Journalist Alison Mau revealed that a former television boss once lunged at her in the back of a taxi and attempted to kiss her when she was 23. Mau, now 61 and co-founder of the sexual harm reporting platform Tika, shared the nearly 40-year-old incident while discussing her career and the need for new reporting avenues.
Journalist Alison Mau is opening up about an incident of workplace harassment from early in her television career, a memory she kept private for nearly four decades. Reflecting on her start in the industry at age 23, Mau recalled a night when a respected superior crossed professional boundaries.
I was 23, and it was my first television gig. And I adored my boss and we had a great working relationship. And one night when he’d drunk too much, he lunged across the backseat of a taxi and tried to kiss me. I went ‘WHAT?’ and reacted with horror. And it never happened again, but it was an example of inappropriate behaviour that these days you’d be off to HR, right? I never told anyone.
Alison Mau, co-founder of Tika
Mau noted that while the era was different in terms of how society understood the seriousness of such conduct, the experience was part of a broader pattern of harassment she witnessed in newsrooms, including what she described as blatant, over-the-top behavior during her time at Channel 9 in Melbourne.
Building Tika and the Journey of Publishing a Memoir
Now 61, Mau has channeled her personal experiences into advocacy, co-founding Tika, a free legal service and innovative digital platform designed for reporting sexual harm. The initiative gained momentum after receiving seed funding from the Clare Foundation in 2024, enabling Mau and co-founder and lawyer Zoë Lawton to work on the technology start-up full-time.
The platform’s development runs parallel to the success of Mau’s memoir, published last year, which became a surprise bestseller and earned a shortlist nomination for audiobook of the year. Mau noted that she received roughly 500 to 600 messages from individuals sharing their own stories over the past year. Rather than taking on others’ pain as empathy, Mau approaches survivors with compassion.
How the Tika Platform Processes Reports
Tika serves a dual purpose: providing an informal space for survivors to unburden themselves, and utilizing modern technology to track patterns of misconduct. Mau highlighted the reaction of people who encounter the system for the first time, noting an absolute mic drop moment when you explain how the large language model takes your report and starts looking for other people who’ve reported the same person
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While acknowledging that New Zealand police maintain supportive teams for criminal processes, Mau pointed out that historical and institutional handling of sexual harm has often fallen short, leaving a clear need for alternative reporting avenues like Tika.
