Masterchef winner Julie Goodwin has revealed her lowest moment and the miraculous intervention that helped save her life.
Goodwin, who became a household name after winning the first series of the Channel 10 reality cooking show in 2009, opened up about how trying to cash in on her fame led to overwork and battles with crippling anxiety and depression.
Appearing on SBS’s Insights on Tuesday night, Goodwin said she went with her husband Michael to a Central Coast Mariners A-League football match but had split up with him to meet some friends when a wave of despair hit them.
“I realized I didn’t want to be alive anymore, so I went for a walk,” Goodwin told host Kumi Taguchi.
‘I walked for a long time to a park facing the sea.
‘I sat there and I was just trying to muster up the courage to free my family from my existence.
‘I understood that I would be causing pain and sorrow, but in my mind, which was not okay, it would be the last time I would cause that pain and it would be over.’
Goodwin said what happened next was “something of a divine intervention.”
Julie Goodwin (pictured right with husband Michael left) revealed on SBS’s Insights show the low point of her mental health battles after winning Masterchef in 2009.
“A beautiful young couple saw me and they came and sat down with me, a young man, a young woman and a dog and they just said ‘you look like someone who could use some company, so let’s just stay here for a while,'” she said.
‘They just talked to me about life, about their children, about their family, we talked about dogs.
‘I told them about my dogs and my kids and within two hours they had changed their minds.’
She called her husband Michael and asked him to pick her up and there she told him what had happened.
“It was absolutely shocking,” Michael said.
“We just turned the car around. We drove to the local hospital and showed up at the emergency room.”
Goodwin, who revealed in her 2024 biography “Your Time Starts Now” that she was sexually abused as a child and then attempted suicide as a teenager, said her 2018 drunk driving conviction weighed heavily on her mind.
“The shame still runs deep,” Goodwin said after a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit caused him to lose his license for six months and receive a $600 fine.
“What that did was strip me of any vestige of anything good that I believed about myself.”
Goodwin said that after winning Masterchef she was “inundated with amazing opportunities, jobs and events”.
“I was afraid to say no to something because I didn’t know how long it would last,” she said.
‘I took in everything I could and what ended up happening.
Goodwin made her third appearance as a Masterchef contestant in the Fans and Favourite 2022 14 series
“What my family received from me was the last thing left when I walked through the door at the end of a full day.”
By the end of 2019, Goodwin had written six cookbooks, hosted a morning radio show and ran a cooking school, Julie’s Place Cooking School.
“There was definitely a lot of overload and overwork there,” he admitted.
‘I ignored a lot of warning signs about my mental health.
“There was some unresolved past trauma and all of that just created a perfect storm and it turned into what I would really describe as a breakdown.”
Once she was admitted to the hospital, Goodwin said she “just decided that the things I had been trying to do to make things better weren’t really working.”
This led her to leave the radio in 2019 and then close her cooking school.
Just three weeks into a five-week hospital stay, she received a surprise call.
“It was an opportunity to return to Masterchef,” he said.
After speaking with her husband, her two children and the psychologist, they agreed that she should do it on the condition that she could do things that would take care of her mental health.
“This came at a good time during his recovery,” Michael said.
“She was a bit lost after closing the business and leaving radio. That gave her something to focus on and also a real purpose and excitement.”
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