A year and nine months after she founded NOW Australia claiming it was meant to focus on the problem of women being sexually harassed in the workplace, former TV newsreader Tracey Spicer is once again avoiding public appearances in order, she claims, to focus on her own mental health.<\/p>\n
Spicer has retreated like this on earlier occasions too: she disappeared after actor John Jarratt was cleared of harassment charges and also when actor Geoffrey Rush won a case against the Daily Telegraph that had accused him of sexual harassment.<\/p>\n
After a series of incidents that can only lead to one conclusion — Spicer’s embrace of the #MeToo movement was meant more to embellish her own image than anything else — the women’s movement in Australia has been put on the back foot and left wondering how it will recover from the Spicer show.
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\nIn 2006, after 14 years at Channel Ten, Spicer was sacked when she returned to work after having a second child. She turned it into an exercise to gain publicity, accusing the network of discrimination and threatening a court fight, but later accepting a settlement. That itself should have made any observer understand what she was about; had she wanted to expose discrimination, she would have gone ahead with the threatened case. But this episode served its purpose and gave her a public profile.<\/p>\n
After a stint with Sky News, with whom she worked until 2015, Spicer took up the #MeToo mantle soon after the exposure of the antics of film moghul Harvey Weinstein in the US came to light in October 2017. She put out a tweet, inviting women to send her their stories of harassment, saying: “Currently, I am investigating two long-term offenders in our media industry. Please, contact me privately to tell your stories.” It must be noted that prior to this, Spicer had dropped hints here and there that she understood that the problem was widespread.<\/p>\n
But when her tweet resulted in a large number of responses, Spicer professed that she was amazed to hear from such a large number of women. This contradicted what she had been saying prior to her tweet. She could not keep up with the responses to these poor souls. In March the following year, NOW Australia was set up, apparently to cater to these women’s needs. They needed professional help – from lawyers, counsellors, psychologists and the like. Spicer has no qualifications apart from a general graduate degree.
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