In an extraordinary affidavit submitted to her defamation trial against Mr Pesutto, Mrs Deeming said she believed her former boss and David Southwick MP “set out to damage and utterly destroy me” after a controversial women’s rally she helped organise was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
Before the motion to expel meeting, Mrs Deeming claimed the Liberal leadership had made calls telling MPs she’d “organised a Nazi event and had been drinking and hanging out with Nazis, and partying with them, and that they had the evidence to prove it”
“I couldn’t understand why (Mr Pesutto) would hate me so much to be doing this. I thought he was intent on ruining me and my career at all costs – no matter if I was innocent or what it would do to my innocent children.”
Mrs Deeming said following publications linking her to Nazism, “it was like I was radioactive”.
Mrs Deeming said she lost her “sense of connection with everyone in my life, even my husband and children and my closest friends”.
“The experience of extreme stress and anxiety, of isolation and powerlessness that swept over me, has never eased.”
She said she decided to sue Mr Pesutto for defamation “to seek to restore my reputation”, despite the ongoing “harm that my family and I are suffering”.
“What I wanted more than anything else on the planet was a full exoneration of everything that he had implied and led people to believe about me having some kind of link with Nazis.”
[Ed: Mr Pesutto not only tarred Moira as a Nazi, but effectively all women who are actively campaigning for women’s sex-based rights. It has impacted on all of us across the political spectrum.]
Source: Moira Deeming vowed to sue John Pesutto for defamation after press release | Herald Sun