CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses allegations of sexual harassment.
A Sydney woman has accused The Daily Telegraph of “betraying” her after it identified her in a story about sexual harassment allegations, allegedly without her consent — in a move that she says reinforces women’s “very real fears” about reporting allegations of sexual harassment.
Rosie*, who requested her name be changed to protect her privacy, said she was approached by a journalist from The Daily Telegraph after the masthead got wind that she had filed a sex discrimination complaint against world-famous pool club Bondi Icebergs.
Rosie filed the complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission after it allegedly banned her from the venue following allegations she made about members sexually harassing her. She says she agreed to provide the statement detailing these allegations to The Daily Telegraph, but did not give permission for her name to be used. She originally proposed giving the newspaper non-close up images of her surfing, and a pseudonym. On advice from her lawyer, she later asked not to be identified due to the nature of her work, and claims she was told via text message that she would not be identified.
Rosie says she later received a text message from someone working at the newspaper letting her know that the story would be published with her name in it, offering to put a line in the story saying she declined to comment when contacted.
“[A member of editorial staff] said that we knew your name and the basis of your complaint before we contacted you, so we will write the story based on that,” a text message allegedly sent from the newspaper read.
“I explained to him that you don’t want to be identified, but he said we knew your name from council sources who told us about the complaint, and we could have written it without coming to you.”
Rosie said she begged the publication not to identify her, but “woke up to my name and face plastered across the front page of their print publication and all over their social platform.”
“I was devastated when they backflipped on that agreement,” she claimed to PEDESTRIAN.TV.
“The Daily Telegraph came to me with the story, they wanted to run it — not me. I never intended on this going public.”
She said she felt like she had been “betrayed”. Upon seeing the article and her face on the front page of The Daily Telegraph‘s paper, Rosie says she sent the newspaper a flurry of distressed text messages seen by PEDESTRIAN.TV in which she begged for her name to be removed from the story. In her messages, she disclosed other experiences she’d had with alleged abuse to explain why she was so upset about her name being published.
To her horror, the following day The Daily Telegraph published a second story about her — quoting the information she says she had disclosed in her text messages. It listed previous AVOs Rosie had applied for, two of which the article said had been “dismissed”. Rosie alleges she had no idea this story was going live.
“By mentioning the AVOs, they exploited some very private, personal and painful previous experiences I had had with men unknown to me to generate negative attention directed at me,” she alleges.
According to Rosie, mentioning her four previous AVOs without providing what she called “the very vital context that police applied for two of them on my behalf and encouraged me to apply for the other two myself, which I later dropped before a hearing” is “victim-blaming”.
She felt the article portrayed her as “vain”, “as a man-hating, self-absorbed litigant”, and as a “self-absorbed young woman”.
“It’s cheap and outdated, we should be so far [from] this type of reporting in 2023,” she said.
“This is my life, and that follow-up story caused me distress. I did not need to be reminded, let alone shamed, for the crimes men had committed against me previously.
“Women are already aware of the uphill battle they face when speaking out about [alleged] abuse, victimisation. The Daily Telegraph‘s reporting has just reinforced those very real [fears].”
Rosie said that while the aftermath of The Daily Telegraph‘s report (and the subsequent stories from other publications about it) has been mostly okay — aside from a few nasty messages on social media — she worries about the impact of stories like hers on women who may feel that speaking out against sexual harassment is not worth it.
“This is why women don’t come forward,” she said.
PEDESTRIAN.TV reached out to The Daily Telegraph for comment but the publication did not respond.
Help is available.
- If you require immediate assistance, please call 000.
- If you’d like to speak to someone about sexual violence, please call the 1800 Respect hotline on 1800 737 732 or chat online.
- Under 25? You can reach Kids Helpline at 1800 55 1800 or chat online.
The post A Syd Woman Trusted The Daily Telegraph W/ Sexual Harassment Allegations. She Says It Betrayed Her appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
