Virginia Trioli reveals the tragedy that followed her on-air gaffe mocking Barnaby Joyce

TV presenter Virginia Trioli has revealed the personal tragedy that followed her infamous on-air blunder.

In 2009, during an ABC News Breakfast broadcast, an interview with Barnaby Joyce had just finished airing when the cameras cut back to Trioli at the news desk. She was captured on camera twirling her finger near her head, implying the Nationals senator was crazy.

"The camera cut back to me earlier than expected and I was caught," Trioli recalled on Friday in a speech she gave at a Women in Media conference. "I think my heart stopped dead for a full five seconds."

Earlier that morning, the journalist walked into work feeling "high as a kite".

"I'd just returned from a week's leave during which I underwent what felt like my 100th IVF procedure and 85th embryo transfer -- at least that's how the numbers felt to me," she explained in her speech. "We finally had an embryo that looked like it stood a chance. It was transferred and I returned to work, technically pregnant and over the moon."

Then, the unfortunate gaffe happened.

"I stumbled through the rest of the broadcast in a daze," said Trioli. "Once off air I spoke to my EP, and then I rang Senator Joyce to apologise. He had not seen the incident and dismissed it lightly — graciously accepting my apology. Later in the day he even joked to the media about how maybe he was a bit crazy."

It was a tough day for Trioli. Aside from the embarrassment, it didn't look good for an ABC journalist to be seen as biased.

"The oceans of social media outrage were boiling, and the waves of abuse were pounding me," she recalled. "I turned off all social media and spent the rest of the morning in frantic discussions with the head of news and current affairs and the MD of the ABC. We knew how this looked. An ABC presenter sending up a Coalition member at a time when the broadcaster was under sustained attack for perceived bias."

She returned home that day and told her husband, journalist Russell Skelton, that she'd "just killed a 20 year career in journalism."

She said she spent the rest of the day crying, and two days later she began to bleed.

"Now, it is of course highly probable that this tiny precious embryo was never going to take, so many of them don't," she said at the conference on Friday. "But to this day, and for all time, I will always believe that it was my own silliness, and all the drama that followed, that stole away one more hope for a child."

She finished by emphasising that she could have made the gesture about anyone that day, thanks to the emotional toll IVF can have on a woman.

"For anyone who thought or still thinks that was a moment of left/right ridicule, let me set you straight. If you think that, then you can know nothing of the abysmal lows and the ecstatic highs that make up the IVF rollercoaster and the emotions that go with it. It was foolish. It was unprofessional. But it was not bias."

Let's block ads! (Why?)