No Filter

Want to listen before everyone else? Mamamia subscribers get exclusive early access to No Filter from 6am every Saturday, a full two days before regular listeners. Click here to subscribe now. For the best part of a decade, Cassandra Thorburn has been publicly known as one thing: Karl Stefanovic's ex-wife. The headline that ran when their 21-year marriage ended in 2016, and pretty much every headline since. But Cassandra was a journalist and a television producer long before any of that, working across Australia, New Zealand and the US, and in the years since her divorce she's quietly rebuilt herself over and over: a season of Dancing with the Stars, a children's book, a podcast on surviving separation, a stint as a dental nurse, aged care work through the pandemic. She is, by her own account, someone who has never really had a plan. She's just kept saying yes to the next thing. Then, at the start of this year, she was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of breast cancer, one so uncommon that fewer than tw