{"id":16054,"date":"2019-11-25T05:19:18","date_gmt":"2019-11-25T10:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=16054"},"modified":"2019-11-25T05:19:18","modified_gmt":"2019-11-25T10:19:18","slug":"sarah-hanson-young-australia-senator-wins-defamation-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2019\/11\/25\/sarah-hanson-young-australia-senator-wins-defamation-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Hanson-Young: Australia senator wins defamation case"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Australian senator has won a defamation case against a former political opponent she had accused of making sexist slurs towards her.<\/p>\n

Sarah Hanson-Young, of the Greens party, argued David Leyonhjelm defamed her in interviews last year by saying she was a misandrist and a hypocrite.<\/p>\n

Mr Leyonhjelm, who has since quit the Senate, failed to persuade a judge that his remarks were legally protected.<\/p>\n

A judge ordered him to pay A$120,000 (\u00a363,000; $80,000) plus costs.<\/p>\n

When she filed the Federal Court case last year, Ms Hanson-Young become the first Australian sitting politician to sue another for defamation.<\/p>\n

The feud between the pair fed into a wider public debate about sexism in Australian politics, where women comprise about a third of parliament.<\/p>\n

Ms Hanson-Young said she would donate the compensation to women’s charities.<\/p>\n

“When a man does the wrong thing, he should apologise, and when he doesn’t, he should be called out,” Ms Hanson-Young said on Monday.<\/p>\n

“And that’s what I did in this case – and I did it, not for me, but for every woman and girl across the country who has ever been told to stay silent, made to stay silent.”<\/p>\n

What prompted the case?<\/h2>\n

Mr Leyonhjelm, a Liberal Democrat, was widely criticised<\/a>\u00a0after he told Ms Hanson-Young to “stop shagging men” during a debate in the Senate about curbing violence against women.<\/p>\n

\"David<\/a>
David Leyonhjelm did not contest Australia’s election in May<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

After Ms Hanson-Young spoke out about the remarks, he repeated similar comments in television and radio interviews.<\/p>\n

The case drew additional attention when Ms Hanson-Young accused Mr Leyonhjelm of “slut-shaming” her. However, she ultimately did not sue on these grounds.<\/p>\n

Rather, much of the legal case centred on Mr Leyonhjelm’s claims in interviews that Ms Hanson-Young had said “words to the effect that all men are rapists”.<\/p>\n

Ms Hanson-Young strongly denied ever making such a statement, and her account was backed up in court by other senators.<\/p>\n

Mr Leyonhjelm’s lawyers denied he had concocted the statement, but conceded that he could not remember her exact words.<\/p>\n

They argued Mr Leyonhjelm’s media interviews should be covered by parliamentary privilege – a defence against defamation – because the comments had originated in the Senate.<\/p>\n

Justice Richard White disagreed, adding Mr Leyonhjelm’s comments had been “actuated by malice in that he published his claim concerning the applicant to a mass audience with the intention of publicly shaming her”.<\/p>\n

The court will make a ruling on the legal costs next month.<\/p>\n

Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Australian senator has won a defamation case against a former political opponent she had accused of making sexist slurs towards her. Sarah Hanson-Young, of the Greens party, argued David Leyonhjelm defamed her in interviews […]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[350,109,2,6],"tags":[819,1023,6772],"class_list":{"0":"post-16054","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-australia","8":"category-headline","9":"category-news","10":"category-world","11":"tag-australia","12":"tag-defamation","13":"tag-sarah-hanson-young","14":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16054"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16057,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16054\/revisions\/16057"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}