'I'd been holding on to shame far too long' - Melissa Leong

This story discusses sexual offending and may be distressing for some readers.

Before writing her memoir, Melissa Leong says she didn't "identify" when friends talked about their own experiences of sexual assault or rape. But while writing Guts, the Dessert Masters judge was "blindsided" by the realisation that an experience she didn't consent to in her 20s was, in fact, exactly that.

"It was clearly time for me, mentally and emotionally, to A - acknowledge it and B - process it. This is not my shame to hold on to. It wasn't my fault, I didn't do it, and I had been holding on to this sense of shame and embarrassment for far too long.

"As I started to write, these words flowed from my fingers, and I could see them on the [computer] screen. It was almost an out-of-body experience," she tells RNZ's Saturday Morning.

Leong prefers to use the term 'rape' rather than 'sexual assault', which she says "euphemises and softens" an experience that is "horrible and embarrassing and violent sometimes and tremendously damaging".

These days, we talk about consent so much that "it's become a bit of a cliche", Leong says, but when she was raped while working in the hospitality industry in her 20s, people were not having the same conversations about what it means.

"This is very relevant information I wish I'd been armed with back then... I repressed what happened to me for so long because I was so ashamed that I didn't even identify as somebody who had gone through an experience like this."

As a young woman, Leong really wanted to be part of the "dynamic, creative, exciting" hospitality industry, but despite being careful, she sometimes found herself in "dark moments not of my own choosing".

Far too often, women place the needs of others in front of their own, Leong says, then at some point, open their eyes and wonder "how the hell they got there."

For the former MasterChef Australia judge, one such moment was realising her "perfect on-paper life" with her husband in a lovely part of Sydney didn't feel right.

For many couples, the pandemic "expedited relationships to their natural conclusion", Leong says, and in late 2020, she announced her separation from Melbourne chef and cocktail bar owner Joe Jones.

"If I'm honest, the marriage was never right, and I'm grateful, in a way, because it expedited maybe a more protracted unhappiness for me."

Leong, who trained as a journalist and entered food media via "the back door of blogging", signed on to be MasterChef Australia's first female judge in late 2019.

While the show "catapulted" her career, its success also took away her privacy and led to photographers secretly following her - "which is absolutely harrowing as a woman".

In 2023, Leong made a sudden departure from MasterChef.

"There are moments, I believe, in each of our lives where there's a gap, and we can choose to take it or we can choose to continue to do what we're doing. That's a choice that we make for ourselves. That's not something other people can tell us to do.

"I have never regretted those experiences because they've led me to an existence that feels more in tune with how I feel, [with more] contentment and a sense of harmony in the world."

Leong says her lifelong yearning to find her own place and purpose took shape while growing up in Sydney's predominantly white Sutherland Shire with parents who'd immigrated from Singapore.

There, she was taught to "fit in" and "be very Australian" and felt frequently anxious and depressed.

"There were big chunks of childhood where I just felt heavy."

As an "intense introvert", the 43-year-old says she still sometimes finds it difficult to articulate herself.

"I think that's why I've ended up in the world of communication in one way, shape or form, my entire adult career.

"The idea of clearly describing feeling, sentiment, energy, stories, all of that's very, very important to me, and it has also been my great pleasure in life to help people also convey their stories."

Melissa Leong will next appear on New Zealand TV screens in Taste of Art - an upcoming cooking reality show filmed in Queenstown with the "wonderful" Vaughan Mabee, who is executive chef at the award-winning Amisfield restaurant.

"He is a light and a delight to work with, and I can't wait for people to see what we've done."