(Credit: Marcin n®/Wikipedia)
Australian politician Emma Husar is suing BuzzFeed over its story reporting that former staff members complained about her, accusing her of bullying and sexual harassment. She claimed the article was “slut-shaming,” the Guardian reported.
“Ms Husar has launched defamation proceedings in the Federal Court against Buzzfeed, and the reporter of the original story Alice Workman,” the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported. “She claims she was not given an appropriate amount of time to respond to the allegations the organisation put to her, before it published the story and it was promoted on social media.”
Husar also claimed that she wasn’t given an opportunity to respond and called the story “shameless misrepresentation.”
Husar pointed iMediaEthics to her statement in the House of Representatives in which she called the BuzzFeed article “the most damaging article.” She said she was contacted a minute after publication by BuzzFeed seeking comment and “answers to 48 questions” so she ended up having “no chance to refute or respond.”
“Within 36 hours of this gross misrepresentation and the slut-shaming smears going viral, I was asked to resign as the member for Lindsay,” she said.
Further, Husar said BuzzFeed “knew I was bound by confidentiality under the Whelan process I was being examined by, but they went ahead and they published their slut-shaming story knowing, with full intent, that it would go viral.”
“Let me correct the record. They didn’t give me any notice in advance. They didn’t give me the opportunity to seek release from my confidentiality obligations so that I could respond,” she is quoted as saying. “They didn’t give me the opportunity to use our legal system to preserve the confidential process until it had properly played out. Sunlight is always the best disinfectant and, today, I bathe those misrepresentations in a flood of light.”
iMediaEthics has written to BuzzFeed for its response to her lawsuit.
