The Crucifixion of Angie Jones

How Australian media and politicians colluded to destroy a woman's reputation, by Jennifer Nabben.

Angie Jones is a 5’1” single mother of four children. She grew up in a working-class suburb in Melbourne with a younger brother who was bullied because he was mentally and physically disabled. Angie's early experiences on picket lines alongside her father, a committed union member and Labor voter, baked left-wing activism into her bones.  

Angie was born standing up for other people’s rights.

Now, her good name is being shredded by a group of politicians whose stupidity and cowardice should become the stuff of Australian folk legend.

For Angie has been cast as the fall girl in the Deeming v Pesutto case currently being heard in Victoria’s Federal Court.  

Angie is accused of being a ‘Nazi sympathiser and a transphobe’.  

Oh, and another thing. Angie is Jewish.

A ‘rowdy’ rally

For those unfamiliar with the background, on the 18th of March, 2023, Angie attended the Let Women Speak (LWS) event in Melbourne along with Moira Deeming, a member of the Liberal Party. The event—organized by women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen—was designed to give everyday women a voice against the loss of their rights caused by the introduction of gender ideology into legal frameworks and policy decisions.

On the day, the Victorian police held back a group of trans rights activists yet somehow failed to stop another group from standing on the steps of Parliament and performing a Nazi salute.

Sue Chrysanthou and Moira Deeming

At a press conference following the rally, the Premier, Dan Andrews said that the LWS rally was: “A nasty, hateful event, long before anyone offered up the Nazi salute… you could say that the Liberal Party are becoming a nasty, hateful, little rabble.

For the Labor government that has dominated Victorian politics for three terms - this was an opportunity for Andrews to pounce on his political opponent John Pesutto, the newly elected leader of the opposition Liberal Party. 

The LWS event provided political gold for Andrews, political risk for the Liberals and a disaster for the women wanting to highlight the erosion of women’s rights in Australia. 

Australian media did their bit. The event was described as ‘anti-trans’, with the Nazis' attendance serving as supposed proof that the feminists' cause aligned with theirs.

Panic

John Pesutto panicked when he received early reports that one of his newly-elected female MPs Moira Deeming was prominently featured in many of the early press reports of the LWS rally. 

Victorian Labor is ever-keen to present the Victorian state as the most socially progressive in Australia. Here, you can change your legal sex as easily as applying for a parking permit. The Labor government recently employed a Commissioner for LGBTQIA+ rights following another new position for a ‘Commissioner for Men’s Behaviour Change’.  

But while Andrews’ government promotes Victoria as ‘big-hearted’, some would disagree. 

In 2024, the outgoing Ombudsman, Deborah Glass produced a 230-page report on the Labor administration. Glass said in her report that, 'People were generally "shit scared" of upsetting the government… and if they were in any way identifiable as having done so, their careers would be finished.'

Illiberal liberals

It was in this political culture that John Pesutto made a series of decisions which are now the subject of a defamation case brought by his MP Moira Deeming. 

The day after the LWS event, the Liberal Party’s communications team pulled together a dossier of evidence against Kellie-Jay Keen and Angie Jones.  

Pesutto was considering his best course of action and firing Moira Deeming was top of the list. Negative media coverage of the rally presented Moira as ‘right-wing’ and stated that she associated with ‘known Nazi sympathisers’. This provided him with the cover he needed. His communications team sent selected bits of information to journalists even as the dossier was being compiled. 

The dossier was assembled over the course of a day and included information from sources including Pink News, Wikipedia, social media and Twitter accounts from users including ‘@paulinepantsdown’.

The dossier had a copy of a single tweet from Angie Jones’s Twitter account which the media included in their coverage of the rally (and now their coverage of the court case). The tweet was:

“Nazis and women want to get rid of paedo filth. Why don’t you?” 

Pesutto and the Liberal MPs on the stand have said they believe that the tweet does not need to be read in context but stands on its own. 

But reading the tweet in context tells a different story. 

The schoolboy dossier

Ms. Chrysanthou, Moira Deeming’s barrister, has been meticulous in exposing the dossier's contents as little more than a political hit job used to drive a narrative justifying any action taken against Moira Deeming.

Chrysanthou described the dossier in court as, ‘something that looked like it was pulled together by an eight-year-old’.

The shame game

In the days following the event, Mr Pesutto arranged press briefings, TV appearances and radio interviews where he repeated the false accusations in the dossier.  Kellie-Jay Keen and Angie Jones threatened to sue Pesutto for defamation. He settled out of court, and as part of that settlement, Pesutto published the following statement on his website:

‘Kellie-Jay Keen and Angela Jones are passionate women's rights activists with long histories of advocacy in Australia and internationally. I agree with them that genuine community concerns regarding women's safety and access to single-sex spaces, services and sport warrant meaningful public discussion’.

By now, Pesutto was well aware that the charges against Jones and Keen were unsubstantiated, misleading and just plain false.

This did not stop him from proceeding to try to destroy Angie Jones’ reputation in court.

When an apology is not an apology

Despite John Pesutto’s public statement admitting that Angie Jones was a principled advocate for women’s rights, he simply walked this back in his testimony. While the agreed settlement prevents Pesutto from further defaming Angie publicly—there is one place in which that agreement can be broken – and that’s a court of law.  

The Deeming v Pesutto case is being prosecuted nearly 18 months after the LWS event. It’s live-streamed daily and closely followed by politicians, the press and the public. Throughout it all, Angie Jones is forced yet again to watch John Pesutto defame her as a ‘Nazi sympathiser’.

“Having to go through this last year was bad enough. I was in a really bad place. The press coverage affected not only me but my whole family” Angie told me. “But having to sit through the same lies for a second time is just horrific. Even though the evidence in the case makes it clear that I am not any of the things they accuse me of, Pesutto and the media are only interested in the stories that sell”.

The cost of standing up

Angie’s reputation as a left-wing feminist with personal experience of violence meant she was respected in her community and trusted as an advocate for women experiencing domestic abuse. 

Before the LWS rally and the media brouhaha - Angie Jones had 14,000 followers on Twitter, a job she loved and a private life. Since the rally, Angie has received hundreds of death threats, been chased by a group of men who recognised her in the street, and was encouraged ‘to kill herself’ by trans activists online. 

These abusive social media posts were also used against Angie in a private family court case to prove she was of ‘bad character.’ 

What really happened?

So why did the Victorian police fail to stop the far right from gatecrashing the rally? While we may never know the full answer, the prosecution did present a curious piece of evidence.

Sue Chrysanthou showed several text messages between the Liberal MP, David Southwick and the Shadow Minister for Police, Brad Battin. Southwick asked him to find out why the police had not prevented the gatecrashing of the rally - the Shadow Minister simply replied, ‘We need to be very careful of the Victorian police’.  

On that day in 2023, the moment the men in black were allowed to perform the Nazi salute, three things happened – Labor spun themselves as the defenders against both Nazis and ‘hateful’ women,  Moira Deeming’s political career became the price for saving John Pesutto’s skin and Angie Jones’s single tweet became one of the most threadbare and transparent means to destroy a good woman’s good name.

This ordeal has had a devastating impact on Jones's life. Pesutto’s disgraceful tactics have cost her her job, privacy, and peace of mind. She has endured death threats, public harassment, and the entirely false picture painted by the media was used against her in a family court case. Despite the profound damage inflicted upon Angie, the media continues to fixate on a narrative that profits from her suffering. The politicians who continue to exploit her situation for their own gain demonstrate a callous, almost sadistic, disregard for her wellbeing.

The Deeming court case is ongoing, but to date, there has not been a single press article, TV or radio interview to ask Angie Jones or any other women at the event what they were there to speak about that day.