If you put yourself on a stage, speak publicly, nominate yourself for awards, if you present a wealthy, fabulous lifestyle in order to recruit other people to do the same job as you then you become a public figure. And should those things you present as fact turn out not to be fact, but instead to simply be a manipulation of the truth in order to get other people to sign on the dotted line in order to make you money, then damn right you should expect people to call you out on it.
And if you make public claims about a product that are untested, or simply not true or, in lots of cases (cure for cancer, anyone?) downright dangerous, then you should absolutely expect people to call you out on it, and you should expect the ASA to come knocking.
And if you're the public face of that company, and you make a shed load of cash, not of the products you sell, out of simply being the public face of that company, then again, you should expect your work to be scrutinised.
I don't think remarks about people's personal appearance are on, but out of 14 threads, I think there's been ONE personal remark, that was jumped on and shut down.
So where's the bullying? The person who claims she's being bullied is doing so to undermine the fantastic journalistic research that has been done on these threads. The industry has many questions to answer that would never even have been asked if it weren't for the good people here.
In my field, I'm a public face. Everything I do is scrutinised, criticised, belittled, by members of the public within seconds of me doing it. Have I ever thought it was bullying? Have I bollocks. I just take it on the chin and never read the comments