by Keiran McGee
In this special essay, Keiran McGee—Juanita Nielsen’s relative and co-producer of the only family-approved project about her life—powerfully questions the manner in which her memory has been exploited and twisted by the media.
Juanita—journalist, businesswoman, and activist in Sydney’s Kings Cross—disappeared after walking into the Carousel Cabaret. A coroner later found she was likely murdered, yet no one was ever charged. Since then, her legacy has been commodified through books, art, podcasts, TV series, and documentaries—and was even fictionalised in Donald Crombie’s 1981 feature film The Killing of Angel Street.
Keiran dismantles the media’s long-standing role in shaping Juanita’s story, exposing a cycle of misogyny and profiteering that’s only deepening in the age of AI.
This essay asks: how do we tell stories of loss—without causing further harm?
Juanita Nielsen’s story isn’t a mystery – it’s a mirror. For 50 years, the Australian media’s obsession with her has exposed a brutal truth: murdered women are treated as spectacle. But her story is more than one woman’s tragedy – it exposes the systems that profit from the deaths of women and the escalating harm.
The late Juanita Nielsen was a citizen journalist, a political agitator, a businesswoman. In her newspaper NOW, she wrote the copy, modeled the clothes, and shaped her own image with unapologetic control. She was vain, generous, fiercely independent—until her disappearance in 1975. From that moment, the media stole her story, stripped her identity, and turned her death into a commodity.
From the start they branded her an “heiress”. That word rankles. “Heiress” creates distance, implying unearned privilege and detachment. It framed her as a caricature, not a victim. Soon, the media spun a lurid fantasy: a frivolous woman, her choice to attend a meeting at the Carousel Cabaret painted as reckless. This wasn’t reporting – it was myth-making.
For half a century, journalists, filmmakers, and writers have hijacked Juanita’s image to churn out profitable tales – fictionalised, violent, and cherry picked evidence. One journalist, a bubble of spit on his lip, mimed her murder with a punching gesture. Another gleefully spun an hour-long fantasy of her torture, based on nothing but gossip. This is murder porn. It erases her humanity. And it never stops.
Juanita Nielsen’s case is not unique. The tropes that dehumanised her – voyeurism, victim-blaming, and a morbid fixation on violence – are embedded in how the media covers murdered women in Australia. According to the RED HEART Campaign, 103 women were killed in Australia in 2024; an average of two women killed per week. Yet their deaths are framed as isolated tragedies. This isn’t a string of one-offs. It’s a national emergency, flattened into clickbait and sold as entertainment.
These failures are even more acute for marginalised groups, such as First Nations women. Their stories are routinely erased, reduced to stereotypes, or left untold. According to the National Homicide Monitoring Program, 476 First Nations women were killed between 1989 and 2023 in cases that rarely make headlines.
The pattern runs deep. In 1973, just 18 months before Juanita disappeared, Esther George (also known as Blaskowski), a First Nations woman from Doomadgee Mission, died in a suspicious house fire on Victoria Street in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Her death was met with silence. Juanita was one of the few who wrote about it. In NOW, she condemned the description of the victims as “derelicts” and demanded better.
Esther’s case was forgotten. Juanita’s was sensationalised. One erased. The other exploited.
The repercussions are immense. Globally, less than 40% of women who experience violence seek any help, and fewer than 10% seek help from formal institutions. Among adolescent girls who have experienced forced sex, only 1% have ever sought professional help. Stigma and shame silence survivors, often fatally: sexual violence frequently precedes femicide, yet it remains underreported.
The “good victim/bad victim” binary – implying women invite violence by their actions, location, or trust in others – misrepresents the reality of gender-based violence and obscures the broader epidemic, with over 85,000 women and girls intentionally killed worldwide in 2023.
Journalists claim they seek “Justice for Juanita.” But what does that mean when her killers are dead, and prosecution is impossible? Finding her remains might bring peace to members of our family, but for outsiders, obsessing over her death’s mechanics is morbid voyeurism dressed as altruism. It’s an excuse to tell salacious stories about a murdered woman.
Others claim to honour her. “She gave her life to save Kings Cross,” they say. But Juanita didn’t go to the Carousel Cabaret to die a martyr. She went to discuss advertising, reluctantly, because she needed the revenue. She didn’t give her life. She was murdered. And suggesting otherwise amounts to victim blaming under the guise of reverence.
This speculation, martyrdom, and exploitation has one goal: to build a profitable story from her death. I’ve watched it my entire life.
When I finally had the opportunity to tell her story, through the ABC’s Juanita: A Family Mystery and Unravel: Juanita – the only projects my family ever consented to – I hoped to restore her humanity. Instead, I uncovered a tangled mess of misogyny, ego, and institutional neglect, like a Rat King feeding on itself.
And it became the worst betrayal.
The ABC included a man’s graphic, unverified account of Juanita’s murder, despite my objections as creator, co-producer, and narrator, and despite my evidence proving his description wrong. I was coerced into narrating this segment and participating in publicity while undergoing cancer treatment. Sensationalism was prioritised over everything else. After release, other journalists easily debunked many of the man’s claims. The ABC sheepishly and without apology removed the content. But the damage was done.
To mitigate the fallout, the ABC promised a recut…but even that unravelled. When I tried to withdraw, they threatened to use footage of me regardless. Again, while undergoing cancer treatment, I was pressured to approve a script I believed included false and potentially defamatory claims. It revealed a deeper pattern of my experience with the ABC: dismissing good-faith objections that challenged their self-protective control over the narrative. What began as a promise to restore Juanita’s voice became another act of silencing—an extension of the same exploitation that had defined this project.
The ABC still owns footage of me, my family, and Juanita. They refuse to remove it. With AI’s rise, that refusal feels even more chilling. Deepfakes. Voice clones. AI-generated murder fantasies. They could exploit Juanita’s story all over again…and no one could stop them.
AI is a new weapon in the war on murdered women’s dignity. It doesn’t fix media’s failures – it scales them. Trained on decades of biased reporting, AI absorbs and amplifies stories that sensationalise women’s deaths.
This automation fuels victim-blaming at speed, churning out headlines and summaries that fixate on women’s clothing or behaviour rather than systemic violence. True crime podcasts and YouTube summaries dominate online, with AI tools increasingly driving their production. For example, in 2025, the now-defunct YouTube channel True Crime Case Files amassed nearly two million views on a single AI-generated video, its creator calling the monetisation of hypersexualised, victim-blaming stories a “gold rush”. Without oversight, AI distorts facts, numbs the audience to violence, and erases context.
In theory, AI could uncover underreported cases, analysing data to highlight systemic gaps and bring attention to underrepresented voices, but only if guided by ethics, not profit. Instead, media’s current trajectory puts exploitation on autopilot.
Media organisations, rushing to appear ethical amid AI’s rise, trumpet safeguards like the ABC’s AI Principles, promising accuracy, accountability, and compliance with Editorial Policies. Yet my experience exposes their failings. The ABC sidestepped these guidelines with a release form that let the man fact-check his own story and tailored scripts to his demands. This betrayal reveals how even “well-meaning” institutions, without rigorous checks, risk compromising their own standards.
Governments and media outlets must act now: establish independent oversight bodies, adopt strict ethical standards for AI, ban unverified content, prioritise victim dignity, and elevate marginalised voices. Without reform, AI will automate decades of harm, turning stories like Juanita’s into endless clickbait. This isn’t progress, it’s industrialised abuse.
Juanita Nielsen was a passionate citizen journalist who believed in the power of truth to create meaningful change in her community. Yet, the ABC – an institution that claims to uphold journalistic integrity – reduced her legacy to sensationalism, exploiting her story rather than respecting her values. This irreversible betrayal of her memory stands as a stark reminder of the harm unethical media practices inflict…not just on individuals and families, but on society as a whole.
Finally, July marked 50 years since Juanita’s disappearance. It is also 50 years of the Australian media exploiting a murdered woman for profit. It is time to stop.
Let Juanita Rest in Peace.
This article was originally published here.
