Golriz Ghahraman: ‘I feel more myself than I have for so long’

Sunday, 7 July 2024

When she was charged with shoplifting in January, Golriz Ghahraman’s world shrunk, almost immediately. Six months on and in the wake of her conviction, she tells Frances Morton of the warning signs she ignored, her biggest regret and why moving forward doesn’t mean embracing a big life again.

Golriz Ghahraman’s world is much smaller than it once was.

When the former Green MP was charged with shoplifting in January, resigned from Parliament and then pleaded guilty to the charges, she went into a personal lockdown while media camped outside her Auckland home. “I’d go to the back end of the house and shut all the blinds and just kind of be there,” says Ghahraman.

At the time, Ghahraman expected little more for her future.

“I felt resigned,” she says. “In that moment, and I think maybe others who have been in crisis and hit that bottom might relate to that, I felt like, I’m never going to have any friends or any work. I’m going to take my cat and live with mum and never leave the house.”

Slowly, as the court process played out under public glare, Ghahraman, 43, started to process both her crime, the period that led up to it, her mental health and the idea that there might, just might, be an after.

We meet several times over the two weeks before her sentencing for the theft of clothing worth $8926 from shops in Auckland and Wellington, at a cafe on Auckland’s Karangahape Rd, one of the few places Ghahraman ventures out to when she leaves her house. She is warm and talks freely. Laughs quickly, if a little warily and with an underlying combination of bewilderment and shame at her situation. She is more at ease when the conversation steers away from herself towards the legal system, which she knows intimately as a former criminal barrister and lawmaker, mental health issues and political causes.

Ghahraman wears symbols of the kaupapa she cares about. Around her neck hang three necklaces – a glass watermelon representing colours of the Palestinian flag, a small map of Palestine and a ladybird, given to her as a baby in Iran by her mother’s high school friend, nine years before Ghahraman’s family fled in 1990 to settle in New Zealand as refugees. The T-shirt Ghahraman brings along for our photo shoot is designed by Hushidar Mortezaie and pays tribute to the Iranian women’s rights movement.

When she got caught, Ghahraman says her first thought was for the shops. She met with the owner of Scotties to apologise and was astounded when the owner turned around and asked, “But are you OK?”

“The next thought was for the communities that were associated with me because of the advocacy I’d done and how hideous it is that now they have to deal with this,” she says.

It was the empathy that New Zealanders have shown, at a time when Ghahraman says she felt so undeserving, that has surprised her the most.

“I was expecting to get all of this hate and all of this backlash but I don't think I've had anything that I've done in politics, other than maybe talk about MS [multiple sclerosis], that has had as much of a supportive outreach as this.”

It has come from friends, family, colleagues and the communities she’s been working with and, more broadly, from across the political spectrum, former ministers, prominent figures and the general public.

“Someone cycled past me the other day. They were going in the other direction and they came back to say, ‘Hey I just want you to know there are a lot of people who get it’.”

Black and white

Ghahraman herself is still grappling with the shoplifting and the big question – why?

“It’s so weird. I’ll spend the rest of my life getting my head around the fact that that’s a symptom of this other thing.”

She is careful to make it clear that she fully takes responsibility for the crime and is sorry for the harm caused. Nothing about the offending, she says, ever felt good.

“It felt like, this is proof that you’re a bad person, a shameful person, an undeserving person. It felt like shit, it felt like hell. It was never, like oh, there’s a high. It was more like, there’s proof that you’re broken.”

The “other thing” that has come to light since Ghahraman spent 40 minutes circling a small boutique watched by security cameras as she stashed items into a tote bag slung over her shoulder is a mental health diagnosis of severe Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“Looking back I can see the burn it down, embarrass yourself, bad behaviour. I could have never talked to anyone about shoplifting. I was so ashamed. It was like, this is proof that you’re crazy. I was just hoping to somehow get out.”

The “complex” part of the diagnosis links to ongoing trauma contexts, rather than to a distinct event. For Ghahraman there are two contexts: the first is her early life in war-torn Iran and her family’s displacement as refugees; the second the more recent and persistent threats and abuse she has been subjected to as New Zealand’s first refugee Member of Parliament. Ghahraman notes she became the target of racist and misogynist attacks even before she became an MP. They began as soon as she put her hand up as a candidate in early 2017 and, over the next seven years, death threats and threats of sexual harm only increased.

“Now looking back, I was living in a way where I had this low key to high key visceral fear, but it was like, this was part of the job. You walk out of the house and you’re scanning,” says Ghahraman. “You handle it and you handle it. And there’s a numbness that comes with that.”

There were warning signs that things weren’t right with her mental health that Ghahraman can now see. She felt anxious constantly and was not sleeping. She remembers saying to a friend that she felt her relationship to alcohol was changing, getting riskier.

“I’d get angry with myself for being too weak and have that internal monologue, of this is the job, especially the job of a ‘first’. You’ve got to keep being strong.”

That meant pushing on as the 2023 election loomed.

“I really regret that I let people down who relied on me as their representative. I really, really, really wish, every second of every day, that I had resigned before the last election. Done two terms and resigned and gone and got support.”

In the clinical psychologist’s report, quoted by Ghahraman’s defence lawyer at her sentencing hearing, her shoplifting is described as loss-reactive. “These individuals do not require the things stolen and have notable experiences of loss and trauma in their past,” it reads. Ghahraman says her therapist explained this type of shoplifting as self-sabotaging behaviour, with similarities to substance abuse or self-harm.

“I do find it hard, as I think people who have seen this story find it hard, to see why someone would behave in such a bizarre way, because of trauma. But I read it in black and white in a report, so I have to accept it.”

Has she shoplifted since?

“No. I can’t even imagine it,” she says “Looking back, it’s like looking at a different person.”

Financially, things have been “pretty tough”. Ghahraman has done a bit of contract work and relied on savings. “I’ve tried to be in the crisis rather than try to problem solve. I don’t live a very extravagant life, so it’s OK,” she says.

When her world suddenly shrunk,Ghahraman, free of the constant demands of travel to Wellington, rediscovered the luxury of sleeping in her own bed for more than a fortnight. “For seven years, I hadn’t ever been home for longer than the two week recess every so often.”

Nights are now spent watching obscure horror movies with her flatmate or having potluck dinners with friends. She has adopted another cat, a black kitten who turned up sick in her friend’s garden on Persian New Year. The SPCA was full so Ghahraman took her home and called her Vida, which means ‘found’ in Farsi.

“It’s so interesting that I’m probably externally in such a terrible place, if someone is looking at my life right now, but I feel so much more centred or grounded. I feel so much more myself than I have for so long.”

Longer term, Ghahraman knows her political career is dead, but she is hopeful her legal career is not. A conviction, particularly for a dishonesty offence, is a hurdle to overcome for any practising barrister. Ahead of her sentencing hearing on June 24, I asked what she expected.

“I feel really at peace with whatever the court decides. We’re applying for a discharge without conviction. Even if I get a conviction I feel like the worst has already happened.”

Judgement day

As a former Auckland barrister, Ghahraman understands the ins and outs of appearing at the downtown district court better than most of us. “I know what will happen and what you have to do to walk in, and then you go up the escalator and then you walk into the courtroom….”

And yet, when she appeared to plead guilty in March she said it was “an out of body experience”. She didn’t speak to media at the time. Photographers ran after her as she arrived and left the court. In the photos, there is a man shining a torch, apparently trying to obscure the images being snapped. Ghahraman says he turned up with the communications person supporting her lawyer. “At that point I was just trying to walk. I wouldn't have even known that the torch thing was a thing that works or doesn’t work.”

The reception is more subdued when Ghahraman arrives on that late June Monday afternoon for the sentencing hearing. There are fewer media present. The judge allows Ghahraman to sit in the public gallery alongside her supporters. Her parents are not among them. Ghahraman says they are both unconditionally supportive but that she “couldn’t bear it” if they were there.

The sentencing hearing stretches on for nearly two hours, with Judge Jelas attentively questioning Ghahraman’s defence lawyer Annabel Cresswell and the police prosecutor Alysha McClintock. Much of the discussion is about Ghahraman’s mental health and whether or not it played a role in her offending. As the hearing comes to a close, it is clear Ghahraman isn’t facing a prison term, but a question hangs over whether she will get a conviction. The judge reserves her judgement, setting a further hearing for Thursday of that week.

I meet with Ghahraman, at the same Karangahape Road cafe, on the day after the hearing. She is less calm and restive for some kind of resolution, but understanding of the judge’s caution.

Inevitably, at times she wanted to leap up and have her say as a defence lawyer. “There are so many different places where you want to speak when it’s your own case,” says Ghahraman, especially when the court was addressing her mental health.

“It’s the most intimate thing in the world. It is, for lack of a better word, crazy to be sitting there with people who don’t know you at all.”

Her biggest takeaway, she says, was the need for trauma-informed training for police, lawyers and judges - a better understanding of the impacts of trauma across the justice system. It’s got her thinking about how many people sitting in our prisons are also suffering from trauma.

“Maybe that’s a defence mechanism,” she shrugs. “I can project my own feelings of stress and anxiety of this hearing onto other people, then you’re allowed to feel bad. You’re not allowed to feel bad for yourself when you’re not a self-compassionate person.”

Ghahraman returns to court two days later with a keffiyeh draped around her neck, a symbol of support for Palestine. She tells me she sought permission from members of the Palestinian community before wearing it.

“It feels really important to go, I’m going through my thing, but it is nowhere near as important or serious as the genocide. That is what I’m thinking of.”

The session is set for 1pm. The long hand on the clock in the hushed courtroom clicks 10, 20, 35 minutes past the hour before Judge Jelas finally emerges to deliver her judgement. In it, she states:“I consider [Ghahraman’s] mental health to be a feature contributing to the offending but not necessarily causative of it. Her mental health has made her more vulnerable to offend.” Ghahraman stands. She receives a conviction and is ordered to pay a fine of $1600 plus $260 in court costs.

Ghahraman hugs supporters and quickly disappears down the corridor. An hour later I catch her on the phone and ask how she felt about being denied a discharge without conviction.

“Obviously I was disappointed and it will affect my ability to move forward in lots of different ways. But I’ve always wanted to take full responsibility and if that’s what this means, that’s kind of ok. I’ll work harder to move forward.”

Does that mean her world is about to expand?

“No, I love my smaller world. It’s still not tiny. It's got all of my loved ones in it. It's got all of my communities in it. It’s got activism and that’s more than enough.”

There is laughter in the background and chattering voices.

“I better go because I’ve got people over.”