Stuff Digital Edition

‘I was terrified of people recognising my face’

Tracy Watkins

Additional reporting by Virginia Fallon

The day the police phoned was the day Maria Johnson’s world fell apart. A successful businesswoman, educator and public figure, Johnson had been in the Marlborough Sounds, organising a valuation on a property that was in dispute over what had been a protracted and ugly divorce case.

When she answered a call from an unknown number a few days later, a police officer told her she was under investigation for breaching Covid regulations.

‘‘They asked me what I was doing in the Sounds. I told them, and they said, ‘Well, we’ve had a complaint from a member of the public saying that you have breached your business exemption to go to the Sounds’.

‘‘I was just gobsmacked. I’m not a rule breaker.’’

But it wasn’t just the police who were on her case. Someone – Johnson believes the same person who went to police – also leaked her name to a Stuff reporter. The effect on Johnson was immediate and devastating. There was a firestorm of publicity. Her lawyer advised her to stay silent.

During the worst of it, when her Facebook page was filled with ugly threats, there was a moment when she thought seriously about walking off the end of a jetty.

‘‘I didn’t even want to go out in public. Because I was terrified of people recognising my face. It just pushed me into a real state of total, total despair. I felt like I lost my entire identity.’’

Yet before the arrest and charges, Johnson says she wasn’t even aware she had done anything wrong; in fact, she believed she had followed the rules by the book. So how did it all go so wrong? Johnson, who founded the early childhood chain Little School, had travelled to Auckland from Wellington to fill in for a staff vacancy when the city suddenly went into lockdown last August. She lives between the two cities because of her childcare chain.

‘‘At 6 o’clock that night, Jacinda announced that we were all going into a short and fast seven-day lockdown. I was like, ‘Oh God, here we go again. Do I try to get out of Auckland back to Wellington?’. But I had so much that I needed to get done up in Auckland… so I made the decision to stay, thinking ‘I’ll be fine being up there on my own for seven days’.’’

But the seven-day lockdown turned into weeks.

Johnson is involved in an acrimonious and high-profile divorce dispute that has dragged on for years. With another important court date looming and feeling isolated in lockdown, she says she was suffering both mentally and physically.

‘‘I started suffering from severe anxiety,’’ says Johnson. ‘‘I was sitting at the desk, and my heart rate was up over 140 beats a minute. I was having panic attacks.’’

Desperate, she asked her thenlawyer for advice. She says he told her she needed to get out of Auckland for some emotional support and said she should contact her Wellington GP for a medical exemption to travel.

Johnson’s Khandallah GP supplied a note confirming that she was suffering from anxiety and stress and needed to be back in Wellington to receive the support of her lawyer, family and friends. Johnson believed that note entitled her to a medical exemption, but says she has since discovered she needed to get any exemption signed by police.

But she says at the time that information was not easy to find.

So believing that she had the necessary paperwork and having sought advice from her lawyer, Johnson headed to the airport.

Her trip coincided with Auckland moving to level 3, when people were permitted to leave for essential personal movement – though subject to an exemption, which was granted only rarely.

It also coincided with the start of the vaccine rollout in New Zealand. Johnson is not vaccinated –

More than 50,000 people were reported for Covid breaches during the height of the pandemic. Only a handful were charged and publicly vilified. Maria Johnson was one of them. She was forced to step down from her public positions and nearly a year later is still paying the price. Did the punishment fit the crime? reports.

she insists she is not anti-vax, and is vaccinated for everything else, but was personally worried about the Pfizer vaccine due to a longstanding heart condition.

When Johnson was stopped at the Air New Zealand counter she was asked for her travel exemption and told the staff she didn’t have one but she had a note from her doctor, which she showed them. She also had a negative Covid test.

After turning back other passengers because they didn’t have the necessary exemptions, the Air New Zealand staff accepted Johnson’s reasons and allowed her to board. Johnson assumed that meant her paperwork was in order.

But it was once she was back in Wellington, which was in level 2, that things started to go wrong.

Johnson says her lawyers told her she would need a valuation for a Marlborough Sounds bach that was in dispute in the divorce settlement. Two days after returning to Wellington, she flew to Picton to meet the valuer.

A few days after returning home, the police called, with charges soon following. News articles, meanwhile, suggested Johnson had gone to the Sounds in breach of a business exemption granted for her trip to Wellington. The police report, meanwhile, says

Johnson initially told them she was in the Sounds to recuperate.

Johnson says she never had a business exemption and never claimed to have one (under the terms of a business exemption, the trip to the Sounds would have been against the rules).

However, Johnson didn’t appear to have any form of exemption, even though she believed she did. The police file states that the doctor’s note was not sufficient on its own.

The file also makes reference to Johnson turning up at the station with her partner, Andrew Hollis, a controversial figure in Tauranga, where he is running for Parliament under the Right-wing, antimandate, New Nation banner. The police file notes that Hollis refused to wear a mask and was belligerent, which Johnson disputes.

‘‘He was just upset when the police officer said that it was all out of their hands and Andrew said, no, this could have been stopped... he was not belligerent, he was protective.’’

Johnson says her then lawyer told her it wasn’t worth her time fighting the charge and to apply for diversion. ‘‘I got told... it’s nothing more than a speeding ticket.’’

Johnson’s lawyer at the time was contacted for comment. He declined.

During the two years of pandemic life, police and other government agencies received 57,371 reports of Covid breaches during the various lockdowns. . People were dobbed in for driveway drinks with their neighbours; for walking with people outside their bubble. Former Health Minister David Clark was famously outed for going mountain-biking.

Depending on your point of view, these offences were either the pandemic equivalent of a parking ticket, or something far more serious, akin to dangerous or drink-driving.

Clinical psychologist Dougal Sutherland says shame has always been a way of keeping people within the rules of society, so it’s not surprising New Zealanders responded to lockdown breachers in the manner they did.

‘‘The size of that public reaction was probably related to the fact it went against so many of our values we were trying to live by at the time.’’

Elements of fear and anxiety likely had a part to play in that reaction and rule-breakers who were perceived as privileged got it particularly hard because everyone else was doing it tough.

And as for whether the nation’s outrage was proportionate to those crimes? ‘‘Maybe the way to judge that is the impact it had on the person.’’

Only a handful ended in police charges being laid, however. Johnson was one of them.

At a hearing in Blenheim last October, the charges against Johnson were dismissed after she was offered diversion without conditions. Writing in support of a discharge, the police prosecutor concluded that Johnson had acted in good faith. She had taken the required Covid test and tested negative; she had no criminal history, and she had been medically cleared to travel by a doctor due to stress. Officials at the airport had also accepted Johnson’s medical explanation and allowed her to leave Auckland even while they stopped others without the right documentation from leaving, he noted. And, he said, Johnson had sought advice from her lawyer.

Case closed – except in the court of public opinion.

After her name came out in the media Johnson had to step down from the Life Education Trust, of which she was a member. She also stepped aside from the Teaching Council’s Disciplinary Tribunal, which has since opened an investigation into whether to strip her of her teacher registration following a complaint. An adverse finding would be career ending.

‘‘I’d taken years to establish myself and my career. Years. And, for want of a better word, of being an upstanding citizen.’’

Johnson says she wishes now that she had ignored her lawyers and stood up in court to make her case, and have her side of the story heard.

‘‘I wanted more than anything to go and stand up in Blenheim District Court… and say these are the facts.

‘‘But I was terrified, because my lawyer also said, ‘if you go down, and they find that you’re guilty, then that’s your career, totally over’. And I’m like, ‘but I didn’t do anything wrong’.’’

But they said, ‘well, you didn’t have the correct piece of paper to leave Auckland’.

‘‘But no-one told me that. Noone.’’

‘‘I’d taken years to establish myself and my career. Years. And, for want of a better word, of being an upstanding citizen.’’ Maria Johnson

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2022-05-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281672553555603

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