Samantha Brick, Germaine Greer on 60 Minutes

English woman Samantha Brick is now a world-wide celebrity.  She's the lady who sees herself as a beautiful trophy wife and has had men falling over themselves trying to get her attention all her adult life.

She’s had experiences that most women only dream about.   On a New York flight, the captain sent her a bottle of champagne and a message that read ‘This is from the captain — he wants to welcome you on board and hopes you have a great flight today.’  

A well-dressed man bought her train ticket while standing in a queue and another stranger paid her fare as she stepped out of a cab in Paris.  Walking through a London market, she was tapped on the shoulder and presented with a bunch of flowers and bartenders frequently wave her credit card away when she tries to pay her bill.

But not one girlfriend has ever asked her to be bridesmaid and she’s been dropped by countless friends because they don’t want her anywhere near their partners. Insecure female bosses have also given her a hard time and she has missed out on promotions at work. 

Last night Samantha Brick was interviewed on 60 Minutes.  We see her living in the French countryside, married to a chauvinistic, portly Frenchman who says he will divorce her if she gets fat.  He regularly puts her on the scales and if she's put on a few pounds, she happily jumps on the exercise bike to get it off.   

She prepares him 5 course lunches and massages his head with lavender oil after lunch before his afternoon nap. The 60 Minute producers set out to get Aussie women all fired up with the help of Jermaine Greer, who was her predictable self – outraged that Samantha Brick has the audacity to appear happy being treated like a slave by her husband.  

When you delve further into Samantha's background, you discover that she is a clever, successful woman who currently writes for the Daily Mail. She knows how to get a reaction from a story and wrote an article in July about how she checks her husband's emails which attracted 783 comments.  

She has a personal safe bolted to the floor in her office and in it, is a notebook containing all the passwords for his phone and email accounts. But she doesn't need to refer to it anymore because she knows them all off by heart.

Samantha was an overweight child and when she overheard someone call her a ‘fat cow’ at school, she was shattered and inconsolable. Her parents took her out of school and enrolled her in another one and her mother got her a membership at her health club and three months later, she started at her new school a happier, slimmer child.

But the fear of being fat again has ruined her chances of having a child. Terrified she wouldn’t be able to lose the post-baby weight, she kept putting it off and now at 41, the opportunity could be lost.

She has a teenage step-son to look after now and her obsession with food has spilled over into his life – she won't buy biscuits, chocolate bars or fizzy drinks and when his overweight friends come to dinner, she never offers them dessert.   

The program probably had the desired effect, it was quite disturbing to see a woman  so completely dominated by her French husband but I have a suspicion it’s all an act. And why ruin a good story?