Irony, when you hold us. While reporting on recent developments in the Hockey Canada affair for the Canadian business channel BNN Bloomberg, journalist Paige Ellis suffered a live attack on Thursday from a man wearing a hockey jersey. It is a verbal assault with a sexual content, according to the journalist.
“There’s something eerily poetic about being sexually harassed by a man wearing a hockey jersey while talking about alleged sexual misconduct of hockey players,” the reporter tweeted. English, sharing the video of his assault.
There’s something grimly poetic about being sexually harassed by a man in a hockey jersey while talking about alleged sexual misconduct by hockey players. pic.twitter.com/yMTEUMmF1v
— Paige Ellis (@paigesellis) October 6, 2022
“Sorry everyone, that really surprised me,” she said, after being abruptly interrupted by the man. Paige Ellis calmly continued her direct immediately afterwards. His tweet has been shared over 2,000 times, and garnered over 10,000 likes.
The event came as many of Hockey Canada’s partners decided to sever their ties with the organization, and Justin Trudeau called for the departure of his management, following the unveiling of the existence of a second fund used to settle complaints of sexual assault at Hockey Canada.
Paige Ellis was precisely reporting the effects of the withdrawal of financial partners from the organization, when the man interrupted her. The journalist received many encouraging comments, lamenting that she had to endure this aggression, and congratulating her for the humor and professionalism with which she reacted.
Live attacks, an old cliché
Women journalists have long suffered such attacks live on television, as well as several other types of attacks, in person and online. According to a United Nations report published in 2021 on the occasion of the international day for the elimination of violence against women, this would be a widespread problem all over the world.
“While journalists, both men and women, are exposed to violence and threats to their safety in retaliation for their work, attacks against women are gender-based and highly sexualized, online and offline,” said Irene Khan, United Nations Special Rapporteur and Director General of the International Development Law Organization, at the release of the report.
The situation is not new. In 2015, in the pages of To have to, we learned that an obscene comment by Donald Trump having resurfaced in a video (“ F**k her right in the p***y ”) generated a wave of attacks on female journalists, where men hurled this sentence at them in the middle of the street.
“It is insulting, threatening and denigrating language which, in some cases, could be the subject of complaints to the police,” said then-Justice Minister Peter MacKay.
Remember that several years later, in 2022, Monia Chokri staged this phenomenon, making the trigger for her latest feature film, Baby sitterin a gesture of feminist reappropriation in the post-#MeToo era.