No Filter

16 years ago, Australian journalist Laura Brown packed up her surburban life and moved to New York. Today, she is a media superstar and powerhouse as the Editor-In-Chief of InStyle Magazine where she is revolutionising the fashion and magazine industries with her very Australian humour and her ability to get her celebrity friends to do anything she asks. So how did a girl from Camden land one of t...

Sami Lukis doesn’t count sheep before she goes to sleep. She counts men. Specifically the ones she has slept with. The 47-year-old presenter and radio host has been dating for 30 years. And she’s taken her dating stories and turned them into a book, Romantically Challenged. She talks to Mia about the good, the bad and the ugly of the dating world. CREDITS: Host: Mia Freedman  With...

Aly Raisman is one of the most famous, successful and popular gymnasts in the world. She's a six time olympic medalist and captained the gold medal winning US team in both 2012 and 2016. She’s also one of 250 young girls who was abused by the Doctor of the American Gymnastics team, Larry Nassar. She talks to Mia about her experience and how she’s advocating for change... CREDITS:...

Anne Tonner didn’t know much about eating disorders. As a human rights lawyer and mother of four, she knew they existed but she didn’t know how they could take someone to the brink of self-destruction and sometimes beyond. But then one day her 13-year-old daughter Chloe told her she wouldn’t drink water because she thought it would make her fat and suddenly she was faced with a f...

Vanessa Grigoriadis has spent years thinking about consent. The American journalist and author interviewed 120 students, 80 administrators, victims, perpetrators and accused for her book  Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus.  What she found out was that, when it comes to sexual assault, things sometimes aren't black and white. Vanessa seeks to discover whether, wh...

When you think of Jana Pittman, the first thing that usually comes to mind is hurdles. Right? Hurdles, the Olympics, and maybe that memorable headline - “Drama Jana.” But what if we told you that was by far the least interesting thing about the former two-time world champion? Because it’s the truth. Jana is 35 now and she’s a single mum to three kids - how that happened is...

If you open up a fashion magazine in Australia you'll most likely be greeted by a group of size six models smiling/grimacing back at you. Sure, they're beautiful and their clothes are amazing but they only represent 20% of the population. And this is what model, agent and soon to be author, Chelsea Bonner is trying to change, one body positive model at a time... Show Notes Your host is Mia Freedma...

Jelena Dokic has lived a very extraordinary life in just 34 years. From the outside, she seemed to have the perfect story. She was a refugee turned world number four on the tennis circuit and by 16, she had defeated world number one Martina Hingis at Wimbledon. But on the inside, Jelena was struggling. Her father and coach, Damir, started abusing her when she was just six years old. He’d bea...

Over the next two weeks, we will be dipping back into two of Mia's favourite episodes. The second? Magda Szubanski... Magda Szubanski has written and created some of Australia's best comedy shows and characters. And this year, she's even been instrumental in changing the law when it comes to Marriage Eqaulity in Australia.  So what is it like being Magda? What's life been like since coming ou...

This is the first of a two-part series over the Christmas break where we'll look back at some of Mia's favourite interviews. This week it's Turia Pitt. At the age of 24, Turia Pitt was caught in a bushfire while running an Ultramarathon in Western Australia.  She suffered burns to 65 % of her body and has since had over 200 operations to get back to full health. Turia could have been defined...

American journalist Anne Helen Petersen has been writing about celebrities since she was at uni and over that time she's noticed one thing - the rise of unruly women. Unruly is described as disorderly, disruptive and not amenable to discipline or control. And, if you look around Hollywood you'll see this kind of behaviour everywhere. So Anne decided to collect her thoughts and research into a book...

Andrew Daddo does a lot of things. From writing kids books, to hosting parenting podcasts to acting in Round The Twist. Oh....and being a dad to his three kids. But behind the public profile he's just a normal guy who likes to make his own surfboards and hang out with his family. So what was life like inside the famous Daddo household? How did he wind up in the jungle on I’m A Celebrity Get...

Sophie Monk has been a celebrity for almost 20 years. During that time she has been in a girl band, been a solo singer, an actress, a TV star, engaged 2.5 times, posed for Playboy, starred alongside a cast of famous faces for UberEATS Australia and most recently been Australia’s 2017 Bachelorette But that last fact is probably the least interesting thing about Sophie. She spent a decade...

Justine Clarke has been performing on stage and screen for decades but most people will remember her as Roo from Home and Away in the 80s. So what was it like to have that level of fame as a child and how did she deal with it? She also tells us what it's like to work on a show as iconic as Play School and what really goes on behind the scenes. And what is it like being 46 in an industry that prize...

Until a few years ago, professional violin player, former presenter of the Classic Breakfast program on ABC Classic FM and music teacher Eddie Ayres had presented to the world as female. You might remember his name being Emma back then. But while on a solo bike ride of Pakistan in 2013, Eddie watched the Oscar Winning film Boys Don’t Cry - and it was here that he realised he was not a self d...

“People want to see people who look like them on television - the true diversity of the community - but traditionally male, middle-aged white executives would choose women based on their penises” Ever since news broke last month about Harvey Weinstein's alleged history of sexual assault journalist, feminist and author Tracey Spicer sent out a tweet asking if there were women in Austral...

Kerri-Anne Kennerley is simply described as the Queen of Australian TV. Since she was 13, "KAK" has been a presence on our screens - interviewing thousands of people, singing, dancing and making politicians do the Macarena. Kerri-Anne has just released a memoir called, fittingly, A Bold Life. And when she came into Mamamia to talk about it, we couldn’t possibly contain that much razzle-...

Marian Keyes is one of the most successful authors in the world. She’s sold 35 million books in 35 languages and she’s done that by writing about women’s lives….in all their messiness. She writes the words and the feelings that are inside your head and she makes women feel seen and heard and understood. In a laugh out loud way. She’s able to do this because she - lik...

This is not your ordinary No Filter. Today, the tables have been turned. Mia Freedman has been a parent for 20-years and we invited her son Luca into the studio to grill her about their unique relationship. Mia tells Luca about the time she dropped him as a baby, what her first thoughts were when she gave birth, and how she reacted when she first found out he was watching porn. This interview will...

Andy Gourley is a 47-year-old pastor, former accountant, skateboarding fan and the founder of Red Frogs, a volunteer group providing support and a positive peer presence to large groups of young people. Nowhere is that more important than at schoolies.  Every year, since 1997, Andy and his team have travelled to the Gold Coast to help partying teens stay out of trouble.  So where did it...

You know that Tiffiny Hall is the energetic personal trainer with the long blonde hair who has appeared on several seasons of The Biggest Loser. What you probably don't know is that she’s also the author of four fiction novels and five nonfiction books. She’s one of the highest qualified female martial artists in the world for her age. And just a week after giving birth to her first ch...

When couples therapist Esther Perel speaks to large groups of people about her area of expertise, sex and relationships -she asks the audience to raise their hands if their lives have ever been affected by infidelity. Maybe it was one of their parents. Maybe it was their own partner. Maybe it was them. Or maybe they were the third party. She says around 80 percent of the room raises their hand. Es...

Janine Middleton is not who you would expect to be the CEO of Australian Marriage Equality. She’s not Lesbian. She’s Not Gay. She’s not Bisexual, not Transgender, not Queer or Questioning and she’s not intersex. In fact, no one in her family is. She’s in her late 50s. Is a former investment banker. Lives on Sydney’s North Shore. And she wears pearls. And yet, sh...

In 2011, Manal al-Sharif defied Saudi Arabian laws when she posted a video of herself driving on YouTube. Her decision and her Women2Drive campaign landed her in jail for eight days. But it also made her passionate about changing the way her country views women. Six years after that act, Saudi Arabia has announced that it will allow women to start driving in 2018. Manal has written a book about dr...

Scott Pape was just 35 years old when he and his wife Liz lost all their possessions in 2014. Everything. Every photograph, item of clothing, piece of furniture….all of it.  And as he stood there looking  at the charred remains of his house after the Victorian bushfires that devastated the area where he lived with his young family, he had an incredibly surprising reaction. Surpris...