Authors note: The intention of this article is to ensure the safety of the missing person, and raise awareness that our police, law and media are hamstrung to do the best by victims and vulnerable people. They cannot do this when ideology takes preference over facts.

When a person goes missing in New Zealand, we rely on two institutions above all others to tell us the truth: the police, and the press.

This week, both failed.

A man has gone missing in Wellington. The police are calling him a woman. The media are calling him a woman. And under the laws that a small, government-funded activist network lobbied into existence, they are both legally compelled to do so.

This is not a story about one missing person. This is a story about what happens when the agency tasked with protecting every New Zealander becomes an activist agency protecting an untruth.

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The appeal

Wellington Police issued a missing persons appeal for “Amber Bohanna,” described as a woman from Karori. The NZ Herald published it without question, using she/her pronouns throughout.

Amber Bohanna is a male.

His sex is directly relevant to a public safety alert. Physical description, risk profile, likely social environments - all shaped by reality. Replacing that with a legal fiction does not protect the missing person. It protects an ideology. And it potentially hampers the ability of the public to assist in finding him.

The police are not doing this out of malice. They are doing it because the law now demands it, the institutional culture enforces it, and anyone who departs from the script risks complaint, investigation, or worse. The Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act 2022 and the amended Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Act 2021 have together created a legal environment in which the police - New Zealand’s primary public safety agency - cannot accurately describe a male in a missing persons bulletin without potential legal and political exposure.

That is the chilling, concrete, real-world consequence of laws built not on public need, but on activist lobbying. And the man at the centre of this case was part of that lobby.

Amber Bohanna’s InsideOut connection

According to InsideOut Kōaro’s own 2019/20 Annual Report, Amber Bohanna served as Treasurer on the Board of Trustees of InsideOut - one of New Zealand’s most politically influential transgender lobby organisations, operating inside schools and alongside government.

In his own Treasurer’s Reflection in that report, he named InsideOut’s funders: the Ministry of Youth Development, COGS, CAYAD, Lotteries Commission, and the Wellington City Council. Public money. Flowing to an organisation running school workshops, co-producing resources for health professionals, and lobbying Parliament for the very laws now protecting his legal identity in a police bulletin.

InsideOut celebrated when the Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill passed its first reading in August 2021. Introduced 29 July 2021, passed in six months, Royal Assent 17 February 2022. Minimal public debate. Years of groundwork by activists, culminating in legislation rushed through under the previous Labour government.

Amber Bohanna was part of the governance structure of the organisation that helped make that happen, he oversaw the books that funded the activism.

The network: InsideOut, Gender Minorities Aotearoa, and the state

During Bohanna’s tenure as Treasurer, InsideOut co-produced a guide titled Supporting Aotearoa’s Rainbow People: A Practical Guide for Mental Health Professionals in direct collaboration with Gender Minorities Aotearoa (GMA), RainbowYOUTH, and a Victoria University researcher. Hosted at rainbowmentalhealth.nz, this resource was distributed to counsellors and therapists nationwide - pre-emptively reshaping clinical culture to demand gender affirmation before the Conversion Practices Act legally mandated that approach.

The therapy sector was captured before the law arrived. The law then locked that capture in permanently.

In 2024, GMA published a document titled Anti-Transgender Extremism - funded by the New Zealand government’s Community Matters Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism Fund. The same counter-terrorism infrastructure built to prevent radicalisation was directed at funding a political document by a lobby group based at 130 Riddiford Street, Newtown, Wellington.

I investigated and podcasted on this document at length. You can check out my full exposé here, including interview on The Platform with Sean Plunket:

They have named YOU as the extremist

The GMA Anti-Transgender Extremism guide deserves your full attention, because it reveals the strategy plainly.

The document classifies the following as markers of extremism:

• Using the phrases “think of the children”, “protecting women”, or “gender ideology” - described as dangerous coded language

• Carrying out “transphobic research, academia, policy writing, or influencing how society is run in other non-illegal ways”

• Advocating restrictions on puberty blockers for children

• Stating there are two sexes

Most strikingly, it states that “covert” anti-trans extremists - those who write, research, publish, and advocate - are more dangerous than those who commit physical violence, because they are more likely to “recruit others, influence society, and undermine human rights protections.”

My investigative journalism. A parent at a school board meeting. A counsellor who suggests a distressed teenager explore their feelings before pursuing irreversible medical intervention. All of it - classified, in a taxpayer-funded counter-terrorism document, as a form of extremism more dangerous than physical violence.

This is not a fringe pamphlet. It is a deliberate architecture of pre-emptive censorship. By labelling dissent as extremism before debate can occur, the lobby removes the possibility of honest public conversation. It is a strategy designed by people who know they cannot win on the evidence.

And it was produced by the same organisation that collaborated with the group whose Treasurer is now the subject of a police missing persons appeal - a police appeal that, thanks to their laws, cannot state his sex.

What we believe - and why truth is not hate

I want to say this plainly, because the entire strategy of this lobby depends on misrepresenting it.

Those of us who advocate for repealing the Conversion Practices Act and correcting the BDMR do not hate trans-identifying people. We do not want them to suffer. We do not want them to come to harm.

We want them to be told the truth - because without truth, there is no genuine care. We want them to get the help they need and see them as positively contributing members of society.

The evidence is consistent: People who identify as ‘transgender’ carry significantly elevated rates of co-occurring mental health conditions - depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder, trauma, and dissociation. These are clinically significant. They are not resolved by changing a name on a birth certificate or compelling everyone around a person to adopt a fiction. They require honest, compassionate, exploratory care - the very kind the Conversion Practices Act now makes legally dangerous to provide.

When society legislates around a distressed person’s delusion rather than addressing its roots, it does not heal them. It builds an entire legal and social infrastructure around their pain and calls it progress. It punishes anyone - a parent, a teacher, a journalist, a counsellor who gently tells the truth.

A society that legislates lies does not become more compassionate. It becomes more brittle, more dishonest, and ultimately more dangerous - most of all for the people it claims to protect.

I explored this at length in Defining Women Without Fixing the Problem. The crisis in how we define and protect women is real. But we will never fix it by first agreeing to pretend men are women.

When the Police protect a fiction, everyone is less safe

Return to the missing persons case.

A male is missing. The police cannot accurately describe him. The media will not. The public - who might recognise him - are being given a description shaped by ideology rather than reality.

The system these activists built is now working against the goal of finding a vulnerable person. That is not a theoretical consequence of bad law. That is the real-world, immediate, human cost of institutional capture.

The police are not villains here. They are trapped - by law, by culture, and by the fear of what happens if they depart from approved language. That is precisely why these laws must be repealed. Not only because they corrupt public discourse, and not only because they silence journalists and counsellors and parents. But because they have now demonstrably compromised the ability of New Zealand’s primary safety agency to do its job.

I hope Amber Bohanna is found safely. I hope he receives the genuine care and support that his situation clearly calls for.

But his safe return does not close this story. This story closes when the laws that erased reality from a police alert are repealed. When the network of publicly funded organisations that built those laws - InsideOut, Gender Minorities Aotearoa, and their government backers - are held publicly accountable. And when New Zealand’s police can once again do what we ask of them above everything else:

Tell the truth.

Penny Marie

Penny Marie is a New Zealand-based advocate for sex-based rights and strong families. She formed Let Kids Be Kids in 2023. Penny is currently overseas working with international counterparts on this very topic, please follow, comment, share and support her.

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I recently met Dr. Joseph Chrysostom, a surgically trained frontline doctor working in accident and emergency in Wales. What he shared is the kind of conversation that powerful institutions would prefer never happened.

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Dr. Chrysostom has spent the last two years investigating the “gender surgeries” being performed on young people across the UK. He has written to health secretaries, to the DHSC, to NHS England, and to his own health board. The response? Silence, deflection, and an utter refusal to take responsibility.

What the surgeries actually are

Dr. Chrysostom is direct and clinical:

• Vaginoplasty, he explains, does not create a vagina. It creates an open surgical wound in the perineum with no anatomical, physiological, biochemical, or microbiological resemblance to a natural vagina.

• Phalloplasty similarly produces a skin and fat flap mound - not a penis. Both surgeries carry serious complication risks that can cause lifelong morbidity.

This surgeon’s conclusion? These procedures are a medical deception - and if they are funded by taxpayer money, he believes a fraud investigation is warranted.

Hidden from Wales, hidden from parents

One of the most disturbing details Dr. Chrysostom reveals is the deliberate geography of these surgeries. Welsh patients are referred by gender clinic staff - who hold no fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons - to surgeons in London. He believes this is no accident. If these operations were performed locally, he says, people would be outraged.

The same pattern of concealment, he argues, runs through the schools. Relationship and sex education lessons are shaping young minds in ways parents cannot see, cannot scrutinise, and are rarely informed about. You cannot obtain meaningful informed consent, he says, from someone indoctrinated since childhood.

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‘Gender surgeries’ are promoted to New Zealand children

Why is Dr Chrysostom’s voice so important to New Zealand families? Because ‘gender surgeries’ are an end result of the current Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act 2022 - a one-way funnel into irreversible genital mutilation and high risk of complications.

• As recently as last month, an international film festival promoted ‘gender surgery’ to school children. Let Kids Be Kids contacted the film censorship authorities with our concerns but they were brushed aside.

• Gender clinics are dotted around NZ. This is where school children are being referred for social and surgical ‘gender’ adjustment.

Watch the full interview

This is the kind of testimony that you’ll never see in the mainstream media. Dr. Chrysostom is a brave professional putting his name and career on the line because he believes children deserve better.

Watch the full interview now on FrontlineXN - and share it widely. These are the voices that need to be heard.

If this matters to you, please forward this post, share on social media, and help us amplify the doctors who are speaking the truth.

If you have a story to share with me, please reach out via Let Kids Be Kids.

Penny Marie

Penny Marie is a New Zealand-based independent journalist, researcher and advocate for sex-based rights. She is the founder of Let Kids Be Kids.

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I want to be honest with you about something: This piece is going to frustrate some people who consider themselves aligned with my views.

NZ First is the only party in parliament with the courage to even attempt this conversation. Winston Peters and his caucus have consistently stood in rooms where others have gone quiet, and that matters. I have respect for them. I have gratitude for them. I addressed the NZ First Convention on 6 September 2025, and I said to them directly what I am about to say to you. So this is not an attack from the outside. This is what I told them and their members - because I believe they deserve honesty more than they need cheerleading.

The Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill, introduced by NZ First MP Jenny Marcroft and now drawn from the ballot, would insert new sections 13A and 13B into the Legislation Act 2019, defining “woman” as “an adult human biological female” and “man” as “an adult human biological male.” Public polling shows majority support. The intent is genuinely good. But a careful reading of where gender ideology actually entered New Zealand law - and how - tells me this bill addresses the wrong problem.

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The real problem is not the word “woman.” It is the word “sex.”

The activist overreach that sex-based rights advocates have documented over the past decade does not flow from any ambiguity in how legislation defines “woman.” It flows from the Human Rights Commission’s interpretation of “sex” - a word that appears in section 21 of the Human Rights Act 1993 as a prohibited ground of discrimination, but which is not defined in that Act. The HRC has, for years, taken the position that gender identity and expression fall within the scope of “sex” as a prohibited ground. That interpretation is embedded in its guidance, its communications, and its complaint-handling.

The bill does not define “sex.” It does not amend the Human Rights Act. It does not constrain the HRC’s interpretation of sex in any enforceable way. A defined “woman” in the Legislation Act does not tell the Commission - or any tribunal - what “sex” means in the Act the Commission actually administers. The lever that matters has not been touched.

There is a second problem, and it cuts in the other direction

Both new sections open with the phrase “regardless of gender identity.” That phrase introduces “gender identity” as a named legal concept into the Legislation Act for the first time.

Currently, it has no legislative footprint there. This bill would give it one. For those of us who argue that gender identity is a contested philosophical construct that should not appear in statute at all - this is not a small concession. Naming a concept in law, even to override it, is still naming it. That is the opposite of the direction we have been calling for.

What I said to NZ First leadership and party members

At the NZ First Convention I said this:

The Marcroft bill is, by that measure, exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit I was describing. It adjusts a definition without touching the legislative infrastructure through which gender ideology was actually introduced into New Zealand law.

Watch the speech I gave at the NZ First Convention in 2025

That infrastructure is specific and traceable.

• The Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act 2022 compels affirmation-only responses to gender-confused children and puts counsellors, parents, and religious communities at legal risk if they explore root causes or alternative frameworks.

• The Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Act 2021 introduced a self-identification process that allows individuals to change the sex recorded on their birth certificate through a statutory declaration alone - no medical requirement - a mechanism that has been used to advance the narrative that legal sex and biological sex are legally separable concepts.

Neither of these Acts is touched by the NZ First bill.

I asked NZ First leadership directly at the convention

They heard the full analysis that day:

• The Yogyakarta Principles pipeline

• The Human Rights Commission’s activist role

• The downstream effects on school policy

• And a specific list of entities I put forward for investigation:

  • All DEI policy and legislation

  • Trans and rainbow charity funding

  • Media

  • The Human Rights Commission

  • The Ministry of Education

  • The Ministry of Health.

A members’ bill defining “woman” in the Legislation Act does not trigger any of those investigations. It does not repeal the Acts that gave gender ideology its statutory footing - the two Acts named in this article.

I used a metaphor in my address that I still think is right.

The Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill is not the climb. It is a definitional patch applied to the ambulance.

The climb - the actual legislative correction New Zealand - requires:

1. The repeal of the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act 2022, which chills counsellor and parental freedom to explore anything other than gender affirmation with gender-confused children.

2. And the correction of the self-identification provisions in the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Act 2021, which severed the legal connection between recorded sex and biological sex.

Until those Acts are addressed, a new definition of “woman” in the Legislation Act is a footnote to a much larger failure.

I said this to NZ First. I’m saying it to you now. I do not think less of them for the attempt. But I will not pretend this is the fix when I know - and they surely know - that it isn’t.

Penny Marie

Penny Marie is a New Zealand-based advocate for sex-based rights and spoke at the NZ First Convention on 6 September 2025.

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We don’t have a “First Lady.” So why does the media keep saying we do?

Before we get to the heart of the matter I really want to discuss, there’s something that needs to be said about how Amanda Luxon is being portrayed, weirdly, as a ‘First Lady’.

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We never have. We currently operate under a Westminster-based system of parliamentary democracy - the same tradition as Britain, Canada, and Australia - where the Prime Minister’s spouse holds no official role, no official title, no salary, and no formal duties. This is not a technicality. It is a fundamental feature of how our system of government is designed. The PM’s partner is a private citizen.

Yet since November 2023, the New Zealand media has repeatedly and consistently referred to Amanda Luxon as our “First Lady.” NZ Herald used it. RNZ used it. Woman Magazine used it. The Petra Bagust podcast used it. It appears in NZ Herald coverage. It has been casually adopted across mainstream media as though it is simply accurate - as though it describes something real.

It doesn’t. It describes something American.

“First Lady” is a term of American political culture, attached to an American system of government where a directly elected President and their spouse occupy a unique constitutional and ceremonial position.

Here is what makes this remarkable. The same mainstream New Zealand media that has spent years portraying Donald Trump and American political culture as something alien, dangerous, and to be viewed with suspicion - that media has quietly imported one of America’s most loaded political constructs and applied it to the wife of a National Party Prime Minister facing collapsing poll numbers.

They did not do this for Bronagh Key. John Key was one of New Zealand’s most popular Prime Ministers, serving three full terms from 2008 to 2016. Bronagh maintained a private life throughout. The media did not call her “First Lady.” They did not do it for Mary English. They did not seriously sustain it for Clarke Gayford, Jacinda Ardern’s partner - and Ardern was a media-curated global media phenomenon.

The label arrives with Amanda Luxon. Consistently. Across outlets. At the precise moment a political strategy requires her to be visible.

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A title with no constitutional basis, borrowed from a political culture the same media asks us to distrust, applied selectively and suddenly to the wife of a PM whose approval rating is underwater.

That is not journalism. That is framing. And framing, as you’ll see in everything that follows, is exactly what this story is about.

The ‘Amanda’ Strategy

Since Chris Luxon became PM in November 2023, Amanda - a self-described introvert who “typically stays out of the spotlight” - has made a series of carefully timed media appearances. Every single one has arrived when his numbers needed rescuing, and every single one has been on soft-format platforms, with female-skewing audiences, doing political work that Chris cannot do for himself.

The timeline

I tracked the key media appearances of Amanda Luxon since the November 2023 Election which installed her husband Christopher Luxon as the New Zealand Prime Minister…

Early 2024 - Woman Magazine profile

First major interview as PM’s wife. Warm, personal, described as “unscripted.” Sets up the relatable Amanda brand.

Mid 2024 - Paula Bennett’s podcast on NZ Herald

Luxon’s preferred PM rating sitting around 23-25% and sliding. Amanda appears for a 43-minute “intimate chat” about their 30-year marriage, life in the public eye, and what’s it’s really like at the top. Also to note: The YouTube has just 51 views two years later, 0 likes.

October 2024 - “A Soggy Saturday in Samoa with NZ’s First Lady” NZ Herald

A 1News poll taken just two weeks before this article had Luxon dropping three points to 25% as preferred PM, with voters already “restless about the economy.” Rather than address that directly, the NZ Herald runs a soft profile of Amanda alongside Chris at CHOGM in Apia - projecting partnership and stability while the numbers slide. No policy. No politics. Just the reassuring image of a grounded couple on the world stage.

January 2025 - RNZ Summer Times “Roadie to Waiheke”

This is the most strategically sophisticated entry on the list, and the one that gets the least attention. Parliament is in summer recess. Political coverage is thin. RNZ’s Summer Times reaches a broader, more female audience than the press gallery. And the piece lands at the precise moment Luxon’s “out of touch” problem is fully established - 51% of New Zealanders polled by 1News already held that view, cost of living is the dominant political issue, and his “$60 a week on groceries” gaffe from the election campaign is still radioactive.

So what does Amanda deliver? A working-class Christchurch backstory - grocery shop daughter, state school, ham-slicing, petrol-pumping. A story about doing electrical work in her backyard. An anecdote about a stranger mistaking her for a cleaner outside Parliament and offering her a job. And she also stated that her preferred roadie mate would be Melinda Gates.

Everything Chris polls badly on - relatability, groundedness, ordinariness - she quietly provides, on the public broadcaster, in a lifestyle slot, while he’s nowhere near the story.

It’s reputation management dressed as a roadie playlist.

April 2025 - Grey Areas with Petra Bagust (92 minutes)

Luxon’s approval rating touted as ‘plumbing new depths’ in March 2025, trending toward the worst of his tenure. Amanda does nearly an hour and a half on “public scrutiny,” personality types, and - critically - how differently she and Chris see the world.

Paddy Gower at Stuff runs a glowing reaction piece calling her “the answer to our divided society.” The political benefit to Chris is enormous and costs him nothing. Watch Gower’s reaction here… a story about a story…

March 6, 2026 - National crashes to 28.4%.

Worst result since Simon Bridges was rolled in 2020. Leadership speculation reaches fever pitch. Finance Minister Nicola Willis publicly says “I am not happy with that number.” Luxon tells media his leadership is “totally solid” - the language of a rattled man.

April 1, 2026 - The Amanda Luxon Dom Harvey podcast drops

Two hours and three minutes. Amanda directly addresses “the negative headlines, the polls, the rumours.” She talks about kitchen dance parties and memes. She calls Chris the love of her life.

She humanises a man that 52% of voters disapprove of - just 25 days after the worst poll of his prime ministership.

Notice the framing, not the just picture in the frame

It gets attributed to Mark Twain all over the internet. Twain never said it. The real lineage goes back to Thomas Jefferson - author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president - who in 1807 wrote:

Even the quote warning you about misinformation gets misinformed. That’s how deep this goes.

This year - pre-election in New Zealand, and in a world being reshaped by forces most people can’t see - slow down. Ask who MADE this story. Ask WHY NOW. Ask what it’s designed to make you feel, and whose interests that feeling serves. The frame around the picture matters more than the picture itself.

Be the person in the room who sees the frame, not just the picture inside it.

I talked about media framing recently on RCR’s Political Panel, check out the episode here.

PS - it’s worth watching the short 2016 Fox News analysis of Denzel’s reason for saying this… and the level of trust in the US media at that time!…

Penny Marie

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This week Jamie Dally and I sat down with former National MP, NewZeal founder and freshly‑minted NZ First candidate Alfred Ngaro – a man who has quietly re‑entered the political arena at one of the most volatile moments in recent history.

In Winston Peters’ State of the Nation event last weekend, Alfred was never formally introduced from the podium. He s…

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The CTV Families Group has welcomed the Government’s decision to appoint a retired Supreme Court judge to lead an independent inquiry into the Tauranga landslides, calling it an important test of whether New Zealand has learned from past failures after major loss‑of‑life events.

“Full independence, transparency, and rigour”

For fifteen years, advocate Dav…

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I noticed an ad on Facebook today. It struck me that the woman was promoting a health product, wearing a hospital staff uniform, standing outside Auckland Hospital, saying she works for Auckland District Health Board (DHB).

Please share this with friends who may be susceptible to being sucked into fake ads and scams!

I sent it to a medical friend and ques…

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At the 2026 Tauranga Business Awards, Bay of Plenty defence‑tech company SYOS was crowned Business of the Year and hailed as proof our region now plays on the world stage of innovation and export growth.

Look more closely and an uncomfortable reality emerges: the flagship achievement we’re applauding is supplying “mission‑ready, combat proven” drones int…

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When people joke that the Amish never had a Covid pandemic because they don’t have television, they’re raising something significant. If you turned off your screens, was there even a pandemic?

Maybe there wasn’t… if you missed the 1pm liturgies, the Curve Crusher t‑shirts, the d…

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Stuff’s Quarantine Nation podcast sells itself as sober reflection on the Covid years. Read through the lens of Edward Bernays, it looks more like a second wave of propaganda: regret without reversal, fear and heroism without accountability, and a tightly controlled story about what we’re allowed to question.

‘Quarantine Nation’ trailer

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Over the last month Let Kids Be Kids (LKBK) has published their findings about SchoolDocs, the company who provides automated school policies to 90%* of schools.

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Summary of recent findings

• SchoolDocs policies are templated for all schools. Boards can make amendments specific to their school. Boards are responsible for the policies set in schools, and tho…

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New Zealanders are being told that “gender equality” is about helping women – but when you read the fine print of the frameworks our institutions have signed up to, a very different story emerges.

Women's Empowerment Principles Report

At the heart of this shift is a quiet but rad…

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The United States today handed over a complete water quality testing system to the Cook Islands Ministry of Health, responding to a specific need identified during a 2025 diplomatic visit when officials explained they possessed the expertise but lacked the right equipment to apply it.

“When Cook Islands officials told us they had the training but lacked …

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France’s decision to open two Epstein‑linked probes marks the first serious attempt by a major European state to map the French dimensions of his network, from alleged trafficking to elite financial ties.

Penny Marie tracks power, money and influence across NZ and the wider West. Subscribe for deep dives others don’t have time to report.

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France’s two Epst…

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers remarks to the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on February 14, 2026.

• This post is also available to share on X.

We gather here today as members of a historic alliance, an alliance that saved and changed the world. You know, when this [Munich Security] conference began in 1963, it was in a nation, actu…

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Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t just a degenerate with a private jet – he was a node in a global financial and intelligence system that shifts wealth and power upwards. That same architecture runs straight through Wellington, and it helps explain why ordinary New Zealanders are getting poorer while the system keeps protecting its own.

Watch our exposé exclusively…

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Watching Secretary of State Marco Rubio step onto the Munich Security Conference stage this weekend, you could feel the room bracing for a Washington hawk. Instead, what Europe got was something closer to an intervention: a call to rebuild Western strength, yes, but anchored in sovereignty, borders, culture and an end to permanent war as a way of life.

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This case targets the Medicines (Restriction on Prescribing Gonadotropin‑releasing Hormone Analogues) Amendment Regulations 2025, which were drafted to block new prescriptions of puberty blockers for children and adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria or gender incongruence.

The regulations were due to come into force on 19 December but have been e…

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On Feb 10 2026, “A coroner ruled that Highlanders and Māori All Blacks player Connor Garden-Bachop, a 25-year-old father of young twin girls, died of natural causes. Garden-Bachop died overnight on June 16, 2024” - NZ Herald.

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When silence hurts

In the coroner’s report released today, Connor’s sudden death in June 2024 is attributed to a mildly dilated heart causing an abnormal rhythm in his sleep, with no drugs, alcohol, or injuries involved and no suspicious circumstances. On paper, the case is now closed; a loving father of twin girls gone at 25, his passing officially framed as “natural causes.”

But for many in the rugby community, including those who loved Connor and Sean Wainui before him, that term does not quiet the deeper unease. The pattern they see - young, elite athletes dying suddenly - collides with a global backdrop where reports and public anxiety about “sudden deaths” among fit young people have sharpened since the rollout of Covid‑19 vaccination. Even as major cardiac and public‑health bodies say they do not see clear evidence of a spike in athlete cardiac deaths linked to vaccination, the suspicion and grief at ground level have not gone away.

It is into this contested space that Shane’s voice still speaks.

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Shane Christie’s unfinished fight

Before his own death, Shane used his voice to push for honesty about risk, safety, and the human cost of professional rugby. In his interview, he spoke softly but firmly about Sean Wainui’s car‑crash death, about Connor’s sudden passing, and about the way vaccination timelines and mandates were handled inside the game.

He did not claim to have all the answers, and he did not present himself as ‘anti‑vaccine’; he’d had three shots. He did, however, insist on something that now feels prophetic: that families deserve to know that every possible factor has been properly examined - including medical interventions mandated or strongly pressured by employers and the state.

Rugby and CTE brain-injuries

Shane was also passionate about pushing for a report to be released by NZRU because he believed its contents could keep players safer from concussion related injuries. In that piece, as in this conversation, Shane emerges not as a crusader looking for a fight, but as a man impacted by a system who isn’t putting player safety first. Shane believed in the power of truth to protect our future generations, and the integrity of the sport he loved.

Rugby, risk, and coercion

He recalled being in managed isolation and effectively told he could not leave without taking an injection he did not feel informed about. The message was clear: comply, or stay locked away indefinitely. Around him, other players heard the same thing in different words - contracts that never mentioned mandatory medical procedures suddenly interpreted as if they did, livelihoods and careers on the line if they hesitated.

What happened to informed consent?

The central concern in Shane’s story is not a simple causation claim between any particular vaccine and any particular death. It is the erosion of informed consent: the lack of transparent risk assessment before 2021, the reliance on official assurances later challenged by independent experts, and the sense that when things go wrong, those at the top are quicker to protect reputations than to ask uncomfortable questions.

Global patterns, local pain

Internationally, sporting bodies and cardiology experts have pushed back hard on the idea that there has been a proven surge in vaccine‑related sudden deaths among young athletes. Large‑scale reviews of cardiac arrests and death rates in this age group have not shown the kind of spike that social media narratives suggest, and studies looking at death certificates within defined time windows after vaccination have not found clear evidence of a causal link.

Yet statistics, however carefully collected, do not erase the lived reality of families who have buried healthy young people, or of teammates who go to sleep wondering if the same thing could happen to them. Coroner Mary‑Anne Borrowdale has now formally recorded Connor’s death as a sudden cardiac event in the context of a mildly dilated heart, a finding echoed by multiple outlets from RNZ to international wire services.

For some, that will bring closure; for others, it will deepen the sense that something doesn’t add up.

Unanswered questions on Covid19

Will the Royal Commission Inquiry into Covid19: Lessons Learned, shed any light? Here is a piece from an in-depth chat with Lynda Wharton from The Health Forum NZ on the NZ Government’s failure to be transparent with the NZ public over their contract with Pfizer. The RCI’s report is due out later this month.

Standing together after the whistle

What Shane wanted, more than anything, was for rugby to stop leaving its wounded in the shadows. He wanted NZ Rugby to front up about concussion, long‑term brain injury, and the accumulation of hits that players’ bodies and minds were quietly absorbing. He wanted medical decisions that affected players’ futures - from return‑to‑play protocols to new injections - to be made honestly, transparently, and with full respect for their right to say no.

Rugby has always sold us a story about standing shoulder‑to‑shoulder, about never leaving a mate behind. If Shane’s life and death, and Connor’s, and Sean’s, are to mean anything beyond the stat sheets, that story has to extend beyond the touchline - into coroners’ courts, boardrooms, and policy tables where real safety and real accountability are decided.

The excerpted conversation with Shane Christie that accompanies this piece is part of that work: not the final word, but a starting point for those who refuse to look away.

Want support or advice?

Noted in this video is a reference to the RCI, the report of findings is due out on February 25, 2026. For advice or support contact NZDSOS or The Health Forum NZ. Shane was in regular contact with both of these organisations and mentions them in this video.

Penny Marie

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I have been independently researching, writing and sharing peoples stories since 2021 when I left my career role, and in September 2023 I formed Let Kids Be Kids.

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