Episode 1: Up Against It

[All quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are from episode one of season four of the Delve podcast “Fractured” by Melanie Reid Investigates]

Melanie Reid, journalist, says, “When we start our investigations, we don’t know the answers, but we try to look into as many angles as possible” towards the end of the first episode of the fourth season of her Melanie Reid Investigates podcast.

Season 4 is called “Fractured”, which offers itself as an investigation into the child-abuse conviction of a mother who is also a migrant to Aotearoa New Zealand. (The pseudonym “Zita” is used for her, “Ravi” for her husband, and “Baby K” for their daughter.)

Many questions arose for me during the listening of the first two episodes, including the choice of the show to rely heavily on Joris de Bres to explain the backstory. It appeared to me a very curious and deliberate decision to have a person without official medical training describe details of the medical issues in the case. Below are some thoughts about this story-telling decision.

Joris de Bres is the primary narrative voice throughout the first episode. Melanie Reid introduces him near the top as the author of the email to her team that initiated the investigation, and she says of him, “As it happens, he’s held some pretty high-profile roles as a New Zealand public servant.” He himself then tells us that his recent background is as a human-rights commissioner and race-relations commissioner. Melanie says of Joris, “He’s already spent more than a year looking into the desperate situation of a young couple and their child,” and, later in the episode, immediately after repeating his former titles, that he “knows the story of ‘Zita’ and ‘Ravi’ inside and out.”

Joris de Bres’s background, compassion, and eloquence on this case are impressive and compelling, and the show uses extensive recordings of his voice to explain the history of the mother, her husband, their baby’s injuries, the medical case, some of the police investigation, and the couple’s current situation.

What the show chooses not to tell us is that Joris de Bres is also known as an advocate of at least the past seven years for parents who have experienced contact with New Zealand’s child-protection and -welfare government agency, Oranga Tamariki.

He has written multiple pieces for New Zealand news sites “The Spinoff” (https://thespinoff.co.nz/parenting/26-10-2017/how-a-bruise-saw-a-child-almost-taken-from-her-family; https://thespinoff.co.nz/parenting/31-07-2018/the-girl-with-the-broken-bones-goes-home-an-update ) and “Scoop” on cases where parents were apparently mistakenly suspected of child abuse, and in which he asserts his belief in their innocence. It appears that suspected child-abuse cases where the child suffers from the hereditary disease osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as “brittle bone disease”, are a particular cause of his:

“Joris de Bres says he was alarmed by the report of the baby being taken into care because he is himself the parent of two children with brittle bones and the grandparent of one. ‘It’s not uncommon for injuries due to brittle bones being confused with child abuse—many OI [Osteogenesis imperfecta] parents, including ourselves, have had that experience before our children were diagnosed.’” (“Call for New-Born Baby to Be Returned to Its Parents”, Joris de Bres press-release, Wednesday, 11 October 2017, 12:32 pm)

(https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1710/S00088/call-for-new-born-baby-to-be-returned-to-its-parents.htm?_gl=1*zaltmm*_ga*MTAxNTgxODY1OC4xNzI2NTQ2MjIx*_ga_GGVMM3MB82*MTcyNjU0NjIyMC4xLjAuMTcyNjU0NjIyMC42MC4wLjA)

This additional information on his background is relevant to the case of “Zita”, “Ravi” and “Baby K”, because “Zita” was convicted in a jury trial of deliberately causing (approximately) “39” broken bones in Baby K’s eight-week-old body in 2018.

The podcast “Fractured” positions Joris de Bres in the first episode as a disinterested human-rights advocate, one with the objectivity and authority to speak to what he clearly sees as the injustice of “this whole machinery of the state” that “seemed to all bear down” on “Zita” and “Ravi”. But he is not only a former human-rights commissioner, he also has the bias of personal experience in apparently being suspected of abuse of his own child(ren), before they were diagnosed with osteogenesis imperfecta, and, because of his public advocacy work on behalf of other parents similarly suspected (even with medical diagnoses), it appears that “Zita” and “Ravi” sought him out to financially aid, if not publicise, their predicament of impending deportation and permanent separation from Baby K.

On a now-closed “Give A Little” page created by him for the couple (“This campaign started on 21 Feb 2024 and ended on 21 Jun 2024.”), Joris de Bres writes, “I am a former Race Relations Commissioner and voluntary advocate for the whānau in their dealings with state agencies. They approached me for help when they were desperate at the end of 2022. We are making progress but there’s a long way to go.” (https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/help-a-young-indian-couple-get-justice)

It is natural to have bias, and I do not offer comment on the nature of the claims that Joris de Bres makes on behalf of the multiple parents that he supports in these broken-bone/suspected-child-abuse cases, including the parents of Baby K. So why doesn’t the show offer this background on Joris de Bres in addition to his titled work as a public servant?

The show says that it does not presume to know answers and does investigate all alternatives, but it does strongly appear to be following the angle that the initiator of their story, Joris de Bres, believes: that Baby K had some kind of undiagnosed medical issue, that “Zita” did not hurt her, that “Zita” was wrongfully convicted, that “shaken baby syndrome” is a “controversial medical diagnosis”, and that a grave and unconscionable human-rights violation is occurring with the impending permanent separation of the parents from the child.

This is how the show describes itself:

“DELVE presents the new in-depth podcast from Melanie Reid Investigates about a controversial medical diagnosis from a New Zealand hospital and the cascade of events that followed.
A baby taken, a mother jailed, a couple forced apart and facing deportation without their daughter.

Crushed by the weight of multiple government departments working in lockstep, what happens when the dream of a new country becomes an unimaginable nightmare?

In this new investigation, Melanie Reid and her team take the x-rays that were used to convict a young mother and put them before international experts, who tell us this case is just the tip of the iceberg of a factitious medical phenomenon leading to injustice around the globe.”

(https://shows.acast.com/the-boy-in-the-water/episodes/s4-welcome-to-season-1-of-fractured)

Melanie Reid has deserved reputation as a courageous, intrepid, thorough, and independent-minded journalist. Her compassion for the distress of this couple is palpable: in fact, the show is heavy on the devastation of the parents. Hearing more about the welfare of Baby K, especially since she has been in the custody of adults other than her parents for the past few years, is something I am keen to hear. In these paragraphs, what I see as deliberate omissions just skim the surface of the questions that came up during the first two episodes, which I hope to capture and hope will be answered in the rest of the season.