Abbie Chatfield has slammed Sonia Kruger‘s Gold Logie win, reminding people about discriminatory comments the TV host made about the Muslim community in 2016.
Sonia, who is the face of several Channel 7 shows such as The Voice Australia and Big Brother, nabbed TV’s highest honour at the 2023 Logie Awards on July 30.
However, Abbie has since criticised her fellow reality star’s win, explaining that she’s “not happy” that Sonia got the gong.
In the episode of her It’s a Lot podcast that dropped on August 10, Abbie started: “Yeah, no, Sonia.
“It’s very easy for white feminists to be like, ‘A woman won. Aren’t you happy a woman won?’ Well, not someone that made discriminatory comments on the Today Show about Muslim people,” she said.
“How about you use the privilege you have as a white woman to not discriminate against people of colour?”
The 28-year-old added: “You’ll be burnt forever in the eyes of Australian media if you have OnlyFans, or if you’re overtly sexual, or if you speak your mind too much, [but] everyone will just push something under the rug if you say something outwardly discriminatory.”
What did Sonia Kruger say about the Muslim community in 2016?
Sona’s comments that the FBOY Island Australia host is referring to were made on the Today Show following a terrorist attack in France in 2016.
“There is a correlation between the number of people who are Muslim in a country and the number of terrorist attacks,” Sonia alleged.
“Now, I have a lot of very good friends who are Muslim, who are peace-loving, who are beautiful people, but there are fanatics.”
The 57-year-old also confessed that she would “like to see [immigration of Muslim people] stopped now for Australia”.
“Because I want to feel safe, as all of our citizens do.”
Sonia has never apologised for her comments. However, the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal initially ruled in 2019 that her comments would likely have encouraged “hatred towards, or serious contempt for, Australian Muslims by ordinary members of the Australian population”.
The complaint was eventually dismissed, and Sonia was found not guilty of racial vilification. This is because it was found that the Muslim community in Australia does not have “a common ethno-religious origin”.
Abbie Chatfield criticises Logie winner Sonia Kruger’s ‘era’ of media
Speaking to her listeners, Abbie acknowledged that successful TV personalities like Sonia are “talented and hardworking”. However, she does believe the ever-changing media landscape is catching out veteran TV hosts.
“People who are TV hosts are so beloved for being this vanilla version of themselves… Then they’re asked about political issues and they don’t see how what they’re saying is crook,” she said. “People in traditional media haven’t spoken about political views throughout the early stages of their career.
“I obviously speak about politics more than other people in mainstream media, but people who are not typical political commentators are [now] asked their views when big events happen.”
She continued: “Sonia comes from an era where they never had to comment on anything… Therefore they have these views that are simmering for years and fermenting. But they’re not expressing their views or exposed to other views because they’ve been doing a one-way medium, which is TV hosting.”
Abbie, who got her start on The Bachelor in 2019, also questioned why “everyone in media [is] so f*cking old”.
“We’ve had the same people on TV for 20, 30 years in this country,” she said.
“No one is ever really given a chance to learn how to be a TV host or to be given a go at anything because they choose the same people over and over again.
“Everyone who’s in media is like 50-plus, which is fine, but there’s no diversity of thought, let alone of race.”
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