Steve Braunias at the Polkinghorne trial: Private passions made public

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THREE KEY FACTS
Steve Braunias is an award-winning New Zealand journalist, author, columnist and editor.
OPINION

Monday was possibly the maddest and most lurid day yet in the long, mad, lurid murder trial of
petite Remuera ophthalmologist Dr Philip Polkinghorne, its madness and luridity set in an upstairs courtroom in the High Court at Auckland, and as if to combat it, to take to it on its mad, lurid terms, the accused decided to model his maddest and most lurid pair of socks yet – his feet flew flags of the rising sun in painful yellows and reds, crazy socks, loud socks, porno socks. You don’t wear socks like that. You wouldn’t dare. But Polkinghorne, 71, has dared to wear his wild, wild heart on his feet every single day of his trial, now in its fifth week, and which is still, incredibly, able to present new gaspalicious evidence of a mad and lurid lust.

He is accused of strangling his wife Pauline to death at their home in the medical and legal belt of Remuera on Easter Monday, April 5, 2021. He called it in as a suicide and his defence maintains she hanged herself, framing it as the last, desperate act of a corporate executive who needed Prozac and Pinot to get her through the stress of a high-powered job. Everywhere in this trial, money. They moved in wealth. They both drove Mercs. Their joint assets were about $10 million. “We own two beautiful homes,” Pauline wrote in a note to self. They met at a Blind Foundation fundraising dinner, and their first date was at the French Cafe: “Philip took my hand, my heart flipped, I was sold.”
But this was not the love story examined on Monday at courtroom 13. The love story of Mr and Mrs Polkinghorne was peripheral, actually just not in the picture, something in the past. The love story played out in front of the jury was between Polkinghorne and his long-time consort, Australian escort Madison Ashton – their first appointment was in 2015 (fee: $800), and they maintained close contact over the next six years, but the Crown prosecution was more interested in their correspondence in the days following Pauline’s death. It was very interesting correspondence. It was not exactly the textbook on how to grieve. It was Polkinghorne in heat, mad for it, the prolific author of lurid wants and needs – another author puts it nicely: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action.”
Shakespeare and Polkinghorne, together at last. My thanks to one of our greatest living authors, a former New Zealand poet laureate, who responded to my most recent portrait of the trial of the century by sending me the lines from Sonnet 129. They can be read as a comment that sex sometimes comes at a terrible cost, that it deranges the mind. Polkinghorne, messaging Ashton in response to photos she sent of her cosmetic alterations: “Breasts bulging in perfect unison waiting to be unleashed to my tongue and fingertips!” And: “For your business it will I bet drive a tsunami of lust!” Also: “For me I get to f**k you endlessly!”
Okay. Enough. Think of the children. Pauline, dead; Pauline, buried; and in the same month, her husband – that is, her widower – keeping busy with a range of tumescent fantasisings. There were quite a lot of nudes (“How can you be stunning?”) and towards the end of the month there was quite a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to arrange their rendezvous at a Mt Cook hotel (Ashton asks, “Is it posh?”) on April 30. “Darling,” writes Polkinghorne, “we are going to last 100 years.” He had recently turned 68.
The messages were read out by Detective Andrew Reeves. He had accessed the phones and other devices. His stumbling monotone and mean little South African vowels nearly managed to desex the content and make it boring. My mind wandered to thoughts of another author, this one quite a good fit for Polkinghorne: John Updike, whose genius was often very consumed with writing about sex in wealthy American suburbs. I read his short story The Other Woman at the weekend. It opens with a man going to the bathroom one night and noticing a piece of paper in an open drawer in his bedroom. It’s a Valentine to his wife from another man. The discovery shocks him: “The moon-struck snow outside the window seemed to leap bluely toward him, into him, with its smooth and expansive curves of coldness.”
But no one writes anything on paper any more. Romance, and everything else, is paperless; all our declarations, our messages, our secrets, are archived online. To watch Polkinghorne in court on Monday was to see a man listen back to so, so many excruciating comms, once private, now aired in public, the content leaping bluely toward him, into him. “Is it cold,” he said in his police interview conducted in a small, bare office at the College Hill station on the afternoon of Pauline’s death, “or is it just me?”
The Herald will be covering the case in a daily podcast, Accused: The Polkinghorne Trial. You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, through The Front Page feed, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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