Celebrity gardener Don Burke won’t have changed many minds with his bumbling interview on Monday night’s A Current Affair.

Meanwhile, tabloid host Tracy Grimshaw showed she’s one of the best in a tough interview with Burke after explosive allegations of bullying, harassment and indecent assault against him were published by the ABC and Fairfax. 

Grimshaw didn’t give Burke an easy run on his former network — Burke’s Backyard ran on Nine for about 17 years before it was dumped in 2004, and since then he’s appeared on ACA and other Nine programs (as recently as a few weeks ago).

The exclusive interview ran for the full 30 minutes of the program last night, with Grimshaw pursuing her questions with tenacity. And while Burke admitted to having made mistakes, to having affairs and not being easy to work with, he denied the bulk of sexual allegations and suggested they were the result of “fragile” ex-employees with grudges against him.

In the sometimes bizarre interview, Burke claimed he had Asperger’s (self-diagnosed):

“I can look at a lens but I have difficulty looking at people in the eye. I missed the body language and the subtle signs that people give you. I don’t see that. I suffer from a terrible problem with that. Not seeing. No one can understand how you can’t see it. But you don’t.”

Autism Awareness Australia quickly responded to the claim on Twitter by saying it was “sickened tonight by Don Burke’s excuse of undiagnosed Aspergers as a reason for his appalling behaviour. What kind of human sinks this low?”.

He strenuously denied a lot of the crude language and any sexual allegations, and said there were grievances with his accusers. Grimshaw appeared incredulous when he refused to detail what they were — he said some of them were “fragile” and he didn’t want to air any grievances publicly.

Burke blamed the “Twittersphere” for the “witch hunt”, and said he thought he was a target because people didn’t like him, and that stories people told about him may have been exaggerated over the years.

At times during the interview Grimshaw seemed exasperated with Burke’s denials, including repeated references to the stories as “rumours”. She also put a story she’d heard herself about Burke from a woman, confirmed by a crew, which he denied. “So the crew are lying?” she asked him. He answered: “I can’t go into that. We have some problems. I didn’t say that.”

In an interview on Nine’s Today program on Tuesday morning, Grimshaw said she’d expected a bit more transparency from Burke: “I thought he would be more accountable when I sat down with him. I didn’t expect the level of denial that we got,” she said.

Nine has said it has started an internal investigation into Burke — part of which has to cover the negotiations with him (if any) about his A Current Affair segments. Who talked to Burke, what assurances were made — Nine says they were not paid for — and what measures were taken to check Burke’s past besides personal knowledge and the fact that he was a past Nine star?

Fairfax has today published new allegations against Burke involving one horrible story from former Olympic gold medallist, Susie O’Neill and confirmed by her then-manager Nick Cummins, which he said he reported to Nine at the time.

If true, it is another example of Nine having prior knowledge of Burke’s behaviour and not doing anything — despite the network distancing itself from the past with its statement: “The current management of Nine cannot comment on how these sorts of matters may have been dealt with in the past; these allegations are serious and would not be tolerated at Nine today,” a spokesman for Nine said.

Fairfax Media did not report who Cummins complained to at Nine, or who rejected his appeal. That would be interesting. Fairfax Media has already reported other women complaining to Nine executives David Leckie and Peter Meakin (who both said they could not recall them) without success.