The list of crimes attributed to Prominent New Zealander would make Al Capone blush.

The news sent shockwaves across the nation. It quickly rose to the top spot on RNZ’s website, then spread, inexorably, to the Otago Daily Times. Discussions sprang up on Reddit. Posts trickled out on X. Minions memes continued to dominate Facebook. The clamour was loud and persistent; the offending predictable, inevitable. Prominent New Zealander had struck again.

Few people have been credited in the media with as many misdeeds as the prolific offender known as Prominent New Zealander. Their decades-long crime spree would make Al Capone blush. Its genesis may have been a 1927 case, when a man described as a prominent Onehunga resident pleaded guilty at the Police Court to a charge of drunk driving. Since then, the offending has spread far from its Auckland epicentre, extending to any cranny that prominence can touch.

The crimes have, if anything, picked up. In 2015, a person described as Prominent New Zealander appeared in court on a number of secret charges. The media has continued to attribute alleged crimes to Prominent New Zealander, notably in 2016, 2017 and 2019.

The name Prominent New Zealander is, of course, a pseudonym given out by news organisations when someone vaguely connected with the concept of fame is granted name suppression by the courts. There’s strong evidence it is in fact multiple people. In January, after years of appeals in multiple courts, a “prominent political figure” who committed sexual assault was named as former Act Party president Tim Jago. A similar process played out before a “prominent businessman” and abuser could be referred to by his true name, James Wallace. 

Often though, the identity of a Prominent New Zealander is never revealed. In 2014, a Prominent New Zealander was discharged without conviction and granted permanent name suppression after admitting to sexually assaulting a woman in Queenstown. A “leading entertainment figure” still has name suppression after being convicted of sexual offences. A “well-known musician” retains name suppression after being convicted of domestic violence.

This secrecy causes problems for the prominent community, which is often the subject of wild rumour and speculation when a Prominent New Zealander is before the courts. In trying to protect the privacy of a single alleged offender, courts routinely besmirch the reputations of hundreds of other vaguely celebrity New Zealanders. The issue was particularly pernicious during Jago’s trial, where media organisations eventually took to clarifying the alleged offender wasn’t a sitting member of parliament, presumably to ward off a portion of the online innuendo. 

The suppression also has an impact on the non-prominent, or “peasant”, community, mainly as an ongoing reminder of the justice system’s inequities. As former justice minister Kiri Allan bemoaned on Q&A in 2021, name suppression gets given out to people with the means to fight for it in New Zealand. Poorer people don’t get the chance to go by Prominent New Zealander. They tend to appear in court under their government name. The disparity cuts along intersecting economic and racial lines, with Pākehā getting suppression at three times the rate of Māori. 

Even if Prominent New Zealander isn’t one person, they’re certainly representative of a single, two-tiered, system; one where the wealthy, connected or well-known get to hide their identities behind alleged prominence, while less well-heeled are left to fend for themselves. Other countries seem to get by without such stringent restrictions. Maybe if they were less assured of their anonymity, a Prominent New Zealander would be less likely to offend in the first place.