Channel 4’s Cathy Newman says ‘I’m still getting abuse over my Jordan Peterson interview’ The Channel 4 News journalist fears that threats are putting women off public life

“They are very determined, these alt-right characters,” says Cathy Newman, phlegmatically.

The Channel 4 News journalist is reflecting on her experiences since a combative interview with the controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson last year, in which she challenged his opinions on issues such as the gender pay gap.

Peterson’s army of online followers subjected her to a torrent of abuse. It included the circulating of fake pornographic images of her – one of which was seen by her teenage daughter.

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Security had to be called in because of what the show’s editor called the “vicious misogynistic abuse, nastiness, and threats” directed at Newman.

Sexist attacks on women in politics

The interview took place in January 2018 and Peterson subsequently urged his followers to “lay the hell off”. But Newman says abuse directed at her because of the interview continues to this day.

“You get slightly inured to it,” she says. “I’m 45 and I don’t take it to heart. I try not to look at it as much as I used to.”

Sexist attacks have long been a problem for women in the political world, as Newman found while researching her book Bloody Brilliant Women.

“Some of the early female MPs got an appalling amount of abuse. It felt so similar to the abuse that women MPs get now,” she says.

Newman feels that things are actually worse today for female politicians than ever before. “We have actually gone backwards. It is very toxic at the moment and it is very frightening for MPs.”

Fighting online abuse

Ellie Cooper, the daughter of the Labour MP Yvette Cooper and former chancellor Ed Balls, recently revealed that their family home has been “fitted with panic buttons, industrial-locking doors and explosive bags to catch the mail”.

What is the solution? Newman won’t go as far as supporting the proposals set out in the Government’s “Online Harms White Paper”. It seeks to introduce a new duty of care towards internet users and hold companies to account for “behaviours which are harmful but not necessarily illegal”. She says supporting it is not her place as a journalist.

But the situation “absolutely does put people off going into politics,” says Newman. “A young woman said to me recently she wouldn’t go into politics because she couldn’t handle the abuse. And I spoke to a senior MP who said she was giving up because she couldn’t take the abuse… More than 50 per cent of the population are women and they need to be represented fairly in Parliament.”

This article first appeared in ‘The Yorkshire Post‘