Samantha Azzopardi spent 10 years receiving care as a troubled teen. It would be years before the truth came out that she was actually an adult woman. Her scams stretched decades and impacted families, friends and even children, in Australia and abroad. But it wasn’t money that she wanted… In this conversation, Mia speaks with investigative journalist Sharon Davis, co-host of the successful podcast Finding Samantha. Sharon worked with colleagues Tim Desmond, Nicoline Greer and Liam O'Brien from ...
Dec 04, 2024•54 min
There’s a reason why behavioural scientist Dr Ali Fenwick is one of the most followed relationship & psychology accounts on social media (and it’s not just his fantastic dancing). In this special episode of No Filter, Clare Stephens explores the real meaning behind the red flags and the green flags we encounter in our relationships with others - from romantic partners to family, the workplace and friendships - Dr Ali Fenwick provides a clear framework for better communication, healthier boun...
Dec 01, 2024•1 hr
At the intersection of sex, marketing and the gig economy, you will find Annie Knight, who has been branded ‘Australia’s Most Sexually Active Woman’. Annie is a 27-year-old Brisbane woman who makes her own sex content and sells it to subscribers via Only Fans where she is in the top 0.02% of creators on the platform. Only Fans became wildly popular during the pandemic, with thousands of Australians creating accounts in the hope of converting home made content - usually sexually explicit photos a...
Nov 27, 2024•53 min
For years, Erica Garza struggled with sex and porn addiction - an addiction that had to reach rock bottom before she sought help. Now, Erica Garza is on a mission - she wants to take away the stigma and shame surrounding women who struggle with sex & porn addiction. How does a habit become an obsession...and an obsession turn into an addiction? And what does recovery look like? (spoiler alert: it doesn't have to mean giving up sex or porn). In this taboo-smashing conversation, Erica talks wi...
Nov 24, 2024•1 hr
Simmone Jade McKinnon was - and is, to many - Stevie from McLouds Daughters. She joined that iconic Australian show fresh from another era-defining TV moment, Baywatch, with a Hollywood star fiancé on her arm and a creative career in full flight. And then everything changed. Simmone and her son Madigan have been living in a caravan and then a shed in her family’s back paddock for the best part of a decade. She’s been making ends meet with carer’s subsidy, odd jobs like jillaroo and by starting h...
Nov 23, 2024•1 hr 4 min
In this special episode of No Filter, Mia Freedman shares a story about a very vulnerable time in her life...when she was dealing with big life challenges around marriage and fertility and career...and what happened when the place she went for help turned out to be, well, a cult. THE END BITS: Subscribe to Mamamia Join the Month of MOVE Get $30 off a Mamamia subscription and get unlimited access to our feel-good exercise app. Head here to get a yearly subscription for just $39. Listen to more No...
Nov 20, 2024•29 min
[Part 1 of 2] One day, Ariane Beeston looked at her newborn baby, Henry, and saw a dragon. And not a cute, happy dragon - but an upset, red-faced dragon. At that moment, Ariane knew something was very wrong. Other very wrong, very scary things were happening too. A few months later, Ariane would be diagnosed with postpartum psychosis. But a diagnosis was only the beginning of her odyssey - one that would see her hospitalised twice, convinced that she didn’t exist, and worried that she might neve...
Nov 17, 2024•44 min
In this conversation, Mia speaks to Jackie O, the equal highest paid person in the media industry in Australia. After working together for 23 years, Kyle Sandilands and Jackie completely dominate breakfast radio. She talks to Mia about the long recovery from divorce, co-parenting, being on Hinge, the media being obsessed with her weight and behind the scenes of negotiating a huge radio contract. You can hear the second half of Mia's conversation with Jackie O here. THE END BITS: Subscribe to Mam...
Nov 13, 2024•49 min
Jackie O was deep into a years-long addiction to pills and alcohol until one phone call changed her life. There’s a reason Jackie O kept her addiction to pain medication and alcohol a secret for so long: shame. But now, she wants to share her story of recovery and healing with the world and to help other people get the help they need - and so she’s sharing the hard truths of the years she spent struggling. Jackie and her best friend Gemma sit down for a searingly honest conversation with Mia Fre...
Nov 10, 2024•56 min
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Nov 07, 2024•2 min
Mitch Larsson is a former male escort with stories you would not expect from someone who was paid for sex. If you haven't heard this conversation before, it's worth the listen! Mitch was a lawyer and stay at home dad but decided he wanted to change careers. And at first, his wife was supportive. In this episode he tells Mia about the time a client’s mum walked in on them, a lady in her 70’s who booked him regularly, a woman trying to get over a cheating ex and the woman who broke his heart wide ...
Nov 06, 2024•49 min
[Part 1 of 2] Anna Grosman is a Melbourne-based mother of two and staunch advocate for women’s sensual empowerment. She’s recently launched Her Confidant - an elite male escort service that aims to satisfy a woman’s libido, body and mind. Anna believes that putting a male escort on retainer will be one of the new trends of 2025 - as more and more women decide to go #boysober - rejecting the dating apps and more traditional methods of meeting a sexual partner - which all too often prove to be uns...
Nov 03, 2024•53 min
Today, you’re going to hear a conversation about vulvas. And it’s not something we speak about often. But our guest today has made a living out of photographing them. Ellie Sedgwick is a body-positive, nude photographer who founded Comfortable In My Skin, a movement empowering people to love the skin they’re in. But, Ellie hasn’t always felt comfortable with her own vulva - she’s gone from being scared to wear swimmers… to considering labiaplasty… to driving around the country to photograph othe...
Nov 01, 2024•48 min
[Part 1 of 2] Bethany Joy Lenz has been in two cults. The first is the cult-classic TV series, One Tree Hill, where she played the role of Haley for ten years, alongside cast members Sophia Bush and Chad Michael Murray. Yet, what few people knew is that the entire time she was on the iconic show, she was in another kind of cult - the dangerous, isolating, manipulative kind. In this Australian exclusive, she shares her story with Mia Freedman and explains how she found herself in a cult to begin ...
Oct 27, 2024•43 min
We bring you an episode of CANCELLED, which is all about Ballerina Farm. Today we are diving into the world of ‘Trad Wives’ and more specifically the world of Ballerina Farm which is both a brand and a woman. Hannah Neeleman is a mumfluencer, a mother of eight children and has amassed a huge 10 million followers on Instagram who follow her literally churning butter and collecting eggs from her chickens. Seems wholesome right? Wrong (kinda). Her charges include competing in a beauty pageant just ...
Oct 23, 2024•51 min
Trad Wives like Hannah Neeleman and her Ballerina Farm empire have captured our imagination - and divided our opinions. Trad Wives are an Instagram phenomenon using highly-produced content to promote traditional family values - specifically, the idea that women would be happier if they stayed home and served their husbands and children, trading in a life of career-focused grind culture for a life of content domesticity - and nobody sells this idea better than Hannah Neeleman. Megan Agnew is a jo...
Oct 20, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Young love. Remember that?! Meeting someone at your part time hospo job where you’re together every night, you start making eyes at each other and one thing leads to another - soon, you’re spending the night at their family home and having dinner with their parents. Well that’s exactly how Emily met Josh. And when you meet so young, it really only goes one of two ways. You either grow up and apart, or you grow together. Like Emily and Josh. After seven years, they knew each other like the back o...
Oct 18, 2024•1 hr 5 min
[Part 1 of 2] This episode is going to help you have better relationships - and understand the bad ones you’ve had in the past - or might still be having. Because the origin of every relationship we have is our attachment style, and knowing what yours is and how that affects the way you interact with people and the romantic partners you choose can be a game-changer. Mia talks to clinical psychologist and attachment theory expert, Dr. Morgan Anderson, about all things attachment styles and so muc...
Oct 13, 2024•34 min
Sometimes, a story can save a life. This is one of those stories. Anna Martin is a recovering gambling addict who, as you’ll hear, almost lost her life to this insidious industry. Anna gambled in the shadows. She didn’t want anyone to know about her gambling habits, or the risks she was taking, or just how bad it got…to the point where she almost lost her life. Shame and secrecy are killers. And gambling is shrouded in shame and secrecy. So it’s no small thing for Anna to share her story with No...
Oct 06, 2024•52 min
In 2000, Ada Nicodemou joined the cast of Home and Away, Australia’s second longest-running soap opera, after Neighbours. She signed on for a 6-month contract to play the role of Leah Patterson-Baker. But 21 years, and a few near-death experiences and a few husbands (Leah’s had way more husbands than Ada who has only had one) one of Australia’s best-known and most-loved actors is still at Summer Bay. On this episode of No Filter, Ada and Mia discuss everything from love, to loss, to loyalty…. Yo...
Oct 03, 2024•54 min
You can hear part two of Mia's conversation with Ada here. Ada Nicodemou is in love again…with her longtime co-star and on-screen husband, James Stewart. Ada Nicodemou has played the character of Leah Patterson on our screens for 24 years as one of the most iconic stars of Home & Away. In this exclusive interview, Ada tells Mia how the last few years have seen her choose herself after a lifetime of choosing others. They discuss the complexities of ending relationships and blended families, o...
Sep 29, 2024•35 min
You can hear the second half of Mia's conversation with Suzanne here . When Suzanne Heywood and her little brother were told by their parents that they’d be leaving the UK, leaving school, leaving their friends and their dog to go and sail around the world for three years…Suzanne had her doubts - but like so many little girls, she trusted her father - he was her hero. But as you’ll hear in this captivating story, there is a fine line between adventure and survival. Between an extended family hol...
Sep 22, 2024•31 min
For many years Paulina Porizkova was the most recognized face in fashion & beauty - from her iconic Sports Illustrated cover to being the face of Estee Lauder. When she married rock star Ric Ocastek from the iconic band, The Cars. From the outside looking in, it seemed like she was living the dream. To look at her, she really did seem like the woman who had it all. But while Paulina was as visible as you could be…she didn’t feel like she was being heard. Not by the photographers and fashion ...
Sep 15, 2024•54 min
Hugo and Spencer live with their loving parents, Michelle and Jono, and are surrounded by extended family, including their grandmother Jasmina and their Auntie Sophie. But how Hugo and Spencer came to be in the world is a very unique and unusual story: their grandmother Jasmina and their aunt Sophie were actually - also - their surrogate mothers. Why did Jasmina decide to be a surrogate for her daughter…at 52 years old? And how did her pregnancy go? How did she feel about the baby? How does it w...
Sep 08, 2024•55 min
Subscribe to Mamamia Writer and activist, Africa Brooke, used to call people out on the internet all the time - because this is what the culture wars told her she needed to do. Until one day - she suddenly stopped. In 2021, Africa wrote an open letter and posted it online. She called it: “Why I’m Leaving the Cult of Wokeness” and it immediately went viral. The letter changed her life, but not in the way she expected it to. So what did she write in that letter? And how did she become unafraid? Wa...
Sep 01, 2024•57 min
Subscribe to Mamamia On Halloween morning, Charlotte Cowles - an Ivy League educated journalist and mother of a two-year old son - received a life-altering phone call from a government agent who informed her that she had 22 bank accounts, nine vehicles and four properties registered in her name, and that she’d wired more than $3 million to Jamaica and Iraq, and that a car had been rented in her name that had been linked to drug trafficking in New Mexico…and that she had warrants out for her arre...
Aug 25, 2024•51 min
Subscribe to Mamamia Are you triggered by trigger warnings? Do you need one before you read a story about anxiety? How about before you see a photo of a meal that includes meat? What about before you watch a performance of Macbeth ? Trigger warnings are supposed to protect us, but do they? Rachael Casella lost her daughter Mackenzie when she was just seven months old. And she refuses to put a trigger warning on her daughter’s life for reasons that may surprise you. Victoria Bridgland is an acade...
Aug 18, 2024•37 min
You can hear the second half of Mia's conversation with David here. Subscribe to Mamamia David Finch is a lot of things: he’s an Autism and Neurodiversity consultant, the author of The Journal of Best Practices; A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband, an essayist for the New York Times Modern Love column…and he’s also UNmarried. In this two-part special episode of No Filter, David Finch opens up to Mia Freedman about his life before and after his Aspe...
Aug 11, 2024•40 min
You can hear the second half of Mia's conversation with Tia here. Subscribe to Mamamia Tia Levings was raised within the same strict Christian fundamentalist ideology as the infamous Duggar family from 19 Kids And Counting . By the time she was 19 years old, Tia found herself in an abusive marriage where the violence was sanctioned by the church. In this must-listen episode of No Filter, Tia tells Mia Freedman about the ways she was groomed to be a Trad Wife, and the moment she knew she had to r...
Aug 04, 2024•44 min
Subscribe to Mamamia Jen Glantz was so sick of being invited to weddings and asked to do so much work…for free. So she did what any good entrepreneur does: she turned it into a business called Bridesmaid For Hire. In this episode of No Filter, Jen spills all the tea about her life as a professional bridesmaid - the good, the bad and the ugly (and all the dresses!) For more about Jen Glantz and Bridesmaid For Hire - go to her website. Or follow her on Instagram. THE END BITS: Listen to more No Fi...
Jul 28, 2024•46 min
