This horrifying saga is too long to fit into one Substack. This is Part One. I don’t know how many parts it will take, but it starts here.
The Independent Police Conduct Authority’s bombshell report into the Jevon McSkimming saga has torn the mask off a police culture that protects its own, punishes the vulnerable, and quietly strangles accountability.
For years, one of New Zealand’s most senior police officers, Deputy Commissioner McSkimming, was shielded from scrutiny while his alleged victim (I will call her ‘Ms Z’ as she was called this in the report) was arrested and charged under the Harmful Digital Communications Act (HDCA).
Former Deputy Commissioner Jevon McSkimming. Source: Stuff
Ms Z was 21 when she met McSkimming, then 40, through a sports club at which he was a coach. Shortly after they began a sexual relationship (the nature of which they disagree) in 2016, McSkimming put her name forward for casual work at the New Zealand Police and “he then personally requested that she be based out of Wellington Central Police Station (making her closer to Deputy Commissioner McSkimming’s place of work) rather than the Royal New Zealand Police College at Porirua, where the role was based.”
For context, McSkimming was promoted to the senior role of Assistant Commissioner in April 2016 so the power differential between the pair was significant.
Ms Z stayed in the role until January 2018 around the time their relationship ended. By May 2018 McSkimming had confessed the affair to his wife, saying it had ended. He also disclosed the matter to his supervisor and claimed that Ms Z was threatening, harassing, and blackmailing him. He expressed fear that she would harass his wife, but didn’t show his supervisor the threatening emails he said he received. He didn’t disclose that his affair was with a Police employee.
The IPCA reports that McSkimming began establishing a narrative to malign Ms Z from the outset:
Deputy Commissioner McSkimming started to form a particular narrative – that he had been in a consensual extramarital affair and that, when he ended it, the female began a campaign of emails and threats in order to convince him to return to her.
Former Police Commissioner Andrew Coster. Photo: RNZ/Nick Monro
In April 2020, Andrew Coster was appointed Commissioner of Police and in October that year McSkimming was appointed Deputy Commissioner. Not long after, he informed Coster of the affair and that he was receiving harassing emails. Coster simply took him at his word. He never asked whether the woman was a police employee (she was). He never asked about her age (21 to his 40). He never asked to see the emails, which contained specific and disturbing accusations.
Coster says that McSkimming said “that he’d had an affair with a student that he had taught sport” and that he had confessed about the affair to his wife and church. Coster believed Ms Z was contacting McSkimming’s wife and harassing him because she wanted him back.
Coster later admitted to the IPCA that, as Commissioner of Police, he “should have asked more questions.” That is the understatement of the century.
Information of the affair should have come out in the vetting process when McSkimming applied for the Deputy role, but he did not disclose it to the external recruitment agency doing the vetting. Coster points to this failed vetting process as a reason he was complacent about McSkimming’s affair. He said his relationship with his Deputy was purely professional and that he took him at his word.
The IPCA report noted that Coster said he:
…accepted Deputy Commissioner McSkimming’s description of the nature of the emails, which were portrayed as an attempt to convince Deputy Commissioner McSkimming to return to the relationship, rather than containing accusations of criminal and civil wrongdoing.
In 2022, McSkimming applied for the role of statutory Deputy Commissioner of Police. This differs from the Deputy Commissioner role he already held as that role is an employee of the Police while the statutory role is an independent one appointed by the Governor-General on the recommendation of the Prime Minister.
In the course of interviewing for the role, all candidates were asked:
“Is there anything that you need to disclose about your integrity, conduct or behaviour, either past or present, that could bring you or the New Zealand Police into disrepute?”
Andrew Coster was on the interview panel which was chaired by Deputy Public Service Commissioner Heather Baggott. Coster told the IPCA that the affair and subsequent dramas were “not explored” in the interview because Baggott stopped McSkimming, saying she was already aware of the matter.
However, Baggott contradicts this, telling the IPCA that McSkimming simply said he had nothing to disclose. McSkimming, on the other hand, said he did not disclose the relationship “because I wasn’t asked those types of questions at the interview.”
Baggott claims that the first “substantial conversation” she and Coster had about the affair wasn’t until a couple of years later in November 2024, after McSkimming had applied for the Commissioner role, when she was informed that the IPCA had opened an inquiry and the Police had commenced a criminal investigation. The IPCA found her recollection to be more credible than Coster’s and found:
Commissioner Coster’s failure to disclose this clearly fell below what a reasonable person would have expected of the Commissioner of Police…
In April 2023, McSkimming received a recommendation from then-Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and was appointed to the role of statutory Deputy Commissioner of Police. Deputy Commissioner Tania Kura was also appointed.
A few weeks later, in May 2023, Ms Z’s allegations resurfaced publicly in comments on a Police LinkedIn post about the appointments.
The IPCA report details:
The allegations made in one of the anonymous posts included sexual assault, improper use of taxpayer-funded hotels and Police property, and taking unsolicited explicit photos and threatening the release of those photos.
One of the posts read: “Yea should be really proud of Jevon McSkimming who cheats on his wife for years using taxpayer funded hotels and police property to do it in a way that makes him feel “safe”, has sexually assaulted at least one Police employee on Police property, threatens to destroy and ruin people when he is concerned about his behaviour being known… He has also taken images of someone without their consent and threatened to use the images to destroy them.”
Other posts included: “It’s sad NZ public have to pay tax to support a man like Jevon who seems to be so deluded to be able to preach about keeping NZ safe while sexually assaulting former NZ Police employee and targeting young females for his sexual gain while married”.
Instead of launching an inquiry, Deputy Commissioner Tania Kura instructed staff to have the comments removed. The posts, which accused McSkimming of sexual assault and blackmail, were quietly deleted and the complainant was again treated as the problem.
However, one of the shining lights in this story, Acting Director of Integrity and Conduct, who RNZ has named as Detective Superintendent Kylie Schaare, opted to call the IPCA to inform them of the matter. However, five days later Schaare emailed the IPCA to say:
“I’ve since found out that this is an ongoing matter that has been going for 6 years…It does not appear that this matter requires investigation or notification to the IPCA”.
RNZ understands Officer M is Detective Superintendent Kylie Schaare. Photo: RNZ / Nathan McKinnon
In response, the IPCA said:
“Tania [Kura] was able to provide a lot more context. [Our] understanding is that Tania will provide a brief written overview of what has taken place, the history of this matter and Police and other actions to manage the situation.”
Speaking to the IPCA later, Kura said McSkimming told her it had gone on for years and she had the impression that “the IPCA had been involved in the matter for years.” She says she spoke to Coster about it and understood that “several people, including Commissioner Coster, Parliamentary ministers and media, had received anonymous emails containing similar allegations at about the same time.”
Kura told the IPCA:
“…the explanation is this is a woman scorned who continues to harass him in a way that is public. Her whole ambition has been to ensure that he never becomes the Commissioner of Police, that has been her ambition. That’s the narrative that I had been given… So if all of those people in the preceding years had never done anything about it, why would I then lift it up again because nothing had been done. That’s exactly how I looked at it to start with.”
The IPCA asked Kura if she or anyone else had taken action to respond to any of the emailed and posted allegations. She said she didn’t think it was her job to respond to the LinkedIn comments, but she said “replies had gone back to emails that she [Ms Z] had sent but there was no reply back.”
The IPCA disputes this:
“to the best of our knowledge and contrary to Deputy Commissioner Kura’s account, no one had attempted to reply to the emails.”
To be generous to Kura, she had just gone through the same vetting process as McSkimming and likely fairly assumed that anything untoward would have been unearthed in that process.
To be less generous, her excuse that the comments were anonymous was called “disingenuous” by the IPCA because it was clear that everyone knew they came from Ms Z and her identity could be obtained from McSkimming.
The IPCA report details how an extraordinary number of people were made aware of the allegations against McSkimming. These emails were anonymous and likely fell through many cracks, but it is difficult to comprehend how no one looked into them.
“From 27 December 2023 to January 2024, a large number of emails were sent from several different anonymous email accounts. Those emails went to a range of people and organisations, including Deputy Commissioner McSkimming, the Commissioner of Police, Deputy Commissioner Kura, the Minister of Police, the Prime Minister, the IPCA and various media outlets. The content of the emails was often graphic. A recurring theme was that Deputy Commissioner McSkimming is a sexual predator who targets young females.”
This is where this story goes from bad to outrageously bad. Instead of investigating the highly concerning subject matter, the Police turned their legal powers on Ms Z. She made many desperate attempts over years to have her allegations of sexual, psychological, and professional abuse investigated. Instead, she was arrested, charged, legally gagged, and humiliated. Her so-called “offence” was sending anonymous emails accusing McSkimming of being a sexual predator; accusations that later proved to be very, very true.
On 25 January 2024, Commissioner Coster sent an email to Deputy Commissioner Kura asking her to refer the emails to the Fixated Threats Assessment Centre (FTAC) for consideration and noting that he believed the emails reached the threshold for action under the Harassment Act 1997.
The email stated: “Further to our discussion, the volume and content of these emails being sent to Jevon (and many others), alongside other concerning aspects of this case, suggest to me it may be an appropriate one for the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre to consider.
Whilst it’s probable they’ve reached the threshold for action under the Harassment Act, there may also be other options that team would advise, including mental health support for the writer.
It’s clearly not appropriate for Jevon to have any role in directing this activity and he should be updated only in the way we would any victim of this sort of behaviour. Can you please provide the independent reporting line for follow-up by FTAC and initiate their consideration of this longstanding and apparently escalating concern?”
The officer assigned to investigate by FTAC, Officer O, became the next to question if perhaps it might be a good idea to investigate the allegations against McSkimming, himself. In his report to his manager, Officer N, he added comments:
“…the accusations made in her emails are more than what we…were told….There are however multiple other accusations made towards him that would definitely not fit within the police code of conduct. Based on what we know directly some of these accusations are certainly plausible and are in line with the information that we already have, examples of these are; it happening during work hours, at hotels paid for by work and occurring at police college accommodation. There are many other accusations also included within her emails. Some appear unrealistic and just said to be vulgar (ie I don’t think are even meant as an accusation) while others could potentially have merit solely based on the power dynamics such as bullying and threatening even if he didn’t see it this way.”
Officer N, Manager Security Intelligence, reported back to Kura that it was not appropriate for FTAC to accept the referral because of “the complexities arising from her [Ms Z’s] previous personal relationship with the Deputy Commissioner”. However, the report did say that Ms Z’s behaviour “likely reached the threshold of criminal harassment and/or offences under the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015.”
The IPCA report reminds us that the FTAC:
“were provided the emails for the purpose of determining whether they could, or should, have a role in safeguarding Deputy Commissioner McSkimming, not for the purpose of identifying any alleged wrongdoing by Deputy Commissioner McSkimming himself. Yet a detective read the emails and was sufficiently concerned by the allegations made in them, that he immediately raised the issue with his supervisor and suggested notification to Police Integrity and Conduct and/or the IPCA.”
The significance of this, IPCA say, cannot be overstated. The FTAC even collated examples where the allegations should be investigated:
a) An email to then-Commissioner Coster sent on 27 December 2023: “What is the complaints process so that Jevon McSkimming (somehow an acting Commissioner of NZ Police) who has sexually assaulted a police employee on police property can be dismissed for misconduct?...
b) An email sent on 3 January 2024: “Jevon creates destruction in society and even threatens to destroy people yet continues to go up the ranks in Police...seems because he threatens (including legally threatens) those who he abuses physically and mentally.”
c) An email sent on 9 February 2024: “If you were lied to then does that mean you consent? Jevon perhaps before you try cover up your behaviour with legal threats you should disclose to Andrew Coster your behaviour and have a look at international legal precedents classifying sex by deception as rape.”
d) An email sent to then Commissioner Coster on 24 January 2024: “Next time you attend church events… make sure to ask Jevon … how many unsolicited photos he takes to try blackmail them into silence.”
Officers O and N met with Deputy Commissioner Kura, talked her through the report, and emailed it to her. Kura then sent it on to the acting Assistant Commissioner of Investigations, Officer B, who Newsroom has named as Detective Inspector Chris Page. Kura’s notes from meetings suggest her focus was entirely on stopping the emails from Ms Z with no energy directed toward checking if what she was saying was true. Her recollections are vague, but she says she gave the report to Coster whose “primary concern was any potential harm to Deputy Commissioner McSkimming.” This was evident in the fact that despite repeated concerns being raised by FTAC about potential criminal offending by McSkimming:
FTAC’s work on the matter was used solely as the foundation for a criminal investigation into Ms Z…
Ms Z was charged with offences under the Harmful Digital Communications Act on 8 May 2024.
Despite the FTAC recommendation and associated in-person conversations, no one conducted any enquiries, including trying to contact Ms Z, to establish the veracity of the allegations prior to her being charged.
Rather than investigating her claims, police treated Ms Z as a criminal. They arrested her, called her crazy, and eventually silenced her under sweeping suppression orders supposedly designed to protect the reputation of one of the country’s most powerful law-enforcement figures.
It is a national scandal.
The IPCA investigated how this could possibly have come about. Coster claimed, contrary to Kura, that he never received the report, but that Kura did brief him. He claims that Kura told him that FTAC had spoken to Ms Z and “nothing of particular note from that came out” so he assumed she had not wanted to make any complaint. Kura disputes this. She says she did not tell Coster that FTAC had spoken to Ms Z.
Alarmingly, Coster also said that he was not alarmed and did not take action because he had actually read some of the emails that had come through from Ms Z and:
“The ones I saw were entirely consistent with what Jevon had described to me, and certainly nothing that…made me think this has reached the threshold for investigation.”
Another excuse he gave was that the emails were anonymous. The then-Police Commissioner certainly seems to lack the necessary curiosity and investigative capability for the role. And, like others have claimed, Coster felt there was nothing to see here because if there were someone would have already done something.
The IPCA characterises Coster’s behaviour as one of “unquestioning acceptance of the narrative put forward by Deputy Commissioner McSkimming over the previous six years – that Ms Z was acting out of anger that Deputy Commissioner McSkimming had left the relationship.”
They conclude: “we cannot escape the conclusion that his preconception of Deputy Commissioner McSkimming as a victim clouded his decision-making.”
Kura clearly shared this affliction and saw Ms Z as a “woman scorned”. She told IPCA:
“Equally her purpose in all of this, and I think some of the emails actually talk about this, that ‘actually I will make sure your career’s destroyed … – because actually I want you back.’ So that’s the other part as well is that we have, we also have the other, the alternative thing that happens where people are scorned, and men are usually the victims of that. So we kind of have a double standard in the way that we deal with males and females in some of this stuff too.”
However, there is one big problem with all this talk of Ms Z wanting McSkimming back and the IPCA identified it:
None of the emails we have viewed suggests any desire for the relationship to resume.
The extensive IPCA report reads like an indictment of the Police hierarchy itself. It details years of indifference, deception, and institutional rot. Multiple senior officers, including former Commissioner Andrew Coster and Deputy Commissioner Tania Kura, are criticised for failing to act on repeated, credible complaints.
From 2018 onward, senior figures within Police National Headquarters knew about McSkimming’s relationship with the young woman. When she later sent emails detailing sexual misconduct and abuse, those same leaders dismissed her as “a woman scorned”. They accepted McSkimming’s narrative that she was a vindictive ex-lover obsessed with ruining him without ever checking the facts.
Ms Z’s emails were numerous and often written in a way that conveyed her distress. This led to them being wrongly dismissed over and over. However, even more unbelievable is how her ‘105 reports’ were treated.
The New Zealand Police have a non-emergency phone number and online portal, ‘105’, that can be called or messaged for advice and reporting crime no longer in progress.
Three ‘105’ online reports were received on 26 April 2024.
Time: 8.37pm.
Who was hurt or threatened: “Threatened to destroy someones [sic] life. Sexually assaulted NZ Police staff. Generally a man of questionable character that uses NZ Police property, taxpayer funded hotels [to further an affair].”
How were they hurt or threatened: “Jevon Murray McSkimming took unsolicited photo/s of a young female and threatened to use them publicly to try and silence the young female and threatened that he knew just how to ‘destroy’ her life. Sexually assaulted NZ Police staff”.
Time: 8.48pm
Included: “Threatens to publish unsolicited image to try silence victim of his sexual assault, stalking and harassment…” and “…a predatory man who grooms young females for sex”.
Time: 9.31pm
Included: “Jevon Murray McSkimming groomed young female seemingly for sexual acts, preyed on her and targeting her after met [in the]… group he associates with. Sexually assaulted NZ Police staff on NZ Police property. Goes out to Wellington bars and tries to assist getting young females drunk so that he may take advantage of them. Takes unsolicited images and then uses them to threaten to publish them and threatens to destroy victim of his behaviour’s life seemingly to silence her from speaking about his abhorrent behaviour…. Generally just a sad pathetic fucked up human that seems to get enjoyment from screwing with people’s lives for his sexual gain”.
The procedure for when an allegation comes through CrimeStoppers or 105 involving a police officer, or member of staff, is to email a specific Integrity and Conduct email address. This procedure was followed because the person clearing the online reports seems to be more competent and have more integrity than Commissioner Coster.
However, as the report bounced around the internal systems it caught the attention of those already involved in other aspects of the McSkimming and Ms Z matters. This resulted in, Officer C, the officer in charge of the case against Ms Z, sending an email to Officer L, the Conduct and Integrity coordinator, saying:
“…This matter has oversight from Deputy Commissioner KURA, management by [Detective Inspector Chris Page], and investigation by [Officer E]. All aspects are well in hand and at this stage I don’t expect there’s a requirement for Integrity and Conduct to be actively involved. Can you give [Detective Inspector Chris Page] a call when you can to confirm please”.
This left Officer L concerned. He interpreted this as him being told to abdicate his duty. He told IPCA:
“So effectively saying that I had concerns that… it’s still an allegation. Still needs to be recorded by us. We’ve got like another arm of police kind of coming in over the top, basically saying that you don’t need to worry about it…”
Usually, Officer L, explained, if an officer was implicated in a report like this he would notify the IPCA and record it in the database. But this did not happen because for the first time in his experience he was told not to get involved.
Officer L’s superior, the Operations Manager of Integrity and Conduct, subsequently raised concerns with her Director, Detective Superintendent Kylie Schaare, about this deviation from procedure. What followed was a series of emails and calls in which the Integrity and Conduct team were told that the investigations team had the matter under control and essentially elbowed them out of the way.
But Schaare continued to have concerns:
“I raised the concern with [Detective Inspector Chris Page] that it didn’t appear to me that anyone had treated [Ms Z] as a complainant and offered to take a statement of complaint from her, particularly given they knew who she was… I recall [Detective Inspector Chris Page] stating that the officers who arrested her asked if she wanted to make a complaint, my response was ‘why would she make a complaint to the officers who have just arrested her, of course she wouldn’t have trust to speak to them’. … It was clear to me that [Ms Z] had never been spoken to as a potential victim given the emails and the concerns she was mentioning….”
But it gets worse. You see, while all of this was going on, the Executive Director Service and Resolutions ‘Ms F’ (who I understand has been identified as Rachael Bambery), decided to run some interference. She had worked as a direct report to McSkimming for seven years, clearly admired him, and had heard about the affair and the emails from him. The IPCA report details:
Deputy Commissioner McSkimming sent a text message to Ms F when the 105 reports came in, because the way the reports had been created meant that he was copied into them as they were submitted. Deputy Commissioner McSkimming asked Ms F to have a look at them, in her capacity as overseer of the 105 Non-Emergency Service. Ms F made enquiries of her staff and told us at interview that she received the reports.
In her submissions, Ms F stated that she only saw one of the reports (the third one) and only read the content of it in October 2024. This was in contrast to her description at interview, in which she relied on the content of the report as providing her justification in how she dealt with them. Regardless of what the reality was, Ms F spoke to Deputy Commissioner Kura, and had the reports packaged up and provided to Detective Inspector Chris Page for use in the prosecution of Ms Z. Her staff also forwarded them to Integrity and Conduct, consistent with usual practice.
Ms F gathered up evidence for McSkimming to use against Ms Z in prosecution. The IPCA points out in the report that there are about five layers of management between the 105 communicator team and herself as Executive Director Service and Resolutions. There was no reason for her to be meddling on the shop floor.
Ms F was quite obviously conflicted and acting inappropriately. She even admitted to IPCA interviewers that she would class the 105 complaints as:
“complete spam” and “gobbledygook”, with “nothing for us to follow up on”:
“…we get a lot of those through 105 like, ‘Mickey Mouse here and this has happened’. You know, just people that are painful. And so that was what it looked like. It did not look like someone who had a serious complaint. That looked like someone just wanted to spam us with stuff to be really annoying.”
“This honestly felt like someone was just making stuff up, because of the incomprehendible (sic) nature of them”.
“What I would call spamming of the system because there was no actionable action.”
The IPCA thankfully views the attitude of Ms F toward victims as poorly as I do:
Concerningly for us, particularly given Ms F’s current portfolio includes responsibility for victims, was her view that the 105 report she read did not fit the profile of what she would expect to see from a victim.
She acknowledges she is not an investigator, and does not have any investigation expertise, but made a judgment based on how a complaint from a victim ‘should’ read:
“If I think about the victims that I have seen 105 reports coming, they don’t read like that. They are way more reserved in how they express some things and … the vulnerability of the uncertainness of how to tell people things is what we see. As opposed to… it feels like it’s the anger, I want people to know what he’s like, versus the vulnerable victim that has had this going on.”
“I don’t know if that’s because I’m not an investigator so I don’t see a range of victims but the messages that come in are not of that spamming nature…they don’t try those avenues. They go to get a lawyer or they go to find a front door of a station or they ring”.
Great that IPCA has called out her utterly unacceptable conduct, however, if LinkedIn is to be believed, Ms F still remains in her role.
The IPCA also take a very poor view of the failure of Police to recognise that:
…a possible victim of sexual assault, who had allegedly been told for years by a very senior Police officer that she would not be listened to (and that explicit images of her might be distributed) if she tried to complain, might present as a desperate person sending sometimes extreme and abusive emails in an attempt to be heard. They also failed to turn their minds to the possibility that a criminal investigation into her behaviour might not be the only way to make the emails stop. Instead, it was possible that by reaching out to her (in circumstances other than the day she was charged by the officers investigating her) and showing a willingness to listen to her story and take any necessary actions, she would no longer feel the need to email in the way she had been. As Officer D expressed it:
“Any number of those people who received those emails should have…we (the Police) should have been looking at it right from the beginning…she’s essentially just emailing into the abyss…people get desperate.”
What happened next is the heart of the scandal. Instead of investigating McSkimming, the Police used FTAC’s findings to justify charging Ms Z under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. She was treated not as a whistleblower or a potential victim, but as a digital offender who needed to be neutralised. The Authority notes that no one conducted any enquiries, including trying to contact her, to establish the veracity of her allegations before she was charged.
The man overseeing the investigation into the so-called harassment by Ms Z against McSkimming is referred to in the IPCA report as ‘Officer C’. He made it clear that he understood that his job was to look into this matter only, not the allegations against McSkimming. He said it was important to “stay in his swim lane”. He assigned ‘Officer E’ to draft a report to the Crown Solicitor seeking legal advice.
The Crown Solicitor’s office responded that they found that there was a prima facie case for Ms Z to be charged under section 22 of the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015, and on a charge of blackmail under section 237 of the Crimes Act 1961.
However, the IPCA identified a problem with the narrow advice that Police sought from the Crown Solicitor. Usually, they said, a broader scope of an opinion based on the full application of the Prosecution Guidelines would be sought including a consideration of whether it was “in the public interest” to pursue charges. The IPCA assert that Officer C “expressly requested it not cover this issue.”
In any case, on the 8th May 2024, just over a week after the 105 reports were lodged online, Ms Z was arrested and charged.
In subsequent the IPCA investigation Police have tried to distance themselves from the decision to charge. Deputy Commissioner Kura said she acted on independent legal advice from the Crown Solicitor and did not know it was limited in scope. The acting Assistant Commissioner of Investigations, Detective Inspector Chris Page, who was involved in charging Ms Z said:
“Most of the legal process decisions were actually left with the Crown Solicitor and we forced them to make those decisions based on what was the best outcome for the case from their perspective…we didn’t want to drive that…because the complainant is the Deputy Commissioner, we left that with the Crown Solicitor”.
Detective Inspector Chris Page, also pleads ignorance to the narrow scope of requested advice. Meanwhile, Officer C, who requested the advice, says that he applied the broader Prosecution Guidelines himself and judged the case to meet the public interest test because “the harm was continuing”, “there was significant and ongoing offending which needed to be stopped”, and “it was not a trivial matter”. He also said that it was for Ms Z’s defence lawyer to establish if there was truth to the allegations being made by her which utterly flies in the face of the concept of the “burden of proof” being on the prosecution.
Again, it gets even worse.
In the Summary of Facts that accompanied Ms Z’s charging document Police stated “that emails alleging that the victim has committed sexual assault or groomed young females, and have called the victim a sexual predator, were false.”
This was based on nothing more than McSkimming claiming they were false.
When asked to account for inserting this claim into the Summary of Facts, Page told the IPCA:
“We’re talking about 300 emails that variously allege all sort of things about which there is no evidence and which ... when [Officer E] ha[s] taken the statement from Jevon, [Jevon] is saying the allegations in her emails just never occurred, from his perspective…From his perspective as a complainant they are false.”
On the 28th November 2024, the Summary of Facts was edited to remove the claim of “false” based on advice from Crown Law. It was also edited to remove the inclusion of one of Ms Z’s 105 reports as an “an example of harmful digital communication”.
The IPCA points out how egregious it is that this was ever included in the Summary of Facts. It is something that, as noted, should have been part of an Integrity and Conduct process. The 105 report they included alleged “that Deputy Commissioner McSkimming groomed young females for sexual acts and sexually assaults females.”
This means that Police arrested and charged a woman for making a complaint through official Police channels about grooming and sexual assault.
Read that again and let that sink in.
So, what did our noble police force do next? Well, they sought to get Ms Z to admit the allegations were false, of course. In the process of attempting to resolve the case before trial, they discussed diversion as an option. In an email from Page to Officer C in July 2024 (the Summary of Facts had not yet been changed) he said:
The victim [McSkimming] is happy to resolve this and does not intend or wish for harsh outcomes. One of the issues however is that the allegations contained in the communications are of course central to the harmful communication and undermine professional reputation.
Therefore an acknowledgement of guilt in this matter requires two things:
1. That the defendant sent the material and intended harm
2. That the allegations made by the defendant and contained in those communications were untrue. …In the absence of that agreement, then we remain on course for a hearing where these matters will be heard and resolved”.
This email suggests that McSkimming is dictating the terms of diversion which is not something a ‘victim’ would usually be able to do. The Crown Solicitor also invited Ms Z to seek a discharge without conviction, but required the same terms including conceding the allegations were false. Ms Z was not willing to do so. Understandably.
The IPCA concludes that the intention of police was clear: “to use a criminal process to stop the harassment of Deputy Commissioner McSkimming (the victim) by Ms Z (the alleged offender).”
Bizarrely, about a month after Ms Z was charged, Deputy Commissioner Kura decided that an investigation into the allegations was warranted after all. Hallelujah. An Executive Director with Police, Ms G, who Newsroom has named as Angela Brazier, describes that McSkimming was “pretty angry” when he found out.
Kura says she sought the assistance of Officer D who RNZ has named as Detective Inspector Nicola Reeves. She is experienced in investigating sexual assaults and was brought in because:
“…we were concerned that if the allegations or the rantings that she [Ms Z] had put out there were actually true, she couldn’t be pleading guilty to things that came about because she’d actually been a victim of some offences.”
To be continued…
Ani O'Brien comes from a digital marketing background, she has been heavily involved in women's rights advocacy and is a founding council member of the Free Speech Union. This article was originally published on Ani's Substack Site and is published here with kind permission.
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