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Aussie TV star stands up to her cyberbullies

One troll may lose her job as a result.

 

Fernando Alfonso III

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Posted on Aug 29, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 12:01 pm CDT

A vicious Twitter troll has lost her job after Australian TV host Charlotte Dawson called the woman’s job to complain.

Dawson, who is a judge on “Australia’s Next Top Model,” recently lost her fiancé to suicide, the Herald Sun reported.

Tanya Heti,  a mentor at Monash University, allegedly tweeted “[I]f I was your fiance I’d hang myself too #gohangyourself.”

Dawson took action to defend herself.

“She had stupidly posted her business card details. So I emailed her boss, a professor at Monash University,” Dawson told ABC Sydney. “I also rang the girl myself.”

Dawson was not satisfied with the initial response she received from Monash University which told her simply that the school did not support Heti’s comments. But since then, the school has released a statement saying that “it’s investigating the matter and the staff member has been directed to take leave with pay,” ABC Sydney reported.

In order to raise awareness about bullying, Dawson has been retweeting messages from trolls Wednesday on her personal account.

“Trolling is something that people do because they’re disinhibited, because they don’t have to look you in the face. A lot of them are just lashing out at anyone and everyone,” Dawson said. “When they start attacking people with vulnerabilities, especially somebody who is incredibly vulnerable having just lost a partner to suicide. I feel very passionately that that should not happen.”

Photo via Twitter

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*First Published: Aug 29, 2012, 10:56 am CDT