Opinion: Jay-Jay Feeney and the cringe media obsession with her scam romance

Can someone please explain why the New Zealand media is still so obsessed with Jay-Jay Feeney? What is this weird, deranged fascination with a washed-up radio has-been who’s clearly neck-deep in a romance scam, grinning like a teenager on her first Contiki tour? It’s embarrassing. Acutally, it’s fucking humiliating.

This is one of two things: a love scam or prostitution masquerading as love.

Every time you go to the supermarket, there she is, on the front of Woman’s Day, posing under a palm tree, spewing some delusional bullshit about her “soulmate” Minou, the 32-year-old Algerian "medical salesman" who slid into her DMs. This guy is so obviously not into her it makes your skin crawl. Anyone with half a brain can see it - he’s using her. And the worst part? The media knows it. That’s why they keep putting her on the cover. Because they think it’s hilarious.

Jay-Jay and Minou, on a holiday that she would have obviously paid for.

She reckons they’re “talking about marriage.” Christ. Of course they are. That’s Scam 101: future faking. Talk big, say all the right shit, and keep the mark dangling until you can squeeze out a visa, a plane ticket, or a nice fat transfer of Western Union cash. Jay-Jay thinks it’s romantic. Everyone else is watching this trainwreck in real time, cringing so hard we’re getting secondhand whiplash.

She says people are just being “negative Nancys.” No, love. They’re being realistic. The rest of us are just too polite to say what everyone’s thinking: this dude doesn’t give a care about you. He’s not in love. He’s not special. He’s not even present. He’s probably got ten other middle-aged women on the hook from different countries all getting told the same story.

And yet the media keeps serving this up like it’s some fairy tale. There are actual love stories worth telling in this country, real relationships built on substance, and yet we get this boomer fantasy fiction, dressed up with French Champagne and beach photoshoots like it's Bridgerton: The Midlife Edition.

What makes it worse is Jay-Jay herself. She’s not just clueless, she’s willfully ignorant. She admits she thought it was a scam at first, but now apparently it’s all good because she “did her research.” What does that even mean? She Googled “is Minou real” and waited for a sign from the universe?

He really doesn’t look like he is enjoying that…

This is a woman still legally married to her ex, still sharing a bank account with him, still emotionally tangled up in a past life, and she thinks she’s ready to get married to some guy she’s spent maybe three weeks with in total? It’s got “SEND MONEY BABY” written all over it.

Dom, her ex, must be watching this circus with his hands in the popcorn bucket, because even he comes out of this looking like the stable one. Imagine that – Dom Harvey is the grown-up in this situation. What a plot twist!

At this point, it’s not even about Jay-Jay anymore. It’s about a media industry so desperate for content it’s willing to exploit a gullible woman’s midlife meltdown for shits and giggles. They’re not celebrating her story. They’re not supporting her journey. They’re watching her drown in delusion and calling it entertainment. And that’s sick,

“He liked what he saw” - Umm, yeah, bro, we all believe you.

So here’s an idea: stop printing this shit. Stop putting her on the cover. Stop pretending this is some epic romance worth rooting for. She’s not “living her best life.” She’s being played, and half the country is watching through their fingers while the other half wonders how the hell she hasn’t figured it out yet.

While Minou prostitutes himself to Jay-Jay, she prostitutes herself to magazines like Woman’s Day for a couple of - I guess you have to him somehow