Outback Wrangler Matt Wright‘s wife Kaia has announced the couple are due to welcome their third baby – as her husband faces potential jail time.
The baby is due in April next year, she confirmed with News.com.au. The Wrights already have two children: six-year-old Banjo and Dusty, who is nearly three.
The news comes just a month after Wright was found guilty of conspiring to cover up details of the helicopter crash that killed his best mate, and he could face up to 15 years in jail.
Lawyers for Wright are battling to keep him out of jail as they prepare appeals against the jury’s findings.
Kaia sat through the trial while pregnant – and kept it a secret from the media until now.
She said: ‘It’s a huge blessing during what has been a hellish time of media onslaught and ongoing bullying. It’s brought my focus back to what is good, true and beautiful, and that’s our family, it’s what really matters.’
The Outback Wrangler star lost his best mate and co-star Chris ‘Willow’ Wilson in the February 2022 crash that left pilot Sebastian Robinson a paraplegic.
The crash occurred during a crocodile-egg collecting trip in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory while Mr Wilson was slung on a line below a chopper to drop onto nests in remote swampland.
Outback Wrangler Matt Wright’s wife Kaia has announced the couple are due to welcome their third baby
Chris ‘Willow’ Wilson died collecting crocodile eggs while slung on a line beneath a helicopter
The helicopter (pictured) crashed during a crocodile egg-collecting mission in remote swampland in the Northern Territory, in February 2022
Wright was accused of lying to crash investigators about the amount of fuel in the machine, of trying to get Mr Robinson to falsify flying hours and of asking a friend to ‘torch’ the helicopter’s maintenance release.
On August 29, a Supreme Court jury in Darwin found Wright guilty on the first two counts but could not reach an agreement on the third count regarding the ‘torch’ claim.
Prosecutors alleged Wright was worried investigators would learn his chopper flying-hour meters were regularly disconnected to extend flying hours beyond official thresholds and paperwork was falsified to match.
The prosecution did not allege Wright caused the chopper crash, the death of Mr Wilson or Mr Robinson’s injuries.
During the trial the defence targeted Mr Robinson as a cocaine-dealing ‘party animal’ who was to blame for the crash.
Wright has been granted bail ahead of a sentencing hearing on December 12.
Following his guilty verdicts, Wright told reporters outside court that there were ‘no winners’ from the trial.
Kaia and Matt Wright first met when the TV star suddenly landed his helicopter near her while she was with friends on a boat off Rottnest Island in 2014
Lawyers for reality TV star Matt Wright are battling to keep him out of jail as they prepare appeals against a jury’s finding he tried to pervert the course of justice after a fatal helicopter crash
‘The ordeal has been incredibly tough on everyone and it’s always been hard to understand why the focus of these investigations have been solely on me and not into the cause of the crash,’ he said at the time.
Prosecutors have indicated they will be seeking a term of imprisonment for Wright.
The maximum penalty for attempting to pervert the course of justice is 15 years’ in jail.
Ms Wright, has never her husband’s side throughout their many ordeals after they first met eight years ago.
Kaia was sipping champagne on a boat off Western Australia‘s Rottnest Island in 2014 as she rued her shocking love life to some close friends.
‘I’ll just hope an angel will fall from the sky,’ she told them.
And then fate stepped in.
‘Randomly, this chopper just flew in and landed in front of us,’ she later told Stellar magazine about that first meeting with her future husband.
‘He was all booted up. He changed into some shorts and jumped out.’
They exchanged numbers on the first date – she put his next to ‘Big Kid’, he put hers next to ‘Legend’ – and a whirlwind romance followed.
They got engaged in 2016 and married in 2017.
The couple now have a sprawling home in the remote NT outback which they share with their two children, 15 rescue crocs, three pigs – Pepsi, Truffle and Cola – two dingoes, Ernie and Albie, seven snakes and a collection of green tree frogs.
Kaia had grown up in WA’s Kimberley region where her parents worked in community development in Broome and Derby before she attended high school in Perth.
She studied journalism at university in Sydney – and later wrote her husband’s best-selling life story – before moving into advertising.
