Slander in the Court

Deeming V Pesutto

If you don’t think slander is serious, you may not have known anyone personally who has been publicly slandered. Slander has devastating impacts on lives and it should have no place in politics. Because of my involvement with gender-critical politics, I now know many women who have been publicly slandered.

In the gender-critical movement, public slander is something we negotiate to advocate for the political and legal outcomes we want. Our main argument is that sex is real and that women and girls should be protected, from men and boys. it’s hard to mount a case against our arguments with logic and facts, so we get called transphobic on most days, on other days we get called racists and Nazis. Those accusations intend to discredit us as people to nullify our public voice.

I now know several women who have been subject to public slander. I don’t know Moira Deeming well, but we have been in the same small section of Australian women’s politics for a few years. Along with Sall Grover, Angela Jones, Gillian Spencer and Katherine Deves, Moira is among the women I have met personally, who I have read things about in the media, that I know are lies. Those lies are designed to disempower perfectly reasonable and fact-based arguments that gender-critical women are mounting.

Consequently, women who end up on my side of activism are notoriously thick-skinned, often a little bit rude and almost always genuinely motivated. I found it particularly amusing when a video of my friend Stassja Frei was played in the Australian Federal Court in the Deeming V Pesutto defamation case by the defence.  The video was presented as an example of the kind of dodgy characters that Moira Deeming MP was associating with. The kind of women who engage in “the debate” in a hateful way.

Stassja’s speech was from the Let Women Speak Melbourne rally, that Moira attended. For the occasion of the speech, Stassja wore a unicorn horn that she called a ‘female penis’ and did a comedy sketch where she called many people, including some trans-identified people, and the then Premier of Victoria Dan Andrews, ‘dickheads’. The context of feminist comedy played in Federal Court by scoffing Melbourne lawyers, was an amusing highlight for many of us in the gender-critical stands of the Deeming V Pesutto show.

I am not ignorant that the trial could go either way, nor that the lawyers are ordering the Italian marble for the patio as we speak, nor that the lawyers are being partly funded by factional interests of the Liberal Party. I am well aware that political knives are being sharpened in Liberal Party circles this minute. But for me, the Deeming V Pesutto trial is not just about well performing lawyers playing gotcha for the kind of money that would feed Melbourne’s homeless for a year.

This court case is about who can engage in political discourse, how people, and especially women, should engage in political discourse, and with whom women should do politics. Women who engage in essentially working-class politics, with ordinary women, saying dangerous things like “gender identity is bollocks”, those women are not permitted to be speaking around posh Melbourne Liberal Party circles. As I have said many times, but not originally, this culture war has a class war core.

The highlight thus far for me, in the Deeming V Pesutto drama, playing out on public live stream, was being able to watch Moira’s defamation lawyer, the brilliant Sue Chrysanthou SC, mercilessly shred John Pesutto’s defence, and the man himself, on the witness stand this week.

The evidence Ms Chrysanthou went over regarding the life and connections of Moira Deeming was stunning in its mundanity. Moira had some drinks on a popular women’s YouTube channel with other women, Moira laughed about men in gym shorts, Moira nodded while someone talked about institutional capture, Moira is a Christian, Moira spoke at the Let Women Speak rally for a Muslim constituent who wanted women’s spaces, and shockingly, Moira refused to denounce gender-critical women for being far-right, because she knew for a fact that they were not. That Moira refused to slander to gain political advantage, and that she is a politician, may be the one remarkable thing we learned about Moira Deeming.

Ms Chrysanthou tediously and mercilessly dissected the embarrassingly flimsy evidence on which the leaders of the Parliamentary Liberal Party of Victory acted to expel Deeming, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, line by line. By the time Chrysanthou was only a third way through the fateful dossier, the judge and the defence looked to be losing the will to live, while gender-critical feminists around Australia were refreshing their popcorn.

Gender-critical women so rarely see our arguments get one word of defence in this country, let alone get to witness the expensive skills of a woman, such as Chrysanthou, hold a prominent man to account in the Australian Federal Court, for disciplining a woman who expresses very ordinary facts about human biology.

In addressing the issue of Moira Deeming holding ‘fringe beliefs’, Chrysanthou asked Pesutto if it was fringe for a woman to believe that she should be able to choose a person to perform her pap smear, who has a shared health experience. Graciously, Pesutto admitted that this was not a “fringe belief”.

By contrasting the original documents in the Pesutto dossier, to what was eventually presented to the Parliamentary Liberal Pary room, Chrysanthou was attempting to demonstrate that the dossier had been edited to remove material that was fairer to Moira’s gender-critical associates and retain incomplete information that was, at best misleading, and at worst, slanderous.

Nobody was surprised to hear Pesutto admit in Court that former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennet was contributing to his legal fund, but it was a new revelation to hear Pesutto admit that he was sharing a large amount of information with Kennet, some of it he knew to be privileged.

An article from the Australian Financial Review was presented to the court in a way that could have been interpreted to indicate that the article contained poorly veiled threats from Kennet to Liberals who supported Deeming with affidavits.  The vibe seemed to have been “nice pre-selection you got there”.

Stripped of any evidence of Deeming having any links at all to anyone with far-right or Nazi beliefs, Pesutto struggled to articulate his motivation for acting to remove Deeming from the Parliamentary Liberal Party, leaving commentators to make conclusions about factional struggles and Pesutto’s lolly-legs before master politician, former Premier Daniel Andrews.

The entire issue of sex and gender that Moira Deeming has been accused of overbalancing on, is a genuinely difficult one for anyone who takes hold of the Victorian Liberal Party, in the event of Pesutto’s inevitable resignation. Pesutto’s problem, was that he tried to play Andrews in his own game by the rules that Andrews set.

You can’t cover truth with slander any more than you can cover sex with pretend. You can dispense of one woman, maybe even two, but ultimately the issue of sex being real and important will not disappear from public debate while it is being denied in law.

The Victorian Liberal Party will need to step away from the culture wars and dissect the issue of sex and gender, factually and strategically, keeping safeguarding principles and the rights of women and girls out front. If they do this, they will take the public with them. Slander should have no place in a party that purports classic liberal principles. The Victorian Liberals will need a more courageous leadership to remove the stench of slander that is currently blowing down Spring St.