Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe has broken her silence after a video emerged of her engaged in some spirited, early-morning badinage with patrons outside a Melbourne gentleman’s club.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese questioned Ms Thorpe’s mental wellbeing after an incident in which she delivered a serve to a group of men standing outside Maxine’s, an adult entertainment venue in Melbourne’s Brunswick.
She accused the media and her political opponents of hypocrisy for making hay over the back and forth in which she was filmed mocking one man lingering outside the club for his “small penis”.
Senator Thorpe said she had been celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday and looking for somewhere to dance when a passer-by suggested Maxine’s.
“We had a great time inside,” she said.
“It wasn’t until we put our feet outside of the door that I was verbally attacked by one male.”
Senator Thorpe, who resigned from the Greens over an emerging split with her former party colleagues over the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, said it was not inappropriate for her to have goaded one member of a group of men lingering outside the strip club in the early hours.
“I responded how (I have) responded all my life to racism,’’ Senator Thorpe said.
“I walked out the door and he has a shot at me.
“I think you have to have small genitals to do that.”
She laughed off Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s questions about her mental stability during a sympathetic interview on Thursday with Melbourne shock jock Neil Mitchell.
‘An allergy to racism’
“Albo wants to know about my health. I’ve been diagnosed with an allergy to racism; it just comes out,” she said.
Ms Thorpe was rounded on for the incident which some commentators claimed was not befitting the behaviour of an Australian Senator.
On Thursday she offered a rejoinder by claiming she had seen fellow members of the upper house in a state of inebriation at Parliament.
“I’ve had senators cry to me because of their guilt of what white people did to Black people.
“I wonder about those people’s mental health.”
She has had to help some female senators home after they got drunk at work, Senator Thorpe said.
“I wonder about the mental health of senators who are staggering around drunk by themselves – female – at night, where I have gone to their aid to make sure that they get back to their hotel safely,” she said.
Mitchell suggested that Senator Thorpe had been wrong to inject race into the altercation.
“We cannot be racist to white people,” she said in response. “White people don’t fall into that category. I responded to an aggressive white male who was being very disrespectful of me.”
Ms Thorpe laughed off a news report that members of her family and extended family were “angling for control” of the body that will serve as the Victorian equivalent to the Voice.
The Age newspaper reported that members of Ms Thorpe’s family were considering contesting a democratic election to the body.
“I think that’s hilarious (for the media to be) making out we are some sort of mafia family,’’ she said.
“I did have a laugh at those (reports), to be honest.”
Ms Thorpe had recently been embroiled in controversy after rushing a speaker at an anti-trans rally outside Parliament and appearing to lay down in front of a vehicle disrupting the Mardi Gras parade.
“On all of those occasions, except for the last one, they did not know I was a senator,” she said.
