In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Bennet, Jane’s puritanical sister, is recorded as saying:

‘Loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable; that one false step involves her in endless ruin; that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful; and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behaviour towards the undeserving of the other sex.’

Austen was highlighting the unjust social system where the reputation of a woman can be forever ruined because of her proximity to a bad man, and that ruination will be without redemption.

200 years later in Australia, it would seem that women are just as subject to ruinous associations with men, even when those associations are invented.

In the Federal Court of Australia, proceedings have begun in the defamation trial of Moira Deeming v John Pesutto. Moira Deeming MP has faced public scorn and parliamentary party expulsion after accusations that she has links to Nazi men who crashed a women’s rights rally, and that Deeming’s political associates Kellie Jay-Keen, leader of Standing for Women, and rally organiser Angela Jones, have sympathies with fascist men.

One of the key accusations toward Deeming was that she didn’t immediately leave the Let Women Speak rally when members of a local Neo-Nazi group crashed the event. It seems that even in the presence of a hoard of Victorian Police, an aggressive group of anti-fascists, trans activists, and a non-specific group of children’s rights activists, women’s rights activists are to be uniquely wary of reputation damage simply by existing in the vicinity of Nazi men.

In the first day of the trial, the famous Pesutto dossier was discussed. This dossier was alleged to contain all the evidence of Deeming’s dark associations, or associations of associations. Deeming’s high-profile defamation lawyer Sue Chrysanthou, SC, revealed in her introduction that the evidential basis of the dossier was sparse, relying on sources like Wikipedia and the UK LGBTQ publication, Pink News.

In a plot twist worthy of a TV crime drama, it was revealed that David Southwick had a secret recording of the original meeting that Deeming had with Liberal leadership, following the Melbourne Let Women Speak rally. On the second day of the trial, the entire 70-minute recording of the meeting was played in court during which we heard John Pesutto, David Southwick, and Georgie Crozier bombard Mrs Deeming with allegations of her irredeemable associations.

Most startling in the recording was the apparent trepidation in which John Pesutto speaks of the then Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews. Pesutto can be heard saying that the Andrews team were going to make it look like the Victorian Liberal Party walk in ‘lockstep with Nazi protesters’. Under pressure, Pesutto seemed to have no clue on how to separate the issue of women’s rights from the ‘anti-trans’ accusations that the far-left activists and corrupted media use towards gender-critical women.

Pesutto allegedly said that Andrews ‘in his tweets today, is signalling that’s what their week is going to be about’, and he was worried that the issue would build to a ‘crescendo’ that is ‘fuelled by Andrews and everybody else opposed to us’. In the recording, I believe Pesutto sounds like a mouse about to face a lion.

The audio of the meeting is hard to listen to, as Deeming tries to plead her case with the obvious points that she can’t be held responsible for the Nazis turning up at the rally. Ms Deeming is heard clearly struggling to understand the links her parliamentary colleagues are allegedly making between the event organisers and right-wing extremism.

Most alarming for me is how the Liberal leadership spoke about Angela Jones, a person I have known for a few years from the gender-critical women’s movement in Australia.

Kellie Jay-Keen and Angela Jones launched legal actions against John Pesutto earlier this year. Pesutto settled the actions by issuing a statement on his website in May, saying that he does not believe that Keen and Jones are Neo-Nazis and that the women are ‘passionate women’s rights activists’ who share his belief that ‘Nazism is odious and contemptible’.

At one point in the recording of the Liberal leadership meeting, Deeming says to her colleagues about Jones and Keen, ‘They’ve all condemned Nazism and everything.’ Pesutto replies, ‘I don’t think they have. Angie Jones hasn’t.’ Then Georgie Crozier pipes up and says, ‘No. She supported it.’ Angela Jones is Jewish, and a left-wing feminist. She was also sitting in the courtroom listening silently to these accusations.

In an interview with Julie Szego, Angela Jones revealed that the consequences of her involvement with the Let Women Speak rally have been personally devastating. Angela is a single mother of four and has told me that the backlash she faced from the public accusations made against her, triggered serious depression and PTSD. Angela is still facing crushing social sanctions for her alleged association with a group of bad men that she has never met, and whose beliefs she has fought all her political life.

A controversial tweet Jones made following the Let Women Speak event was tendered in court as evidence of her reprehensive beliefs. The tweet reads: ‘Nazis and women want to get rid of paedo filth, why don’t you?’ During the rally the neo-Nazi’s had a sign that said: ‘Destroy Paedo Filth!’ In the to and fro with trans activists on Twitter, following the rally, gender-critical feminists were being accused of being on the same side as Nazis, because they agreed with the Nazi sign. The tweet was an attempt at a light-hearted joke, that just because two groups agree that paedophilia is bad, that doesn’t imply political alignment between those groups. Everyone should think that paedophilia is bad.

It was revealed in court that the Neo-Nazi group have since made a statement that by ‘paedo filth’ they were referring to LGBTQ people, but Angela couldn’t have known this at the time and was falling into a strange rhetorical trap where agreeing that paedophilia is bad somehow implies that a woman is against the alphabet people. When the tweet was presented to the court, Justice O’Callaghan himself asked what trans people had to do with paedophilia.

Associating gender-critical feminists with men who have abhorrent views is a favourite trick of trans activists, and Pesutto’s lawyer did his best to enforce the improbable link with reference to Moira’s views about Victoria’s ‘safe schools’ programs. Deeming has been an outspoken critic of ‘Safe Schools’ type programs, and on cross-examination, made it clear that she wouldn’t easily be tripped up on articulating her motivation for that opposition.

Deeming, and all women’s rights activists on the gender critical side, oppose ideological sex education programs like ‘Safe Schools’ because, in their view, they violate long-standing children safeguarding principles. Failures in safeguarding will make children vulnerable to paedophiles, but this has nothing to do with gay and lesbian people, just bad policy.

Deeming v Pesutto is expected to go for a few more weeks with an impressive list of witnesses to take the stand.

Moira Deeming MP is every woman in Australia who wants to politically engage in her own rights without fear of being smeared with the stain of bad men and their stupid ideas.

Edie Wyatt writes on culture, politics, and feminism. She tweets at @msediewyatt, blogs on Substack and you can catch her on Welcome to the Dollhouse