Exclusive: Global DJ Liv Nervo and the inside story of her wealthy Kiwi love Matt Pringle - and his secret

Pringle is the so-called “Honey King” - owner of Manuka Doctor and Honey New Zealand, along with a host of other businesses.

Through Manuka Doctor, Pringle sponsors the New Zealand Open golf tournament and Auckland’s Stanley Street tennis venue — now the Manuka Doctor Arena — and the brand is a partner of the New Zealand Olympic Team.

Nervo told the Herald she was in a relationship with Pringle that spanned from late 2016 through to February 2019 and from which they had a child now known as “N” in the courts.

The English court case has seen Pringle admit to emotional domestic abuse, with the proceedings sparking the launch of a London-based public campaign to reform laws around reproductive coercion and consent.

And New Zealand is about to be drawn into the debate too, with Nervo planning to write to New Zealand MPs seeking law changes that would have deception more strongly recognised as undermining consent.

In England, debate around deception in intimate relationships and reproductive coercion was spurred by a 40-year plus undercover policing scandal in which women argued they would never have consented to sexual contact – and having children – if they had known their partners were covert state agents under false identities.

In New Zealand, consent under the Crimes Act 1961 can be negated by deception, but courts have generally confined that to deception about the nature or essential quality of the act - rather than lies about identity, status, or parallel relationships.

Nervo has told the Herald how the close and loving exclusive relationship she believed she had with Pringle turned out to be something else.

When she felt some statements he had made didn’t add up, she made a surprise trip to New Zealand to ask him about them directly.

But the meeting ended in shock when she instead discovered Pringle was in another relationship with a woman who was also expecting a child with him.

At the time, Nervo was six months pregnant with a daughter she says the couple had planned and were anticipating with excitement.

“Basically I went into some shock-meets-hypervigilance mode. I was really afraid of who he was and very, very confused,” she told the Herald.

For months, she struggled to reconcile the knowledge that her unborn daughter’s father had a family that - until then - had been kept secret from her.

“These were truly the most horrible times of my life,” Nervo told the Herald. “I just didn’t want to be on this earth.”

She described stress and weight loss - “I was bones and a bump.”

Having confronted Pringle, she said, “He was going to tell me about his other lives but only after I had our baby.”

Their daughter was born in London. Nervo’s mother flew in to act as her birthing partner. Pringle was not present for the birth.

Nervo said she let members of his family know the baby had arrived, including a message to his mother, liquor fortune widow Lynette Erceg, telling her she had a healthy granddaughter.

“He wrote to me a day or two later saying he liked the name.”

She claimed contact with Pringle after that focused on legal and financial arrangements and that he didn’t meet their daughter until she was nearly four years old.

The Herald approached Pringle to ask if he wanted to take part in an interview for this story, but through his lawyer he declined to provide any comment.

Pringle’s English lawyers have argued in court he is trying to build a relationship with his child amidst court proceedings that had gone “nuclear”.

Contact was also made with Erceg, who said she did not wish to comment.

And an approach to the woman who was pregnant at the same time as Nervo was also unsuccessful. She said she had no comment to make and to put questions to her through her lawyers. No response was received.

Nervo provided the Herald with correspondence she said shows the type of relationship Pringle had entered with her, including his desire to have a child.

She also spoke of how she had downloaded an app that would show the dates on which she was most likely to fall pregnant, sharing the results with him.

The messages Nervo provided showed she and Pringle - who she called “Chip” - appeared to be juggling busy global travel so they could be together on those fertile dates.

“Let’s lock in the fertile dates for another go honey,” one of the messages reads.

Another of the messages apparently from Pringle said: “You are going to look so f***ing hot and gorgeous pregnant honey.”

And another said: “Liv, you have my heart. Never think otherwise. I want you pregnant. I want you in my life. I want my mum to meet and love you like I do.”

Messages over the course of the relationship confessed similar pledges of love, she said.

“I always want you to feel loved. Safe. Loved even more. Protect you. Spoil you. Help you ... and to always make sure your hand is held and your body is in my arms.. I love you my love.”

Nervo said Pringle had also become a part of her family, meeting her parents and grandmother and coming to know close friends.

And she said he also spoke of her getting to know his family, showing her messages about her he had apparently exchanged with his mother.

Nervo claimed those messages were later revealed as false, and that Pringle admitted he had used a second phone on which he had written as if he was Lyn Erceg.

Two years after their daughter was born, Nervo said she wrote directly to Erceg - worth an estimated $1.5 billion - asking she intercede with her son and encourage him to accept their daughter on the same terms as his other children.

In that letter, she wrote: “I have been through a very painful grieving process of losing a family and a future that I had invested in and sacrificed a lot for. The deceit has had a profound long term effect on my life and one that will stay with me forever.

“But just as you were a single mother for Matt, I have no doubt to carry on making the steps to create a safe and happy home - hence me reaching out to you now. Matt has shown himself incapable of being a good partner but I still hope he can be a good father to [our child].”

The seven years since their daughter was born have involved an expensive legal fight over their child, including disputes over whether Pringle should have parental rights and contact, whether Nervo’s public comments about the relationship could be reported, and who should pay the legal costs.

Court proceedings in the UK have approached a million pounds in legal fees.

Nervo said the imbalance in resources between the two sides has shaped her experience of the legal process. “Access to wealth and sophisticated legal representation created a very different experience of justice,” she said.

She told the Herald she was not seeking a settlement figure, but an equal standing between the children Pringle has fathered.

Nervo believes she experienced “reproductive coercion”, a term used in domestic abuse research to describe interference with someone’s reproductive freedom.

“Reproductive coercion should be recognised as a distinct, stand-alone form of abuse within the law,” she said. “I lost all autonomy to my reproductive choices due to Matthew’s deep deception.”

Nervo said she later learned that - in addition to his second family - Pringle had also had another long-term relationship, with an earlier woman, that overlapped with their romance.

Nervo has not spoken publicly about her situation and its wider themes since stringent orders by English courts from 2022 meant neither she nor Pringle could be identified.

Pringle’s identity was revealed in late January through a Court of Appeal hearing in London in which he appealed a high court decision ordering he pay some of Nervo’s legal bills.

Family courts generally don’t award costs in disputes about children, and departures from that rule are reserved for cases where a party’s conduct in the litigation is judged to have been seriously unreasonable.

The High Court decision revealed Pringle had spent $850,000 on his own legal fees and - as a result of his behaviour – should pay $405,000 of Nervo’s $1.08m costs.

The Court of Appeal hearing opened with Lady Justice Sarah King telling Pringle’s lawyer Joy Brereton KC that the parents would not have the anonymity granted by previous family court hearings.

She said even though the parents would be known publicly, their child must not be identified.

The Court of Appeal hearing was focused on who should bear the legal costs generated by the dispute over the couple’s child.

Brereton noted Pringle had accepted deception amounting to emotional domestic abuse but argued the case had shifted toward more inflammatory characterisations.

She said the proceedings initially focused on building contact between father and child, but later “mushroomed” and “went nuclear” after Nervo changed lawyers in September 2023.

Brereton said the lower court unfairly relied on “cherry-picked” evidence and should instead view Pringle’s conduct in the “wider canvas” of a father trying to build a relationship with his child.

In the wake of that hearing, The Good Law Project – a not-for-profit that offers legal support to those whose issues it believes in - launched a public campaign about consent law, reproductive coercion and deception in intimate relationships.

The campaign launched with an Instagram video, in which Nervo talks about trying to conceive a baby with Pringle in the summer of 2018.

“We were following my fertile times on an application and lo and behold we got pregnant.”

In that account, Nervo reveals the discovery of another family connected to Pringle, and the subsequent collapse of their relationship. “I felt completely violated - body, mind and soul” she said.

She believes consent laws need to be updated to include deceit and she is writing to New Zealand MPs as part of her campaign to seek law change.

Consent in a relationship requires honesty between partners, she said. “How could I have given consent if everything I was giving consent (to) was based off a lie?”

The Good Law Project’s founder, New Zealand-raised barrister Jolyon Maugham KC, told the Herald there is currently not enough legal protection for those deceived as Nervo had allegedly been.

He said the law could be used to “deliver injustice” in the sense Pringle had “tricked her into having a child” and then “embroiled her in expensive litigation”.

He said Nervo’s ability to access her rights through the courts was constrained by her inability to pay for lawyers to the same extent as Pringle.

The Good Law Project’s campaign publicly named Pringle in connection with the court case.

“We think publishing his name delivers some justice for Liv who really deserves it. Publishing the names of men like Matthew helps create a deterrent effect.”

Maugham said Nervo “very strongly believes that reproductive coercion should be more specifically a criminal offence”.

In England, anonymity in family cases is largely decided by judges case-by-case. In New Zealand, privacy is written into law so anonymity and publication restrictions usually remain even when a case reaches higher courts.

David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and being selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He joined the Herald in 2004.

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