It was much worse than childish insults – it was just about the worst bullying I’ve ever seen on social media, in an attempt to humiliate Helen and destroy her career.
First Louis Staples of the Independent sent a barrage of tweets saying that everyone she worked with at the New Statesmen hated her, then when some evidence emerged of former colleagues saying they really liked her, he changed it to five people under the age of 30 who work there told him this.
She replied saying she was upset by these claims, to which Staples tried to goad her with several tweets along the lines of ‘u ok hun x’, ‘does this hurt your feelings?’ and ‘happy to discuss further if you’re not freaking out over unisex toilets’.
Then Nick Duffy of Pink News joined in and said that Helen had told him he would never be allowed to write an article for her publication because he had criticised her ‘transphobic mate’, to which Staples replied that this is a story he hears a lot and Benjamin Cohen, the CEO of Pink News, replied stating ‘she’s vile’.
She then posted the email she’d sent to Duffy which showed that his claim was a total lie. Pink News had published a biased article about puberty blockers in which it stated that people who have concerns about them are ‘anti trans’, and all Helen said was that she didn’t think this rhetoric was helpful and that it makes commissioning articles on gender more difficult when complex issues are dumbed down to such aggressively, tribal levels.
Worried now that he could be about to be sued for libel, Staples deleted all his tweets and issued a carefully worded apology, but the bullying bat call had been signalled.
Among the highlights: Yahoo News journalist Francis Whittaker said Staples should not be forced to apologise because, even if he’d been lying, he had called out transphobia, and that was OK.
The NUS’s women’s officer, Rachel Watters, tweeted: ‘a reminder that if you're platforming / working with Helen Lewis you're mainstreaming her obsessive hatred of trans people.’
And Guardian journalist James Greig wrote of Staples: ‘Seeing a journalist getting bullied into issuing an apology for an entirely reasonable criticism of transphobia is grim’.
Duffy protected his account and Cohen still hasn’t removed the ‘she’s vile’ tweet, even though he’s known for over 24 hours that what he was responding to was a lie.