Former British reality TV star Matthew Iovane and his American girlfriend Michelle Clemens made global headlines in 2016, claiming they were assaulted on Papua New Guinea’s Kokoda Track.
Now, seven years later, Iovane has finally broken his silence, though not to spill the beans about what really happened.
Rather, he wants every mention of it erased from the internet.
The couple claimed they had been held up at knifepoint on the gruelling 96km trek – frogmarched into the jungle by tribesmen so primitive they could only speak in grunts where Clemens was raped while a distraught Iovane, who had been cut with a machete, could do nothing but look on.
“We were about an hour into the walk when a tribesman appeared ahead of us and another behind us,” Iovane told British newspaper The Sun back in 2016.
“They looked very scary in native costumes and what looked like warpaint.
“They tore up my T-shirt to blindfold me and the awful thought crossed my mind that we could be on the menu. They were totally feral and we were at their mercy. I thought we’d vanish into the jungle and never be seen again.”
Eventually, the couple said they escaped, and claimed to have walked barefoot for six hours until they reached a friendly village where a helicopter was called to rescue them.
When the smoke cleared, two teenage suspects, one of whom was a minor at the time, were arrested and imprisoned. The crime-riddled nation had recently reintroduced the death penalty for ultra-violent crimes like gang rape, and some politicians in PNG were literally calling for the teens’ heads.
The reputation of the people of the Kokoda Track, the country’s most popular tourism asset, had been left in tatters and the very future of PNG’s tourism industry was at stake.
Public sex and unpaid bills
But my investigation on the Kokoda Track uncovered a very different story, starting with the fact that the couple knew their assailants.
Yes, the couple had been robbed at knifepoint, but not by cannibalistic tribesmen.
Their own trekking guides did it after the couple short-changed them by hundreds of dollars. And according to the physician who examined Clemens, there was no evidence of rape.
But witnesses said they saw her having sex with her boyfriend in creeks and other public places along the track, according to several villagers, pious Seventh-Day Adventist Christians who were mortified by the couple’s acts.
To rub salt in the wound, after leaving PNG, Iovane and Clemens left a trail of bad debts – unpaid hotel, food, guide, transport and hospital bills – totalling more than 120,000 kinas ($A50,000).
In 2016, Iovane and Clemens refused to comment on my findings, but it mattered not. After my investigation was published by news.com.au, public opinion in PNG towards the teenage suspects softened while Iovane and Clemens became the most hated people in the country.
In time, The Sun newspaper removed the couple’s tall story about cannibals from its website.
A series of emails from Matthew Iovane
Earlier this year, Iovane sent an email to News Corp, news.com.au’s parent company, asking for my investigation to be “delisted”.
“The article,” he wrote in the email, “contains a lot of my personal information and in turn attracts unwanted attention. This continues to negatively impact my daily life, even after all this time, I have to relive this story over and over again.
“I have and continue to battle with severe mental health issues because of this,” he wrote.
“I am still trying really hard to move on from this story which continues to haunt me; even outreaching to you at News Corp is a step for me if I am honest.”
These claims paint a picture of someone who has paid a heavy price for what happened in PNG seven years ago. But they clash with information published on Iovane’s personal website matthewiovane.com, which states: “Matthew Iovane is an angel investor, beverage start-up entrepreneur and real estate investor based between New York and Los Angeles”.
The website also features various photographs of Iovane looking dapper in designer clothing while posing at various high-end bars, restaurants and hotels in New York.
The claims in his email also fly in the face of a Q&A published in Mensch magazine in 2021 that portrays Iovane as a successful young businessman.
“I generally like to wake up at 6am and hit hot yoga, followed by a cold shower when I feel brave! At this point, I am ready to go with a clear mind equipped with the mindfulness I need to manage my day efficiently. I am CEO and founder of a portfolio of real estate in the UK and a premium portfolio of beverage brands in the US, so I have to make sure each hour is executed with an intent to deliver the results I have mapped out each day,” the Q&A reads.
In the email he sent to News Corp, Iovane also loosely cited PNG’s well-documented history of violent crime to substantiate the story he told The Sun.
“For further context, I think it’s important to look at the historical issues PNG has faced,” he wrote.
“You just have to google ‘Attacks Papua New Guinea’ and you will see how many there are, and that only in 2019 PNG suffered from yet another tribal massacre with 23 dead, including a pregnant woman and children. While PNG is truly beautiful, the country remains unsafe.”
“What happened to me,” he continued, “is just very sad, and when [The Sun’s] story was published, I was approached by various other people who had experienced similar attacks of violence in PNG. Not only was my personal ordeal terrifying but I continue to suffer from acute PTSD, it’s a very dark place that I am continuing to work through.”
‘Never retract this story’
Many people in PNG are not willing to turn the other cheek.
“You should never retract this story because these two pretenders set out on a planned mission to denigrate a third-world nation to promote their own narcissist careers,” said Charlie Lynn, a former Australian soldier and politician who was instrumental in establishing the KTA and now runs a trekking company on the track.
“Pretenders like this need to know there will be repercussions for fabricated stories such as this, which set out to make PNG an international laughing stock for their own benefit.”
Gary Juffa, the governor of Oro Province where the Kokoda Track is found, concurs.
“This matter has never been settled. How has it been settled? Did they apologise to the people of PNG for the bullsh*t they did for fame and glory? For besmirching our entire country? No, they didn’t,” the governor said.
“As far as I am concerned, the story should remain.”
Warren Bartlett, an Australian who hosted Iovane and Clemens at Sogeri Lodge, which he owned in 2016, says he “shall never forget” the “horror story” that was Iovane and Clemens’s visit to PNG.
“As the story of the travels of Matthew and Michelle in PNG was unbelievable, I offered to act as guarantor for the two young men at a bail of 1000 PNG kina ($A425) each so they could face a fair trial in Port Moresby and not have to spend their lives in Bomana Prison waiting for their cases to be heard,” he said.
“Each of them faced almost 30 mentions in the two courts and I was also responsible for paying their school fees and living expenses with their families in Port Moresby for more than 18 months until they decided to head off to their villages out of frustration after their cases had not been heard.
“In total, I paid over 37,000 kina ($A15,750) plus my time and transport to keep these two kids out of prison,” he said, adding that Iovane and Clemens also left without settling a bill for accommodation and food at Sogeri Lodge worth 911 kina ($A388).
“Maybe Michelle and Matthew should reimburse me 38,000 kina to teach them a lesson that foreign tourists should comply with the laws of the host country and not blatantly misbehave,” Mr Bartlett said.
Acting CEO of the Kokoda Track Authority (KTA) Julias Wargirai voiced similar sentiments. After hearing about the alleged rape, the KTA paid for a helicopter to bring the couple from the Kokoda Track to Port Moresby and accommodated them in a luxury hotel. It cost the cash-strapped organisation 80,000 kina ($A34,000) – a sum Mr Wargirai insists the couple must repay with interest. But the only communication the KTA has had with the couple in the past seven years was an email sent by Iovane demanding a refund of 700 kina ($A297) for their trekking permits.
Mr Wargirai said that Iovane and Clemens’ visit has had a “very long negative (impact) on the Kokoda Track. Visitor numbers went down because of their story“.
“It was a misrepresentation of PNG. We looked after them here and then they went back home and called us cannibals. That is not acceptable,” he said.
Dr Robin Sios, the owner and chief medical officer of Paradise Private Hospital in Port Moresby who treated the couple after they were flown out of the jungle, said he had given up trying to get the couple to settle their 1600 kina ($A690) medical bill.
“They live overseas so it’s very hard for us to recoup the money. It has been seven years and my accountants have probably written it off as a bad debt,” the doctor said, adding: “They came here, they wanted medical attention, and we did our best to provide them with the help they needed, and we helped them get home. But as soon as they left the country, they started spreading these false allegations [about the rape and some of the circumstances of the robbery].”
Nevertheless, Dr Sios said he bears no ill-will towards the couple and does not object if my investigation, for which he supplied expert medical testimony, is removed from the internet.
“We’ve moved on and they should move on too,” he said.
“I don’t see anything that could prevent them from moving on. They still have their freedom, they live in a democratic country and no one is obstructing them.”
Before my investigation was published in 2016, Iovane was sent seven separate emails offering him the right to reply to 24 separate allegations made by more than a dozen authorities, businesses and individuals in PNG. Fresh attempts to contact him earlier this year about the couple’s outstanding debts in PNG have also been ignored.
Likewise, repeated requests for comment from Clemens, who now owns and manages Soji Health, a Los Angeles-based distributor of high-end skincare and ingestibles containing CBD, have also failed to elicit a response.
After I contacted her again in March through her personal Instagram account, which shows photos of her enjoying skiing holidays and trips to California’s wine country with a new suitor, I was blocked by her account.
Iovane has made many attempts to have my investigation erased.
In 2021, he sent an email to a senior member of staff at News Corp claiming my investigation “infringes on [his] privacy” and “attracts unwanted harassment”. He also claimed the “tone” of my writing “leans towards the story being untrue” and that it defamed him.
A year earlier, Jennifer Kreder, an attorney at law in Florida, sent News Corp’s legal counsel in Sydney a letter on Iovane’s behalf asking for my investigation to be removed in order “to comply with modern journalism ethics code” because “the harm to a person from the story often is much more severe than any punishment the law imposed for the crime”.
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However, Iovane and Clemens never faced any consequences for their conduct in PNG because they ceased contact with the police and prosecutor’s office in Port Moresby after they left the country. As a result, the trial for the two former teenagers, one of whom was allegedly tortured in prison, has been permanently put on hold.
They were released on bail but remained suspects in the eyes of the law and were unable to engage in public life. They could not be located to comment on this story.
Ian Lloyd Neubauer is a freelance writer
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