Nine News star Peter Overton broke down in tears while discussing a life-changing moment in his 22-year marriage to Jessica Rowe.
The veteran journalist was recounting a deeply moving period in the couple’s love story when he was overcome with emotion – leaving his wife in tears too.
Peter, 59, and Jessica, 55, had been sitting down with Australian Women’s Weekly’s Love Stories podcast to discuss their enduring relationship, when talk turned to their agonising path to parenthood.
While the duo have two daughters, Allegra, now 19, and Giselle, 16, they suffered immense heartache along the way.
“We had to go through IVF and that was particularly difficult and I think anyone who goes through it deserves a bravery medal because you do not expect every step of the way for there to be these stops and starts,” Jessica shared.
“I had assumed – like I think a lot of women do – that it would just happen easily and naturally, and so there’s a real period of time where you’re thinking ‘what if we can’t be parents’ and we really wanted that.”
Peter revealed that the couple’s IVF journey was happening during a “terrible time” – when Jessica was host of the Today Show, and while he was travelling for 60 Minutes “non stop”.
“Everyone has challenges but it was full on,” he said.
“IVF was really challenging and I think we had four attempts, and I remember on the third attempt we’d driven down to the south coast and we were in Huskisson and we pulled over in the car – I can still remember it next to the park and you could see the water – and we were waiting for the nurse to ring to say ‘it’s on, it’s taken’ or not.
“And we sat there and the phone rang and we had convinced ourselves it was third time lucky and it wasn’t third time lucky,” he recalled.
“And I know with the Today Show pressure and then what a woman goes through – what you were going through – with the rigours of IVF, it is hell on you.
“I remember turning to Jessica and saying, ‘you know I’m really cool if we don’t have children, because I don’t want to see you go through all of this – the pain, the challenge. I can just love you and we’ll be absolutely, wonderfully happy for the rest of our lives.”
Jessica, however, wanted to give it another go.
“We did, and I will never forget I was travelling like an absolute madman at 60 Minutes and I’d just got back from a big trip, and they said ‘you’ve got to go again next Friday’ and I said ‘I can’t’,” Peter recalled, adding that he brought the matter up with a superior who was supportive.
The couple worked out that Peter would be in Milan doing a story when the results came in during the early hours of the morning.
“I was in the Milan Hilton… and I’m lying there in my Qantas jammies, and I had my Nokia phone – iPhone’s weren’t invented – and it rang,” Peter recalled. “‘Hello?’ All I heard was Jessica say, ‘you’re going to be a father’.
Peter was overcome with emotion as he shared the touching story, adding “It was the best”.
“It was so special wasn’t it,” a tearful Jessica said. ‘And that was Allegra.”
“19 years on it still gets you,” her husband added. “It was an amazing time.”
It’s not the first time Jessica and Peter have talked about their IVF journey.
Peter previously told The Jess Rowe Big Talk Show that it was the shared secret that “sustained” them as Jessica went through a difficult time and enormous scrutiny before she was axed from the Today show in 2007.
“That was our little secret, wasn’t it? It was the thing that sustained us as all that rubbish went on at the Today show, at least we had our IVF journey,” he said.
Reflecting on the challenges she faced during her stint on Today in a 2021 interview with New Idea, Jessica said she “could not comprehend” the level of nastiness directed towards her.
“All because I smiled, I had short hair, I was too thin, I didn’t have a child – people didn’t know that I was going through IVF at the time – and I snort when I laugh,” she explained.
“It was so public and cruel – definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever been through, career-wise.
“I was picked on mercilessly and couldn’t understand what I had done wrong. Now I know I did nothing wrong. I was simply being myself.”
