A model turned DJ, Liv Nervo had forged an enviable career travelling the world with her sister and musical collaborator, Mim. Old cliches about being a strong, independent woman and not needing a man aside, it’s clear that Liv already had a fantastic life before she met her former partner, Matthew. A successful businessman, their paths first crossed when she played a private party on Richard Branson’s Necker Island.
Series one featured a fraudster impersonating a member of the nobility while leaving their victims to foot the bill for their lavish life, and another faking terminal cancer. Series two keeps the bar for grim deception high, beginning with Liv’s whirlwind romance with Matthew, who was desperate to have a family with her. Mim was equally taken in by her sister’s devoted new partner, who had made his fortune selling honey but wasn’t a fusty corporate type.
Everything else, though, was fiction. Once Liv was pregnant, he became angry and withdrawn, and even skipped a gender-reveal party in Liv’s native Australia. So concerned was her mother, Flaviana, that she hired a private investigator to trail him.
It’s hardly a spoiler to say that what was found – and how Liv used the information to inform her own investigation – was not very good. Somehow – despite being heavily pregnant and finding out some of the worst news she could have imagined about the baby’s father – she had the wherewithal to record Matthew on her phone as she confronted him, and the audio is wild. He wasn’t leading a double life, Liv explains, “it was a triple life … I felt totally violated – mind, body and soul”.
She feels she was deceived into having a child without knowing all of the facts, leading to questions around informed consent. Easily the series’ most notable case, it’s probably not a coincidence that the producers chose to put Liv’s story at the start. As well as pursuing legal action against Matthew, she has since become an outspoken voice against reproductive coercion, working alongside the Good Law Project.
There’s footage of Labour MP Natalie Fleet raising the issue in parliament, mentioning Liv by name. It is interesting and enraging, but it is also bigger than Love Cheats the series, and it feels as if we only scratch the surface when it comes to Liv’s activism. Elsewhere, there’s Fiona Mulkerrins-Dixon from Exeter, who was taken in by the lies told by former partner Ben Millin. (Among them: a dead father who was actually alive, a dead sister who had never existed, and a heart condition that could kill him at any moment).
Extract — continue reading at the source.
