‘I used to be fooled by a serial love cheat who made me go on prime so I would not depart marks’

Liza, 64, was so busy with work and her two children from a previous marriage that she didn’t pursue Michael – rather he dipped in and out of her life with his passport in his pocket

There are a couple of truly memorable poured Liza a gin and tonic with lemon and ice and set about cooking fresh salmon on a portable barbecue. They then drank with champagne and chilled white wine while listening to jazz from a portable CD player. Another was when he took her on a trip to San Francisco and drove her over the Golden Gate Bridge in a top-down Ford Mustang convertible, blaring out Aretha Franklin and laughing all the way.

Michael was charming, cosmopolitan, educated and could be hugely complimentary; the couple had a lot of fun together and, to begin with, Liza really thought he might be ‘the one’. “He told me he’d been a private security detail on an estate in South Africa, spoke Spanish, had a pilot’s licence, a heavy-duty truck licence, was a trained firefighter and had been given some bravery award by the mayor of a precinct in Paris for the way he handled a fire in an apartment,” she recalls. “He said he’d volunteered his services in the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in 2009. “It seems so obvious now that he was attached, but at the time he convinced me that, as an international businessman, he was just so busy that he didn’t have time for a solid relationship,” the comedian, writer, and performer from Melbourne, Australia, says. Liza, 64, was so busy with work and her two children from a previous marriage that she didn’t pursue Michael; rather he dipped in and out of her life with his passport in his pocket as he returned from ‘working away’.

This pretence went on for 10 years. “There were so many red flags; his general unavailability and unwillingness to socialise with me. How we always had sex with me on top – so I wouldn’t leave marks on his back. “How he never used my name, he’d call me ‘Baby’ or ‘Darling’ so he wouldn’t slip up.

“Not letting me meet his friends (he said he didn’t have many) or get involved in his life in any way.

“If we ever did run into anyone he knew, he acted casually and introduced me as a “mate”,’ Liza explains. “I asked him straight out if there was anyone else when we started sleeping together. He made it clear there wasn’t.

“I asked him several times about his relationship with his so-called business partner, asking him if there was more to their relationship than business.

“He convinced me there wasn’t. I always wondered about her. And I was right. “Eventually I googled his “business partner” and it all fell into place. I thoroughly stalked her on the web. She was doing the same thing to me at the same time, as it happened. “I contacted her to tell her about my liaison with Michael.

“At that time, she didn’t want to communicate any further with me and that she was trying to work things out with him,” Liza explains. When Liza confronted Michael, he told her he had started a new relationship, but only from a previous time when they had separated. She broke it off immediately, but a year later the ‘business partner’ called her to tell her Michael had been cheating on them both – with countless other women. “She’d found out about me, thought I was the only one, then eventually she started digging deeper and discovered all his other lovers,” she says. She met with them where possible, piecing together the whole sorry story.

She had no true idea about how many others there actually were – she’d worked out there were at least two or three in this city, two elsewhere in Australia, and a couple overseas throughout those 10 years. “I invited her round and you can imagine what an epic girls’-night-in that was. We drank bottles of wine, swapped notes and realised that practically everything he’d said was utter bull.

“He’d been living with her when Black Saturday happened. He never went anywhere near the bush fires. I told her how excited I’d been by the trip to San Francisco, how it had been one of the great thrills of my life. “She leaned towards me and said gently: “We’ve all been to San Francisco.” It was comedy gold’. Liza is now single, happy on her own and loving life and looks back on the relationship philosophically. “Michael was a skilled manipulator and a classic narcissist – this is what he does to women.

“He gets off conning smart, independent feminists. It’s a sport.

“To him, women are a resource. His betrayal of me wasn’t personal. “The last time I saw him he told me that I should find myself a relationship with someone cos I’d be ‘really good at it’… I reckon that if I’d killed him at that moment, any jury hearing the whole story would have immediately acquitted me.

“I’m so glad I found out about him when I did. It was a lucky escape,” she adds.

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