Pretty HURTS

One of Australia's favourite cover girls in the '80s and '90s, Alison Brahe-Daddo sits down with Angela Mollard to speak for the first time about surviving sexual assault and rape at the height of her modelling career

- Angela Mollard

She was the Dolly cover girl everyone wanted to be. Golden-skinned and sparkly-eyed, Alison Brahe was as well known as Elle Macpherson - but somehow more relatable. Looking back, it was clearly her smile. Wide, natural, and occasionally cheeky, it made you believe that if you couldn't actually be her, you could at least be her friend.

But what no-one knew - even those she loved most was that behind the relaxed summer-girl image, she was grappling with a horrific secret, one that she is only now ready to share.

What happened occurred nearly 35 years ago, a few years before she married the nation's most eligible bachelor, television host Cameron Daddo (in December 1991). It was before children, before moving to America and becoming the teacher's assistant she is now. Yet for all the time and life that have passed, she remembers that traumatic evening in forensic detail.

She hesitated writing about it in her new memoir, Queen Menopause, and is equally cautious as speak via Zoom, after our planned face-to-face interview at her home on Sydney's northern beaches had to shift online while she battled Covid-19.

But even in pyjamas and speaking from her bed, the 52-year-old mother of three knows it's a story she needs to tell. Not necessarily for her own sake, but for others.

“I was 17 and working as a model in Japan when another model invited me to a party,” Brahe-Daddo recalls, explaining that she was excited to go out since every other night had been spent in her apartment block eating packets of noodles and phoning her boyfriend back home in Australia.

Not that it should matter, but she wants to point out what she was wearing when she arrived at the party: “High-waisted jeans with rips on the knees, a black belt - tightly fastened - and a long-sleeved black T-shirt, which showed a slice of my belly."