Sensemaker Daily
A feminist lawyer is planning to sue the Bar Standards Board for sex discrimination after it tried and failed to punish her for criticising a judge.
Charlotte Proudman wrote a series of tweets accusing the judge of not taking domestic abuse seriously enough. The judge had ruled against her in a case in which her client was an abuse victim. Now all five misconduct charges brought against her have been dropped.
Her lawyer says the case should never have been brought. Proudman says she’s a victim of double standards which put her through “two and a half years of hell” while male lawyers were allowed to publicly demean and insult her.
She said the male barristers had called her a “c***” and an “insufferable wanker”, threatened her with being “taken down”, mocked her appearance and name and told her she belonged in a “padded room”.
“Boys club.” The BSB – the Bar’s professional regulator – spent two years pursuing Proudman over a 14-tweet thread.
In the thread, she said her client had been coerced into signing a post-nuptial agreement by her husband, a part-time judge. “I lost the case,” Proudman posted. “I do not accept the Judge’s reasoning. I will never accept the minimization of domestic abuse.
“Demeaning the significance of domestic abuse has the [effect] of silencing
victims and rendering perpetrators invisible. This judgment has echoes of the “boys
club” which still exists among men in powerful positions.”
Proudman went on to accuse the judge of undermining her client’s mental health and casting her as a “failed, unstable wife” even though her husband stood accused of resorting to aggression and throwing things when under the influence of alcohol.
Abuse of process. A disciplinary panel found that the BSB hadn’t recognised the protections to free speech Proudman should have enjoyed under Article 10 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. After the panel’s decision, Proudman said she believed the BSB’s prosecution was a “personal and targeted” attack because of her longstanding public challenge to what she regards as misogyny in the justice system.
Calling the case against her “a clear instance of sex discrimination”, Proudman said: “While the BSB argued that I do not have the right to criticise a domestic abuse judgment, male barristers are free to call a senior judge an ‘idiot’, ‘stupid’, and even assert that he should be ‘sacked.’”
Lawful free speech. Mark McDonald, who represented Proudman, said the BSB should never have brought the case since it was clear she had been legally entitled to send the tweets. “Dr Proudman has spent her professional life fighting against gender-based discrimination and challenging unfairness within our justice system. This should be a wake-up call to the BSB and I hope in the future that instead of attempting to prosecute her, they recognise and thank her for the great work she has done for equality in the past 15 years."
Being investigated and charged by her professional body has been a punishing experience, Proudman told Tortoise after the decision. Receiving emails about the case from the BSB had made her feel like she was having a panic attack. “For the first time I started to understand how my clients feel when they're getting emails from their perpetrators,” she said.
Days before the tribunal started, the BSB sent Proudman a costs schedule of over £38,000 it had incurred on its own legal representation, which she would have had to pay had she lost the case.
Proudman will now be seeking her own legal costs against the regulator. She intends to sue it for sex discrimination and infringement of her human right to freedom of speech.
The Bar Standards Board declined to comment.
