Unlike, a lot of mums, Constance has seven children and is a household name.
Self-professed ‘queen’ – despite her potty mouth – Constance was one world’s first mummy blogger and an influencer before any of us had heard of the term.
Now a podcast host, clothes designer and best-selling author, she still has 1.7 million online followers and fans include Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Whoopi Goldberg.
However, Constance has long courted controversy, which has seen her become the target of endless abuse and hate online for her warts-and-all writing about sex, smoking and drinking.
She has even described herself as the ‘most bullied woman in Australia’.
It’s been a tough few years since she burst onto the scene seven years ago. 39-year-old Constance is currently going through a family court dispute with her first husband Bill Mahon, the financial details of their divorce still haven’t been finalised, she has been sued twice and now lives apart from second husband Denim Cooke after he suffered a near-fatal brain injury three years ago.
The couple are still together, but he lives in a nearby flat because ‘he sleeps 20 hours a day’ and needs support from care workers, leaving Constance staying at her mum’s for the last year.
Her two oldest kids have a bedroom, and she sleeps on a couch or mattress on the floor alongside her three youngest, in a wagon outside, or at Denim’s place. As soon as she gets up in the morning, she embarks on a two-hour round trip to her kids’ Steiner school.
Despite these struggles, Constance is upbeat and positive. She tells metro.co.uk from her mum’s garden in Fremantle, Western Australia: ‘I’ve always had a pretty happy disposition. Of course every now and then I want to have a big whinge because I’m like, f***, I just can’t do this s*** every day anymore. I always focus on the positives. But you can only do that for a certain amount of time before things catch up with you and you say – yeah, things are tough.’
Constance has had to become resilient after years of abuse online. She’s been accused of being dangerous, a bad mum and she’s been called ‘fat’, ‘ugly’, and a ‘slut’. Hate groups (‘horrible forums for arseholes’), with up to 10,000 members have been set up to tear her down, she adds.
Speaking in the aftermath of the tragic death of American mummy blogger Heather Armstrong, who took her own life at the age of 48 after struggling with depression and alcoholism, Constance didn’t know Heather, but says: ‘I saw an article that said she read a lot of the comments about herself. And so the other day, while I was deep diving into her situation, I decided to jump on and see some of the comments made about me.
‘Normally, I just don’t read them. And I’d thought there is not really anything that anyone can say about me that could hurt, so I looked. And it was awful. I got this pit in my stomach which I just couldn’t shake. All I could do was go to sleep. That was the only way to cure it. And if someone was stuck in that world, it would be really hard to get out of.’
For Constance the slurs are repetitive: ‘It’s the same old s***: “Every time I look at her, I feel like I need to bathe myself in Dettol”. And “She’s so dirty. She’s so feral.” That doesn’t really hurt.’
What really upsets her are the accusations that her kids need to be taken off her by social services: ‘It’s bulls***. I’m just going: “Are these people for real?” I don’t have a case with welfare! So that defamatory stuff hurts because what if the kids read that? Or their friends’ parents or their teachers?’
Years of trolling have taken the shine off Constance’s crown. She found fame in 2016 when she blogged about parent sex, which she described as ‘that 3.5 minutes you get in between changing nappies and making food’. Her post went viral and she became known for her raw and honest accounts of parenting.
Soon women across the globe were heralding this straight-talking, no-nonsense Aussie as a breath of fresh air in the parenting arena. Raw pictures of her post-partum body alongside posts detailing the unflinching realities of motherhood, were quickly devoured by those fed up with an internet world full of filters and fluff.
Constance, like them, didn’t pretend to find the constant grind of family life a breeze.
Before long, followers were pledging their allegiance with tiny, dainty crown tattoos in homage to their queen, while others would queue for hours to meet her at book signings.
But, for every fan, there was also a detractor, ready to put the boot in.
‘I’d wanted my whole life for any publication to pick up my work and no one would – and then all of a sudden I had this huge profile,’ she remembers.
‘I felt like this is a time that I should be really enjoying myself and be really happy. But I couldn’t because there were these hate groups and every comment was disgusting. People were putting posters up on walls that said “Vote for Constance Hall as Australia’s number one s*** mom”. And I would look at the hate groups and see people that I know in them.’
One of them was a woman she met at a children’s birthday party who posted Constance’s phone number online. Another time an ex threatened to tell the media – and her parents – about abortions she’d had. She adds: ‘It made me feel like there’s no humanity left in people… Some people are just cooked in the head. But you can’t throw in the towel. Because then they’ve won.’
Constance attributes the hate to jealousy. ‘Because I’m not particularly educated. I am your everyday girl, in a lower demographic than the majority, so people wanted something to be wrong with me in order to explain why I rose and succeeded so much and they didn’t,’ she explains. ‘They want to take me down a peg or two.’
However, there’s no denying that Constace has been involved in a number of controversies.
Her no-holds-barred opinions on step-parenting caused a stir, with some calling out her views after she said that a step-parent shouldn’t discipline ‘someone else’s kid’ unless they were a toddler.
She also faced a $100,000 law suit in 2017 when her web developer claimed she was in breach of contract over her website, while last year Denim avoided a stint in jail for driving unlicensed with meth in his system with his unrestrained child (their son Raja) in the front seat.
Talking about the incident, Constance says that when Denim had his near-fatalmotorbike accident in 2020, it left him with a condition called Adynamia – a lack of motivation after a brain injury.
He would go missing, leaving Constance ‘worried he was going to take his own life’. She’d make missing persons reports only to find him curled up asleep in abandoned buildings.
‘One day after I found him I took him to a mutual friend’s house and he stayed there for a couple of weeks to give me a break. This is when the driving offence happened,’ she explains.
‘I was furious [when I found out], my world was spinning. I didn’t find out that he had been on drugs until my lawyer called me and told me a few weeks later.
‘I confronted him and he told me that he had taken some meth the night before, he had slept before he saw Raja, and told me that if I don’t completely abandon him he will do anything I ask, including re-engaging with his therapies.’
Since then Denim has been working hard, Constance says, going to the gym, engaging with support workers and has ‘transformed his life’, she insists.
‘Some people say it’s my fault for not watching him more closely, or having adequate carers, others say he’s just a junky who should be locked up,’ Constance adds.
‘But until you have lived it, seen the love of your life have everything taken away from him and go from being the most incredible man you have ever met to sleeping in an abandoned building… you don’t know how hard you will kick the dog while it’s down.
‘The driving offence was terrible and humiliating and he could have hurt or killed someone. But he didn’t and even at his very worst, his most dark and selfish moment, he never wanted to hurt anybody except himself.’
Despite all the family have been through Constance says her kids have never asked her to stop blogging, although she isn’t allowed to talk about her eldest step-son, and she’s careful what she posts about her other step-son and five biological children – age four to 18.
They know that a trip to the supermarket will take forever as she stops to talk to fans, and though she wears her heart on her sleeve, she’s learnt that she needs to be more private with new friends and colleagues than she wants to be.
Constance recalls how the seeds of her success were sown when she was just 17 and worked as a hairdresser making the equivalent of £10 an hour. Looking for a way to be more creative and make more cash, she started writing.
When emails were first introduced, she collected anyone’s and everyone’s address – flight attendants, people who gave her a job interview, the person that served her in the bank – and would hit ‘send all’ to hundreds, emailing them her short-form travel stories in the only way she could think of to reach a wider audience. She remembers: ‘They would write back saying “Oh my God that was so funny.” Or, “Why are you sending me this?”’ But she plugged away, eventually writing about the struggles of motherhood with her first four children – and her subsequent divorce – online.
She would write during every waking hour, remembering how ‘f***ing exhausting’ it was; in a carpark after dropping the kids off at daycare, during bath time, all night.
She adds: ‘I was always on my phone. I guess I wasn’t always present with the kids, but I was working my way towards a better life for us.’ And she got in trouble with her mum, who told her that if she spent as much time working as she did on Facebook, she would ‘be on her feet by now’.
By 2007 she was arguing a lot with her first husband. ‘It was a depressing time and I was super lonely and exhausted,’ she remembers.
‘But I was writing about it and getting these women messaging from all over the world. I normalised unhappiness and everyone liked me for that. My mum said I would regret that – and I did. Because when I broke up with him I was the bad guy and I was losing 1,000 followers a day. For a year I was so anxious that something was going to knock me off the throne. People were looking for all sorts of scandals.’
In 2016, following her popular blogposts, Constance hit the big time when she borrowed £50k from her step-dad to self-publish her biography ‘Like a Queen’ which made an estimated $2.5million – far more than any publishers had offered.
It became Australia’s sixth best-selling autobiography and she brought herself a new house with the proceeds.
‘It was better than winning the lottery because I did it myself,’ she remembers. ‘And for the first time, people were paying attention. Before, it was always “the men are talking”, or “the people with degrees are talking”. Now people were listening to me.’
Writing and her fashion brand Queen the Label have since brought Constance an exciting life which has seen her travel the globe with her kids and make enough cash to support her husband.
Despite all the troubles that have come with her career, she feels her future is bright and has exciting new plans afoot – but warns against ‘super hot young girls’ trying to climb aboard the influencer bandwagon with their slick photos and perfect locations. Her career, she says, has been like ‘building the plane while flying it’.
‘I don’t recommend anyone goes down the aisle of the perfect influencer thing because you’re not going to be perfect forever,’ she says. ‘Things are going to change and then you’re going to feel like your only currency was your looks and that’s going to fall flat on its face come midlife. Plus, you put yourself in a very vulnerable position if you are too perfect; you’re only going to get knocked down.’
But for now, Constance, who has a crown tattooed on her forehead, is sitting comfortably tall on her throne.
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