Clementine Ford threatened with legal action by Kingston Council candidate Jane Agirtan over social media spat
A social media spat that kicked off over a designer handbag could end up costing Clementine Ford more than $150,000, after an aspiring councillor claimed she’d been defamed.
South East
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Controversial feminist commentator Clementine Ford has been threatened with legal action after allegedly calling an aspiring politician a “racist, transphobic” who needed to be “forcibly removed from society in a padded van and taken to a mental asylum”.
Ms Ford, who is infamous for complaining the coronavirus was not “killing men fast enough”, is facing a potential defamation suit from glamorous accountant and aspiring politician Jane Agirtan.
Ms Agirtan launched the action after a series of comments shared on Ms Ford’s social media in 2023 and 2024.
A concerns notice sent to Ms Ford’s lawyer Ellie Nolan, and seen by the Herald Sun, included screenshots of posts allegedly made on Ms Ford’s Facebook and Instagram pages.
The posts, which have since been removed, began in August 2023 after Ms Agirtan called out Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney for allegedly owning a luxury handbag.
According to the concerns notice, Ms Ford shared the Instagram story with the comment: “This is @Jane-Agirtan, a racist, transphobic cooker, angling to be a politician”.
Ms Ford, who was under fire earlier this year for allegedly doxing Jews, went on to taunt Ms Agirtan over a warning of potential legal action.
“I’d love for you to try to file a defamation suit,” Ms Ford allegedly posted to social media.
On April 24, 2024, Ms Ford allegedly posted an interaction with another media outlet where she called Ms Agirtan “deeply unhinged” for trying to serve her with a legal letter “for months”.
She added: “Someone call the padded van, this woman needs serious help”.
Ms Agirtan, who is a candidate in the upcoming Kingston Council elections in Melbourne’s southeast, said, since the first post by Ms Ford, she has been hit with an almost daily barrage of threats and abusive messages from unknown individuals.
She has asked for a public apology on all of Ms Ford’s social media accounts, removal of all posts that refer to her, $15,000 in legal costs and $150,000 in damages.
Ms Ford has been contacted for comment via Ms Nolan.
In February, the author was criticised for circulating the names of 600 Jews to her 240,000 followers on Instagram in a bid to expose those “working to silence voices calling for Palestinian liberation”.
The people targeted were mainly academics and creatives and their names were leaked from a WhatsApp group.
Meanwhile, Ms Agirtan has previously come under fire for offensive posts on her personal Facebook page, made between 2014 and 2018.
The string of posts targeted Indigenous people, same sex parents and international students and were unearthed during her campaign for the 2020 Kingston Council elections.
One post depicted an Indigenous elder with the words: “spends all his money on petrol doesn’t own a car”.
In a statement issued to the Herald Sun in 2020, Ms Agirtan apologised and said that the offending material had been taken down.
“The posts – which are from many years ago – are not consistent with the views I currently hold,” she said.
However, on Thursday she told the Herald Sun that the posts had not run on her personal page and were taken from a closed Facebook group called Russians in Australia.
She suspected the memes were a political attempt to discredit her and she was told by an adviser to apologise.