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Bridget Saunders - Source: Close Up -
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Celebrity drug busts, group sex and an All Black sleeping with a porn star. Stories that have been bread and butter for Bridget Saunders, New Zealand's first real gossip queen.
For the past seven years she's been rubbing shoulders with the rich, the famous and the influential in order to fill her About Town gossip column in the Sunday Star Times. Making friends and enemies along the way.
Saunders has now turned her back on tittle, tattle. She is off to write books about "unpleasant, debilitating and degrading sexual experiences."
While others may beg to differ, Saunders says she's always been passionate about values and standards.
"I really care about things like ethics and morality," she told TVNZs Close Up programme. "It's really been about treading that fine line between salaciousness, taste and being fair to people."
She admits that at times she has stepped over that line and has had to apologise to people when she got it wrong.
Saunders says the challenge in her job was taking a distasteful story and trying to present it in a way that wasn't going to trouble the censors.
"If I hear a really, really smutty story what I get out of it is the challenge of presenting it in a tasteful enough way of to get it past the taste police at the paper so that it can go into print."
Over the years the gossip queen has been the target of rumours herself - plastic surgery, prostitution and sleeping with married men among them.
When the heat was applied about gossip concerning her, Saunders was not so forthcoming even walking out of the interview.
"We're talking about the highs and lows of About Town ... we're not having a go at me."
She did eventually answer some questions about the rumours but it was an awkward interview peppered by long silences.
Saunders says she has eyeliner tattooed on "everybody does" apparently and admitted to using botox.
"My head would fall off if I stopped having botox I'm held held together with it,"
Then there was sleeping with married men. She says she's never done it and the rumour in question was started by a rival to the married man in question.
And as for prostitution, Saunders says she's not been a high class or a cheap prostitute.
"I heard a long time ago that I'm a high class prostitute and I thought that was extraordinary."
So according to Saunders the rumours are just that, but what it does seem to show is that the muck-rakers would like to take her down a peg or two. Not that Saunders necessarily agrees with that, she doesn't believe she's as disliked as people would think.
"Theres a small group of people that would really like to flay me alive and they're in the process of trying to make that happen, but I think I am (well liked) ... I think it's taken a while though for people to realise that the column hasn't been written with malice."
So after seven years in the gossip game Saunders announced last week that she is off to write a book about bad sex - she is going to tell us how to do it better. She says that it was her idea to leave the Sunday Star-Times, but her gossip rival at the Herald on Sunday, Rachel Glucina, begs to differ.
Glucina says she was offered Saunders' job prior to her departure.
"Management at the Star Times approached me about 6 - 8 weeks ago trying to head hunt me and poach me over and I met with the editor Mitchell Murphy and he told me he wanted to dump Bridget Saunders," says Glucina.
Saunders remains unconvinced.
"I would very much doubt that she was offered the job before I left that wouldn't make sense," says Saunders.
Whoever is telling the truth doesn't really matter now that Saunders is leaving anyway. She says it's been an extraordinary seven years and she's learnt a lot about herself and human nature.
We bet.
