Mel Greig opens up about her journey

Warning: This story mentions suicide.

It was ten years ago now, but Mel Greig still feels the deep and lasting effects of the ill-fated phone call that turned her life upside down.

This week, the former 2Day FM radio host appeared on the SBS program Insight to talk about the road to rebuilding her public reputation in the wake of the royal phone prank, after which a British nurse took her own life.

Greig remembered the day everything changed.

“I was asleep. My partner at the time started to get all these tweets saying ‘she’s got blood on her hands.’ Then I got a phone call confirming (nurse) Jacinda Saldahna had taken her own life.”

“I don’t remember the next six hours of my life. It was instant grief and regret and remorse. It was just an awful situation to think that I was responsible for someone’s death.”

When asked by host Kumi Taguchi whether she was scared for own safety during the scandal, she replied: “At the time I wasn’t scared for my safety because I thought maybe I did deserve to die for what I did.”

Greig says she now understands suicide more.

“But nothing will change the fact that someone wrote my name and thought of me before they took their own life. That was very hard to deal with.”

In an interview with Mamamia, Greig said she’s come to forgive herself.

“I’ll always feel bad about what happened. But if I hang on to that grief, I’ll never move forward.”

Greig briefly returned to radio in 2015 with a two year stint at Illawarra’s Wave FM 96.5.

But she says finding a job has been a constant struggle.

“I applied for over 100 jobs and got 100 nos back. A charity wouldn’t even take the risk of letting me work behind-the-scenes stuffing envelopes. I just wanted to do good things for my soul again, and no one was giving me that chance.”

“I don’t like to be associated with what happened, but it is a part of my journey. And I have to accept that and there’s nothing I can do to change that.”