With her twin sister Mim, Nervo is half of the globally touring DJ and songwriting duo Nervo, which has performed at major electronic music festivals and clubs worldwide. The pair are Grammy-winning songwriters best known for co-writing When Love Takes Over, the global dance hit by David Guetta and Kelly Rowland. <\/p>\n
Liv Nervo and Matt Pringle had photos taken to celebrate her pregnancy.<\/p>\n
Pringle is the so-called \u201cHoney King\u201d \u2013 owner of Manuka Doctor and Honey New Zealand, along with a host of other businesses. <\/p>\n
Through Manuka Doctor, Pringle sponsors the New Zealand Open golf tournament and Auckland\u2019s Stanley Street tennis venue \u2013 now the Manuka Doctor Arena \u2013 and the brand is a partner of the New Zealand Olympic Team. <\/p>\n
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 \u201cN\u201d in the courts. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 and having children \u2013 if they had known their partners were covert state agents under false identities. <\/p>\n
Mim and Liv Nervo performing in France in 2017. Photo \/ S. Camelot<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 rather than lies about identity, status, or parallel relationships.<\/p>\n
Nervo \u2013 \u2018I felt violated\u2019 <\/p>\n
Nervo has told the Herald how the close and loving exclusive relationship she believed she had with Pringle turned out to be something else. <\/p>\n
When she felt some statements he had made didn\u2019t add up, she made a surprise trip to New Zealand to ask him about them directly.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
At the time, Nervo was six months pregnant with a daughter she says the couple had planned and were anticipating with excitement. <\/p>\n
\u201cBasically I went into some shock-meets-hypervigilance mode. I was really afraid of who he was and very, very confused,\u201d she told the Herald. <\/p>\n
For months, she struggled to reconcile the knowledge that her unborn daughter\u2019s father had a family that \u2013 until then \u2013 had been kept secret from her. <\/p>\n
Liv Nervo said she and Matt Pringle saw each other from late 2016 through to February 2019, when she discovered he had a second family in New Zealand.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese were truly the most horrible times of my life,\u201d Nervo told the Herald. \u201cI just didn\u2019t want to be on this earth.\u201d <\/p>\n
She described stress and weight loss \u2013 \u201cI was bones and a bump.\u201d <\/p>\n
Having confronted Pringle, she said: \u201cHe was going to tell me about his other lives but only after I had our baby.\u201d <\/p>\n
Their daughter was born in London. Nervo\u2019s mother flew in to act as her birthing partner. Pringle was not present for the birth.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe wrote to me a day or two later saying he liked the name.\u201d <\/p>\n
She claimed contact with Pringle after that focused on legal and financial arrangements and that he didn\u2019t meet their daughter until she was nearly four years old.<\/p>\n
Herald approach to Pringle <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Pringle\u2019s English lawyers have argued in court he is trying to build a relationship with his child amidst court proceedings that had gone \u201cnuclear\u201d.<\/p>\n
Contact was also made with Erceg, who said she did not wish to comment.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Nervo and Pringle\u2019s plans <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
The messages Nervo provided showed she and Pringle \u2013 who she called \u201cChip\u201d \u2013 appeared to be juggling busy global travel so they could be together on those fertile dates.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s lock in the fertile dates for another go honey,\u201d one of the messages reads.<\/p>\n
Another of the messages apparently from Pringle said: \u201cYou are going to look so f***ing hot and gorgeous pregnant honey.\u201d<\/p>\n
And another said: \u201cLiv, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
DJ Liv Nervo with New Zealand businessman Matt Pringle. She discovered his double life on a surprise visit to New Zealand.<\/p>\n
Messages over the course of the relationship confessed similar pledges of love, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nervo said Pringle had also become a part of her family, meeting her parents and grandmother and coming to know close friends.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Two years after their daughter was born, Nervo said she wrote directly to Erceg \u2013 worth an estimated $1.5 billion \u2013 asking she intercede with her son and encourage him to accept their daughter on the same terms as his other children.<\/p>\n
In that letter, she wrote: \u201cI 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut 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 \u2013 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].\u201d<\/p>\n
Lynette Erceg, pictured at the 2005 funeral of husband Michael Erceg, who died in a helicopter crash near Raglan. She is estimated to be worth $1.5 billion. Photo \/ Brett Phibbs<\/p>\n
The legal battle <\/p>\n
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\u2019s public comments about the relationship could be reported, and who should pay the legal costs.<\/p>\n
Court proceedings in the UK have approached a million pounds in legal fees.<\/p>\n
Nervo said the imbalance in resources between the two sides has shaped her experience of the legal process. \u201cAccess to wealth and sophisticated legal representation created a very different experience of justice,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She told the Herald she was not seeking a settlement figure, but an equal standing between the children Pringle has fathered.<\/p>\n
Liv Nervo with her grandmother and Matt Pringle. She says Pringle was known to her family as her partner.<\/p>\n
Nervo believes she experienced \u201creproductive coercion\u201d, a term used in domestic abuse research to describe interference with someone\u2019s reproductive freedom.<\/p>\n
\u201cReproductive coercion should be recognised as a distinct, stand-alone form of abuse within the law,\u201d she said. \u201cI lost all autonomy to my reproductive choices due to Matthew\u2019s deep deception.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nervo said she later learned that \u2013 in addition to his second family \u2013 Pringle had also had another long-term relationship, with an earlier woman, that overlapped with their romance.<\/p>\n
The case that opened it up<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Pringle\u2019s 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\u2019s legal bills.<\/p>\n
Family courts generally don\u2019t award costs in disputes about children and departures from that rule are reserved for cases where a party\u2019s conduct in the litigation is judged to have been seriously unreasonable.<\/p>\n
The High Court decision revealed Pringle had spent $850,000 on his own legal fees and – as a result of his behaviour \u2013 should pay $405,000 of Nervo\u2019s $1.08m costs.<\/p>\n
The Court of Appeal hearing opened with Lady Justice Sarah King telling Pringle\u2019s lawyer Joy Brereton KC that the parents would not have the anonymity granted by previous family court hearings.<\/p>\n
Matt Pringle and Liv Nervo were known as a couple among her DJ friends and workmates.<\/p>\n
She said even though the parents would be known publicly, their child must not be identified.<\/p>\n
The Court of Appeal hearing was focused on who should bear the legal costs generated by the dispute over the couple\u2019s child.<\/p>\n
Brereton noted Pringle had accepted deception amounting to emotional domestic abuse but argued the case had shifted toward more inflammatory characterisations.<\/p>\n
She said the proceedings initially focused on building contact between father and child, but later \u201cmushroomed\u201d and \u201cwent nuclear\u201d after Nervo changed lawyers in September 2023.<\/p>\n
Brereton said the lower court unfairly relied on \u201ccherry-picked\u201d evidence and should instead view Pringle\u2019s conduct in the \u201cwider canvas\u201d of a father trying to build a relationship with his child.<\/p>\n
And the campaign that followed<\/p>\n
In the wake of that hearing, The Good Law Project \u2013 a not-for-profit that offers legal support to those whose issues it believes in \u2013 launched a public campaign about consent law, reproductive coercion and deception in intimate relationships.<\/p>\n
The campaign launched with an Instagram video, in which Nervo talks about trying to conceive a baby with Pringle in the summer of 2018.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were following my fertile times on an application and lo and behold we got pregnant.\u201d<\/p>\n
In that account, Nervo reveals the discovery of another family connected to Pringle, and the subsequent collapse of their relationship. \u201cI felt completely violated \u2013 body, mind and soul\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Consent in a relationship requires honesty between partners, she said. \u201cHow could I have given consent if everything I was giving consent (to) was based off a lie?\u201d<\/p>\n
The Good Law Project\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
He said the law could be used to \u201cdeliver injustice\u201d in the sense Pringle had \u201ctricked her into having a child\u201d and then \u201cembroiled her in expensive litigation\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said Nervo\u2019s ability to access her rights through the courts was constrained by her inability to pay for lawyers to the same extent as Pringle.<\/p>\n
Liv Nervo says she left Matt Pringle in February 2019 after travelling to New Zealand on a surprise trip to discover he had a family he had not disclosed.<\/p>\n
The Good Law Project\u2019s campaign publicly named Pringle in connection with the court case.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maugham said Nervo \u201cvery strongly believes that reproductive coercion should be more specifically a criminal offence\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n