The Roast Busters boasted online of having sex with drunken, underage girls. Ringleader Joseph Parker has decided to start talking about it, five years later. Journalist Alison Mau writes that it seems he has "carefully chosen this moment to come forward to speak".

OPINION: If you watched the video interview with Roast Busters ringleader Joseph Parker on the telly on Monday night, there's a couple of other, less widely viewed bits of content you should probably catch for context.

They star the same Joseph Parker, although this time he's calling himself Hohepa. In a three-minute video on the Patreon crowdfunding website, Parker pleads for people to give him cash to launch a music career. It's early days - the video has not attracted any dollars yet. There is no content to show off. But he's really keen for you to fund him "for the ride" and watch him "finding a manager, and booking shows".

In the video on Patreon, Parker refers obliquely to the scandal in which he and his mates victimised and humiliated underage girls by having group sex with them, filming it, and then putting it online to boast about it. Seven victims came forward, five laid formal complaints.

And in a rambling, sometimes-incoherent podcast where Parker burps and stops to scratch his "nuts", he laughs when he talks about Roast Busters and calls it a "performance act" which gave him access to "all kinds of sinful treats".

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He says in the podcast that it is "kinda crazy, kinda cool" to be talking about Roast Busters.

Now, as a reporter for 30 years, I've seen some stuff. I have a pretty strong stomach. But at that point I had to make a dash for the toilet.

SUPPLIED Joseph Parker (left) and Beraiah Hales were identified as the leaders of a group known as the Roast Busters, after they boasted online of having sex with drunken, underage girls.

By all means go and have a listen for yourself, but here are some of the "highlights" from Parker's podcast:

- About the reaction to the scandal, he said: "They kind of took it in a very serious matter (sic) and that changed the entire trajectory of the Roast Busters and changed it into something it wasn't ... obviously destroyed its original meaning". Whatever that was.

- "It was such a traumatic thing for me experiencing that much pressure, that much public notoriety, it was a lot of pressure on me, and very traumatic."

- Parker has also been thinking about "How much it has affected my life and how much it is stopping me, has been stopping me from a success, from moving forward in my life and moving towards the place I want to be."

- "I don't know how something so small has been hindering me from filling out the shoes I know I have built for me."

- "I didn't really care honestly, what I was famous for I just wanted to be known, but I didn't know how badly (the) negative side of fame could affect you."

And so it goes on. I thought about trying to count the numbers of times he says I, me, my - but he says it hundreds of times. The really important thing to know is that not once does he mention the victims. Not one single time.

SUPPLIED Joseph Parker said in his podcast that underage sex acts was a "performance art".

His focus is entirely on how this "performance" that took place five years ago is hindering his rise to fame.

"As a teenager I made some decisions that I thought would be able to catapult me into a career doing the things that I love", he says in the Patreon video.

"All it did was showed me the people that I'd hurt, and left me with a stain on my reputation that'll be there for life."

Reputation appears to be a preoccupation of Parker's. In Monday night's interview on Newshub, he tells reporter Karen Rutherford he removed the Roast Busters video - where he bragged about underage sex - from Facebook because he "already knew that wasn't the reputation I wanted to remembered for. That wasn't the impact I wanted to have on the world".

I, me, my. When Rutherford asks him what he would say to the young women he humiliated, he seems unable to apologise, and just stops mid-sentence. We have seen this kind of thing before, notably in former broadcaster Tony Veitch's repeated attempts to justify the unjustifiable.

This really should go without saying, but to be clear; plenty of young people have made mistakes. No-one should be stripped of the chance for a future, and that includes the career they're passionate about, if they have made a concrete effort to make amends. That's a very important "if".

It's hard to see how Parker has done that. He does not take the opportunity to apologise to his victims, and he offers no explanation of what things he has done - actions speak louder than words - to atone, learn and grow. He really wants that music career, though.

STUFF The Roast Busters scandal prompted thousands of people to mark against New Zealand's rape culture.

There are also untruths in Parker's interview that went unchallenged. He says police decided not to to press charges for a reason, that they "came to the conclusion that they did for a reason."

This is a subtle rewriting of history; you might now assume a thorough and careful investigation was carried out, and a regretful decision made by police not to take the case forward.

In fact, the IPCA ruled the initial investigation into the case had been bungled by police who had failed to undertake basic investigative tasks, and had let the victims down.

Parker also manages to slide right past the issue of what he's actually done to prove he's now a better man. He claims to be, but there's no evidence offered. He claims to have tried to contact the young women but the claim is left unexamined. We have to take his word for that.

In his crowdfunding video Parker looks beseechingly into the camera and promises us he wants to be "the best person" he can be, and that the vehicle he's chosen to make that happen is "music and entertainment." It's all very vague and aspirational, and he does not say what specific good deeds he intends to do to "impact as many people as I can for the better".

Parker has had five years to think about what he did. His podcast shows he's spent most of that time thinking about himself; struggling with how to get rid of the yoke around his neck and be famous again, but in a different way. He has carefully chosen this moment to come forward to speak, and it seems clearly linked to his wish to launch a music career.

He says he wants to make Roast Busters "really really small in my life, where it's not even a thing".

Maybe he'll get his wish. But it's unlikely the victims, who he won't even mention, will be able to get the same wish.