Anne Moran says hostile emails were published without any context – we reveal the context here

Adelaide City councillors say hostile emails from Anne Moran have been consistent and distressing for years, but she says they’ve been taken out of context. Read them here.

Adelaide City councillors say a series of hostile emails from Anne Moran have been consistent and distressing over the past four years.

It comes after the long-serving councillor said the leaked emails revealed by The Advertiser, calling other elected members names, had been published with “no context”.

However, Councillors Arman Abrahimzadeh, Alexander Hyde, Franz Knoll and Mary Couros commented that the emails had been “distressing”, “constant” and “vicious”.

“Councillor Moran’s emails and bullying became so intense that I asked to be removed from her internal correspondence,” Ms Couros said. “The sheer volume was becoming onerous and affecting my own wellbeing.”

Long-term Adelaide City Council member Anne Moran. Picture: Facebook

The emails sent by Ms Moran included calling her colleagues “a joke”, “a loser”, an “insufferable fool” and “self-deluded”.

On ABC radio on Tuesday morning, Ms Moran said she didn’t think the emails were “that bad” and the article “has no context”.

“You’ve only seen my answers to other emails, you haven’t seen what I’m responding to,” she said.

In one email, Ms Moran wrote to Mr Hyde: “Why don’t you zip it”. Mr Hyde had earlier thanked staff for reopening library services in May 2020.

“That’s great news, thanks Vanessa. And also thanks for your ongoing work keeping our staff and community safe,” he wrote.

In another email, Ms Couros was told to: “Grow up. You are in a political environment not a tea park (sic). Constantly accusing me of bullying is bullying”.

Ms Couros had responded to an email in which Ms Moran said she would get “rid of the lot of them (Team Adelaide).”

“Threatening emails is a real low and I personally feel very bullied. It appears to me that this has been the culture of elected members for years before the current council,” Ms Couros wrote.

Ms Moran told the radio she was “angry” with the way a council voting bloc dubbed Team Adelaide had treated the independents saying they had been “bullied and brutalised”.

The leaked emails came more than a year after a previously confidential report, by EMA Legal, found the council was “dysfunctional, frustrating and aggressive”.

Ms Moran was criticised for sending emails to the media, elected members and council staff that regularly upset them.

“Members acknowledged the inappropriateness of email traffic, which frequently happened and its lack of connection to council business on many occasions,” the report author wrote.

“Staff considered that exposure to those communications negatively impacted their own wellbeing and that of their colleagues.”

In a response to questions by The Advertiser yesterday, Ms Moran said the comments were not made in isolation and were in response to “extreme bullying”.

“I am not comfortable with some of the colloquial terms I used but these have been trying times and as I said in response to unendurable behaviour from Team Adelaide both privately and in meetings,” she said.