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Cathy Newman has said she still gets abuse from Jordan Peterson fans, including death and rape threats, years after her fiery clash with the Canadian professor on Channel 4.
Newman, 50, and Peterson, 62, butted heads in a viral interview on the gender pay gap in 2018, which has since racked up almost 50 million views on YouTube. In the wake of the interview, Channel 4 sought “security advice” after Newman was hit with a torrent of misogynistic abuse.
The debate was part of a tense moment in feminist discourse on social media after the onset of the MeToo Movement, and received a lot of attention from men who agreed with Peterson’s controversial views on gender and attacked Newman for her line of questioning.
“It’s really interesting because I still get a lot of abuse from his fans, which is kind of annoying,” she told The Independent at the Henley Literary Festival on Sunday (6 October).
The broadcaster, who has been a passionate advocate for women’s rights for years, said she felt the weight of the responsibility to ger the interview right.
“For a few years that really bothered me, and it sort of got into my head like, ‘Oh, you know, did I screw it all up?’” she recalled at the literary event held at Henley Town Hall in Henley-on-Thames.
Newman, who is promoting her new bookThe Ladder: Life Lessons from Women Who Scaled the Heights & Dodged the Snakes, said she has received years of abuse following the highly publicised exchange.
“The trolls came along,” she said of the aftermath. “I had people sending me pictures of knives covered in blood and, you know, rape threats.
“I had my home address put out online. I’ve had stalkers in the past, so that was kind of moderately worrying.”
She added that the backlash has affected her work, stating: “When you get a deluge of abuse and death threats for it, it’s quite hard to ignore it because you’re not able to do your job properly.”
Newman explained that she had been “landed” with the interview after a long day in which she had been covering the conflict in Syria, as well as Brexit. Due to Channel 4’s lack of researchers, the broadcaster was forced to prepare for the interview last minute.
“I do hundreds of interviews a year. Some of them I’m really proud of and some of them I’m less proud of. And that’s probably in the less proud category,” she said.
“I’d never heard of who he was, I Googled him but there was nothing on Wikipedia at that point. So, that shows how obscure he was at the point I interviewed him.”
She said that an employee at the network had been very enthusiastic about sharing the whole interview and she didn’t have time to reflect.
“It was only afterwards that I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I should have stopped and thought about that,’” she said.
Newman continued: “But, you know, life comes at you fast when you’re doing live broadcasting, and you win some, you lose some.”
She has also received positive responses to the exchange.
“I feel pleased that I get quite a lot of young women stop me in the street and say, ‘I really like what you said to Jordan Peterson, the fact that you didn’t take any crap,’” she said. “Then I get lots of young men going ‘You got owned’.”
Newman was defiant speaking about those encounters, adding: “I don’t really care what some loser in his bedroom thinks about me.”
