So we’ve had a response from Adam Ramsay to our article of yesterday about him. We’ll publish it in full, in the interests of fairness.
And, well, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t ask some questions.
Before we get properly started, that third tweet merits a little attention. Given that the staff of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) have literally just been found by an employment tribunal to have conspired in a campaign of harassment and persecution against ex-staffer Roz Adams ultimately resulting in her constructive dismissal, we’re not sure how strongly we’d play the “CONSPIRACY THEORY LOL!!!!” card.
But onto the guts.
The central focus of our allegation that Ramsay was a liar (though by no means the only example) was the large discrepancy between his claims that ERCC had been the recipient of “numerous threats of vigilante violence” after employing trans-identifying male Mridul Wadhwa as its CEO in spring 2021, and the sworn testimony of ERCC’s management staff to said employment tribunal that they hadn’t.
Despite Ramsay’s sneery and abusive dismissal of our article, he did in fact admit (to someone else) that this was a “reasonable question”.
But his answer didn’t, frankly, seem to cast much light on things.
Ramsay’s article appeared on 17 October 2022. The tribunal took place in January this year, and the quoted section sees barrister Naomi Cunningham (NC), acting for Roz Adams, questioning ERCC head of services Katy McTernan (KM) about some emails between herself, Wadhwa and other staff members on 22 June 2022 – a week after the events which triggered the tribunal (see from paragraph 40 of the judgement).
Ramsay is now attempting to say that no violent threats had yet been received at that time, meaning they must have happened between June 2022 and October 2022, when he published his article.
But that isn’t what the article says.
The article is very clear that the threats were made “at the time” when Wadhwa was appointed CEO in April 2021. That’s a year and a half before the time Ramsay now claims they were made.
It then says a Wings piece about Wadhwa “attacking her appointment” followed after the emails, but these are all the articles on Wings in which Wadhwa’s name appears:
18 October 2020 – Waiting For The Men
22 October 2022 – You’ve Got Males
30 November 2020 – The Poison Within (incidental mention)
3 December 2020 – The Plotters Thicken (incidental mentions)
10 December 2020 – Two Women
23 April 2021 – Men’s Needs (incidental mention)
20 May 2024 – Man At Work
Alert readers will have noted that almost all of those pre-date Wadhwa’s appointment at ERCC, and in fact we’ve NEVER mentioned that appointment on the site until this week, so that doesn’t help Ramsay’s defence any.
He also can’t mean that we attacked it on Twitter, because for the great majority of that time we were banned from Twitter. The only tweets in which we’ve mentioned Wadhwa between his appointment and the tribunal are these two from January this year.
So just in passing, Ramsay is lying about that “attack” too. But the only conceivable article he can mean is the April 2021 one, which means the abuse must have been before that, which means it can’t have been between June and October 2022.
His article goes on to state, in any event, that these things had taken place “by August 2021”, which was when the Graham Linehan blog in which he laughably says part of Wadhwa’s address was revealed was published, which is the first time Wadhwa claims to have felt in danger.
So it’s manifestly clear that Ramsay’s claims today are absolute nonsense. His article detailed events which took place in 2021. Indeed, its second paragraph specifies that the “threats” which “forced” ERCC into lockdown took place in autumn 2021 (which tallies with Wadhwa’s claims about fearing for his safety).
Yet ERCC’s staff told the tribunal, on oath, that even by June 2022 – nine months later – no violent threats had been received by it.
What is plainly the case is that Ramsay knows the emails, if revealed, would NOT be seen by most people as hateful, violent or threatening. (We know that his own judgement of “hate” cannot be trusted, as he describes the legitimate registered charity LGB Alliance as a “hate group”.)
He has no other justifiable reason to withhold them. They are the evidence on which his article is supposedly based, and the veracity of that article is in question. The names of the senders are redacted and unknown to him. If they contain offensive language that language can be censored, and if they contain defamatory allegations those allegations can be described rather than repeated.
(In every high-profile defamation case of recent years, including our own, the tweets, comments, audio or video in question have been freely quoted by everyone.)
Failing that, it might be for the best if Ramsay simply stopped digging before he finds himself in a hole too deep for even all of his considerable money and privilege and contacts to help him climb out of.
