw Freedman on the hit program The Panel. "I just thought, 'Wow, she's amazing,' " McCahon says. " 'What an inspiring woman. I really want to work for her.' So I packed up my car and moved to Sydney." Three months later, when Freedman advertised for a personal assistant, McCahon applied for the job - and got it. Now a close friend of Freedman's, she says she didn't mention at the interview why she had uprooted from Queensland. "Because it might have seemed a little bit stalker-ish."
Freedman has that effect on some people. "I loved Mia," says a former employee of the Mamamia network. "Idolised her, in fact. I remember reading her book" - Freedman's 2009 autobiography, Mama Mia: A Memoir of Mistakes, Magazines and Motherhood - "and going, 'I want to be this woman. I want to have her entire life.' So I started working there as an intern." She adds a little wistfully that, though she eventually joined the paid staff, she never felt she really belonged. "Mia likes a particular type of person - the very out-there, sparkly, confident kind. And if you have great clothes, that's even better."
![Mia with husband Jason Lavigne.](/web/20170512132413im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/h/v/a/t/q/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.ghwbcv.png/1435386337704.jpg)
When I arrive at Mamamia HQ in central Sydney, I see what the ex-staffer means. The place is full of out-there, sparkly, confident young women wearing great clothes. Freedman, who signs even business emails with long rows of kisses ("xxxxxxx"), is small and intense, with a loud voice and wide smile. Though quite soberly attired today, she has a reputation as a quirky dresser. Journalist and novelist Caroline Overington recalls seeing her at the Nine studio one morning in a flowing leopard-print garment edged with pink lace: a $15 dressing-gown from Cotton On, Freedman told her. "She'd taken the strap off the waist," Overington says, "and was wearing it on TV as a cape. Only she could get away with that."
I have heard stories of tension and tears in the Mamamia office. "I was always under-appreciated, underpaid and sometimes woefully chewed out for the smallest things," one former staffer tells me. Says another: "It can be a very traumatic experience, emotionally, to work with Mia." But on this Monday morning, the mood seems purposeful and upbeat. A couple of people actually do high-fives after hearing the figures for traffic to the websites over the weekend.
![Freedman with children Coco, 9, Remy, 6, and Luca, 17.](/web/20170512132413im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/h/v/a/t/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.ghwbcv.png/1435386337704.jpg)
The number of online visitors to the network is reported to have grown by 50 per cent in the past two years. More than 650,000 people a month visit Mamamia, Freedman's original and biggest website (the others are iVillage, The Glow and Debrief Daily). Freedman and her husband, Jason Lavigne, who is chief executive of the business, are planning international expansion. "The focus over the next three years is building a very significant-sized business in the US," says Lavigne, who is quiet and contained. "Our aspiration is to be a global player in women's media."
After the meltdown in Byron Bay, Freedman was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder. A daily dose of Lexapro and physical exercise now keep it in check, she says, though she realised on a recent trip to South Africa with Lavigne and their three kids - Luca, 17, Coco, 9, and Remy, 6 - that her hypochondria isn't completely cured. The first night, woken by a headache and upset stomach, "I said to Jason, 'What if it's Ebola?' "
For many years, I would not say I wasn't coping. I felt a need to appear like the shiny, best, most capable, highest-achieving person in the room.
Freedman is a polarising figure. "She inspires passionate love and hatred - both extremes," says a woman who used to work for her. "Execrable," is the way Melbourne writer Marieke Hardy once summed her up. Online, the level of vitriol directed at her is startling. For every fervent admirer, there seem to be a dozen savage critics. "I've said to her, 'Darling, you're so successful you've got to expect that people are going to be jealous and want to pull you down,' " says her friend, journalist Wendy Squires. "But Mia doesn't understand that." Neither does Leigh Sales, presenter of ABC TV's 7.30, who says: "She is such a warm, engaging person. It actually mystifies me, why there's this cult of people who don't like Mia."
In her lively and often funny columns, Freedman aims to present herself as Everywoman. "There's nothing I've written about that is out of the ordinary," she tells me. "They are the common experiences of women my age, and of every age." Yet this is a person who once became convinced she had contracted HIV because the manicurist at the resort in the Bahamas where she was staying hadn't sterilised the cuticle cutter. She has put forward the theory that her nervous breakdown was triggered by a week's stay at a five-star health retreat, where she was deprived of access to the internet and her mobile phone. She once started a column with, "For the past three weeks, I've been overseas with my family ..." In another, she wrote: "I've had some lovely cleaners."
![Everywoman: A young Mia with her parents and brother.](/web/20170512132413im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/h/v/a/t/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.ghwbcv.png/1435386337704.jpg)
Online commentary suggests this kind of thing rankles with some. As do some of Freedman's opinions. When Australian cyclist Cadel Evans won the 2011 Tour de France, she questioned our national obsession with sporting achievement and asked whether Evans really deserved to be hailed as a hero. The response was a tidal wave of abuse, including threats of violence against her and her children. For a while, she was afraid to venture out her front door. As she put it later, "You don't know if the person who's looking at you in the sandwich shop is the same person who said, 'Die you Jewish c...' . "
Anti-Freedman sentiment spiked again late last year, when she seemed to compare homosexuality with pedo-philia. "We accept that gay people can't change who they love or who they're sexually attracted to," she said on Ten's The Project, "so why do we think that people who are sexually attracted to children can be rehabilitated?" She apologised for this "clunky, clumsily worded analogy" but the consequence, she says, was a call from Nine executive Mark Calvert, informing her he was "resting" her from her weekly slot on Today: "He said, 'We can't have you tarnishing our brand.' " (Calvert denies this.)
!["I'm a heart-on-my-sleeve girl in every way."](/web/20170512132413im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/h/v/a/z/2/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.ghwbcv.png/1435386337704.jpg)
Freedman says, "I don't know whether Mark meant, 'I'm sacking you' or 'I'm resting you for three weeks until this blows over.' But either way, I was pretty upset, so I sort of sacked myself."
On the whole, Freedman's views are progressive. Through her websites, she campaigns for marriage equality, action on climate change and a more compassionate approach to refugee policy. Proudly feminist, she publishes stories that aim to inspire readers ("The four life-goals of smart women and how to nail them") and others that inform them ("Exactly how much you would save if the 'tampon tax' was abolished?"). But a purveyor of ground-breaking journalism she is not. On a typical day, the articles promoted on Mamamia's home page include "Why I will always love my ex-boyfriends" and "No flats on the red carpet, but crop-tops are fine".
To Freedman's fans, her openness is a large part of her appeal. She has admitted to once washing down anti-migraine tablets with a swig of her own breast milk (she needed the medication urgently, had just expressed the milk and didn't have a glass of water). She has written in mesmerising detail about the mayhem that ensued when she consumed a cocktail of Stilnox sleeping pills and champagne on a flight from Tokyo (she tried to stab a flight attendant with her dinner fork and ate her chicken cacciatore with her hands). While I am with her, she gives a presentation to her staff that includes a photo of her in pyjamas, sitting in a puddle of green gloop. She says she was on her way to bed when she tripped and spilled the kale smoothie she was carrying. "I was so tired that I just went and got a spoon and ate it off the carpet."
But there is one aspect of her life Freedman rarely discusses. "I'd probably known her for five years," says Caroline Overington, "when someone said to me, 'Oh well, it's easy for Mia, because of her background.' I said, 'What do you mean?' They said, 'Her father has hundreds of millions of dollars.' I had absolutely no idea."
Laurence Freedman, 71, was a pioneer of the investment management industry in this country. In 1980, he co-founded EquitiLink Limited, which grew into a global company with $3 billion under management. Mia, his only child, is extremely proud of him, especially as he had nothing when he arrived in Australia, age 22, with his parents from South Africa. When I suggest that, thanks to the fortune Laurence made, she and her half-brother, Michael Kotowicz (her mother Kathy's son from a previous marriage) must have grown up in an extremely affluent household, she says: "No, absolutely not. His business didn't become successful until I was in high school. So we were middle-class but not upper-middle class."
Before starting EquitiLink, Laurence had risen to executive positions in the corporate world. Yet the way Freedman paints it, the family struggled to make ends meet. "We could afford to buy, like, one mango each for the season," she says. "That was a treat, buying a mango." Even apples and oranges were prized. "We'd have visitors over and the kids would raid the fruit bowl, and my mum would be like, 'Oh my God, that's a week's supply of fruit and I can't afford to buy any more!' "
Both her parents are left-leaning, Freedman says. "They have never in any way lived a flash lifestyle. They're big philanthropists. That's where the money goes." Laurence has not invested in the Mamamia network, she emphasises. "He's given us some good counsel along the way, but it's been completely funded by Jason and me."
Even as a child, Freedman was a worrier. If her parents were a bit late home from work, she assumed they had been killed in a car accident. As a teenager, she had an eating disorder. She was always a competitive person, she says, and reluctant to admit to any form of vulnerability. "For many years, I would not say I wasn't coping. I felt a need to appear like the shiny, best, most capable, highest-achieving person in the room."
At 19, bored with university and desperate for a career in the media, she persuaded Lisa Wilkinson, then editor of Cleo magazine, to give her a fortnight's unpaid work experience. She stayed for months, getting on the nerves of some in the office, who thought her too pushy and opinionated, but making herself useful. Indispensable, even. "Basically she created a Mia Freedman-sized hole for herself in the magazine," says Wilkinson, who gave her a paid job - as Cleo's beauty writer - at the first opportunity.
She was only 24 when appointed editor of Cosmopolitan in 1996, and 25 when her son Luca was born. By 1999, when she and Lavigne married, she was five months' pregnant with their second child, but a routine ultrasound a couple of days after the wedding revealed that the baby's heart had stopped beating. Freedman was inconsolable. "There's so much self-loathing that goes with pregnancy loss," she says. She shut off from everyone, including Lavigne, and they separated for more than two years.
In 2006, after they had reunited and had another baby, Freedman joined the executive ranks at Nine, hired by its then boss, Eddie McGuire, to ameliorate the network's blokey culture and commission female-friendly programs. "She was absolutely brimming with ideas and confidence," says McGuire, who adds loyally that he "really liked" The Catch-Up, a daytime women's talk show she launched. Not many others did, and Freedman left the network the day the show was axed in June 2007, only seven months into her contract. She was glad to get out and, by most accounts, few were sorry to see her go. "They didn't like what she represented," says a senior Nine staffer. "And they didn't like Mia herself, or Mia's approach, which is direct." "I rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way," she says.
After her miscarriage, Freedman had spent two years in therapy. Post-Nine, she climbed back onto the couch. "Not only was it my first big failure, it was a massive public humiliation," she says. "I felt like I was a laughing stock." An unemployed laughing stock, with no job offers. "The phone did not ring." With nothing better to do, she started a personal blog she called Mamamia, which gradually won a following. By 2008, Lavigne could see the potential to make it profitable by bringing in other writers and selling advertising space. He had sold his liquor-sales business, CBD Cellars, and was looking for investment opportunities, Freedman says. "He thought, 'Maybe there's a business opportunity in my lounge room.' "
In person, as in her writing, Freedman has the gift of instant intimacy. Though she is wary about being profiled, she greets me with a kiss at our first meeting and talks to me as if I were an old friend. Her tone is confiding, her humour self-deprecating, her manner completely assured. As she strides through the Mamamia office, there is no doubt about who is in charge. "I really admire Mia's boldness," says Leigh Sales, making the point that she is a risk-taker both in business and in the extent to which she publicly bares her soul.
But for all her apparent accessibility, Freedman is an elusive subject. I interview many of her friends and colleagues, and their views about her are so contradictory that they might be talking about different people. Some say she is tough, others that she is fragile. She is astute. She is scatty. Empathetic. Self-absorbed. Other than that she has relentless drive, the force of her charm is the one thing on which everyone agrees.
Kerri Sackville, one of the first contributors to Mamamia, says she was delighted when Freedman offered to publish her work: "I'd followed her career through the magazine world and had a bit of a girl-crush on her. I wrote for her for about two years unpaid." Sackville was also pleased to help Freedman manage the website. With two other volunteers - Lana Hirschowitz and Amanda Whitley - she "spent a lot of time moderating comments, writing reports on what was going on on the site, just helping her to run it".
Sackville says she then asked Freedman for a favour in return: "When my first book was published, I asked her to launch it for me. And she declined. That stung really badly." (Freedman says she has no recollection of this. Sackville's literary agent, Pippa Masson, confirms that Freedman was asked and declined.)
Amanda Whitley, who worked for no pay for Freedman for about a year, also ended up disappointed. She and the two other volunteers "had what I thought was a close relationship with Mia, and spoke many times daily via email", says Whitley, who later founded the HerCanberra website. "I guess I'd kidded myself into thinking we were actually friends." But when Whitley decided to withdraw her services, her attempts to maintain a connection with Freedman failed. "I expected maybe there'd be an email occasionally. But it literally was like a tap was turned off."
The third volunteer, Lana Hirschowitz, went on to become managing editor of Mamamia and editor of another of Freedman's websites, iVillage. She worked for Freedman for four years and was one of her closest confidantes, but she too grew disillusioned, resigning in 2013. Hirschowitz says that though she liked and respected Freedman, she was "often difficult, inconsistent and unreasonably demanding", expecting her staff to share her single-minded dedication to the websites' growth. Hirschowitz put in 15-hour days but still felt that her efforts were inadequate. "For all the talk in the world about family-work balance, I didn't have any."
I hear similar stories from others. "Working in digital media is arduous," Freedman responds. "It's 24/7. Always on. And in those early days when we were just starting out, everyone worked much longer hours than they do now. Especially me!"
Pressures have eased since the increase in staff size and the arrival three years ago of editor-in-chief Jamila Rizvi, a former federal Labor ministerial staffer. "It's a crazy, exciting roller coaster, working with Mia - you never quite know what's going to happen next," says Rizvi. "I think the atmosphere is generally very positive. It's work hard, play hard."
Freedman denies rumours of high staff turnover, but says, "As we've grown and hired new people, some of them have unfortunately not been aligned with our culture." A senior journalist who left after clashing with Freedman says, "I think she works better with young people who idolise her." Freedman says she likes youthful employees because they're fast workers, at home in the digital world, not because they're pliable or cheap. It seems she is keen to contain costs, though: she recently advertised for sub-editors in India and Bangladesh.
A couple of years ago, Freedman came in for criticism when word got out that non-staff writers received no payment for articles they contributed to her websites. These days she has a nominal base rate of $50 a story, she says, but she pays most contributors much more - and still pays some nothing at all. "To this day there are a lot of people who never invoice us. Because they're doing it for reasons other than money."
Kerri Sackville takes this with a grain of salt. "There is no writer on earth who doesn't want to be paid," she says. But such is Freedman's magnetism, it seems to Sackville, that many are thrilled just to be in her orbit: "You feel so special. You feel like you're a chosen one. And then, when she doesn't need you any more, you're discarded. I've seen it happen over and over again."
Others insist you could not find a more loyal or generous friend. "She's very much a woman's woman," says Caroline Overington, who points out that when Freedman turned 40, she invited 40 women to a celebration and prepared something to say about each of them. "It was her 40th birthday but every person at the table was singled out for special mention. "
It was a lunch, not a dinner. Freedman rarely goes out at night - she needs a lot of sleep. "All my nerve endings are exposed," she says. "And that can be exhausting."