Young sexism row barrister deactivates account
The junior barrister who shot to stardom after tweeting a screenshot of a senior lawyer’s sexist message has left Twitter after receiving unrelenting abuse from online trolls.
Charlotte Proudman, 27, hit the headlines worldwide in the autumn after she made public Brown Rudnick partner Alexander Carter Silk’s ill-judged private LinkedIn message to her in which he complimented her on her “stunning” profile photo.
As some instructing solicitors vowed never to instruct Proudman again, while others expressed support for her bravery, the Mansfield Chambers rookie leveraged her fledgling fame to write a host of articles for The Guardian about the lack of gender diversity in law while also appearing on the BBC‘s Newsnight and LBC Radio.
Meanwhile, her Twitter follower numbers shot up to over 7,000.
However, as her prominence grew, Proudman came in for some vicious abuse from anonymous online trolls.
Bet your bottom dollar that the greedy little tart @CRProudman has her fingers in this pie somewhere https://t.co/qvHzcuk8SL
— Man With No Name (@Cigar117) January 4, 2016
@CRProudman Merry Christmas you slag
— His Royal Highness (@RAV2419) December 25, 2015
And after a flurry of tweets earlier this month she has deactivated her Twitter account.
The move comes as The Telegraph published a correction last week about its reporting on Proudman, apologising for, among other things, incorrect claims it had made about her relationship with her late grandmother. Friday’s edition of the newspaper contained this humbling statement:
An article of 11 Sept contained incorrect details about a communication sent by Charlotte Proudman to her paternal grandmother. We wish to make clear that the last contact Miss Proudman had with her grandmother was more than two years before her death — not ‘shortly before’, as the article stated — and that Miss Proudman did not accuse her grandmother of having “failed in life”. Nor had Miss Proudman ‘thought up’ her surname; she adopted her maternal family’s surname. Her grandmother in fact died in January 2014, not April 2014 as stated. Miss Proudman has also asked us to clarify that one estranged family member expressed anger to the media, not her whole family. We are happy to set the record straight and apologise for the errors.
Proudman did not respond to Legal Cheek‘s request for comment.