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The ice pipe and extortion threat behind Bainbridge resignation

By Chip Le Grand

February 16, 2022 — 11.56am

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For the past six years, public humiliation and shame has stalked Melbourne entrepreneur Geoff Bainbridge. A day ago, the latest WhatsApp message from an all-too familiar mobile phone number warned that unless he paid up, time was running out.

“Tik Tok little man,” it read.

At 9am on Wednesday, the board of Lark Distilling, a publicly listed Hobart-based whisky distiller Bainbridge ran for the past two years, announced that the Grill’d co-founder had stepped down as managing director for personal reasons.

Geoff Bainbridge quit his job as managing director of Lark Distilling after a six-year extortion ordeal.

Speaking to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald from Los Angeles shortly after the announcement, Bainbridge revealed the extraordinary story behind these reasons; an extortion racket that began in December 2015 when he awoke in an unfamiliar apartment to find two strange men with video footage showing what he’d done the night before.

The most explicit video showed him wearing only underpants, smoking ice from a glass pipe and ranting in a drug-induced haze. “My stomach hit the ground,” he says. “I was just horrified. You are like, what else happened? What else don’t I remember? How am I going to explain this to anyone?”

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Bainbridge, a 50-year-old business investor and executive, can recall only fragments of that night.

He had recently ended his association with Grill’d, the business he helped take from a single burger joint into a $300 million food empire, and was in a south-east Asian country looking at other investment opportunities.

At the end of his day’s meetings, he had settled in at a local bar and struck up a conversation with a woman. After more than a few drinks, he agreed to go with her to a party. On the way, they stopped at her apartment. Another couple was there. They drank more and shared a joint.

The rest is a jumble. He confirms it is him in the video but says he isn’t an ice user and doesn’t know how he came to have the drug or what else he was given.

The next morning, when Bainbridge awoke to discover the two strange men, he soon realised it was a shakedown. They played him the footage. They threatened to expose him. They demanded money.

Bainbridge says he was in a state of panic and fear.

“Your brain doesn’t think logically in this situation. You run scenarios in your head. The reality for me is there is footage of me consuming class-A drugs in a foreign country. That has serious ramifications.”

He took the men back to his hotel and gave them some cash. Then he went to an ATM and gave them more; about $3000 in total. They left and for the next few years, he didn’t hear from them again. Over time, he slowly put the episode out of his mind.

Then, in 2019, he began receiving WhatsApp messages. Remember me? Remember that video? They demanded more money. Bainbridge didn’t see he had any choice.

“You make a bad decision one night and it cascades into another decision,” he says. “I guess that is the nature of extortion. You just find yourself really wedged into a corner.”

Over the next two years, Bainbridge made a series of 14 payments to two extortionists totalling nearly $9000. Because of the illegal drug use, he didn’t feel he could go to the police. Instead, as the frequency and size of the demands grew, he this month approached a London-based global risk consultancy, Control Risks, for advice.

The Control Risks report, seen by this masthead, presented Bainbridge with a devil’s choice. Although it was unclear whether the extortionists were part of a larger, organised crime group, they were assessed as a credible, escalating threat.

The ability of the extortionists to alter the date stamp on one of the videos they sent Bainbridge, to make it appear as if it was captured in 2021 and not 2015, showed a level of technical proficiency. In a recent message, they threatened to provide the videos to Australian media outlets. A subsequent message carried evidence they had.

Bainbridge was given two options. He could either meet the financial demands of the extortionists or disengage in the hope they would go away. Bainbridge chose the latter.

On Tuesday morning, when he was contacted by Sharri Markson, a journalist with The Australian newspaper, and given a deadline to comment on one of the videos, he knew the extortionists had made good on their threats.

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Bainbridge tendered his resignation to the board of Lark Distilling without debate. Although he is a victim of an apparent crime, he accepts he is the author of his own misfortune and that his position at Lark had become untenable.

Bainbridge hopes that the exposure of the video will end his ordeal and eventually, bring him relief. He says he is principally worried about the impact this sordid episode will have on his four children.

“Ultimately, I put myself in a situation I shouldn’t have been in,” he says. “I’m a victim of extortion, but that wouldn’t have occurred without my poor judgment. I am deeply remorseful for my own actions.”