statement by peter james bowditch - home of the … to avo application by meryl dorey part 1 peter...

Response to AVO application by Meryl Dorey Summary

Peter Bowditch 25/10/2012 of 2

Application for Apprehended Personal Violence Order Applicant: Meryl Dorey Defendant: Peter Bowditch

Case: 201200278631 Court: Ballina

Statement by Peter James Bowditch

On September 5, 2012, Ms Meryl Dorey applied for an Apprehended Personal Violence Order to be made against me. The specific actions that triggered this request for protection were set out in the application as:

On the 29th of April, 2012, the defendant addressed the applicant via his web page:

If you or any of your followers come near my family I will react and it will not go well for you. If you think that’s a threat, think again. It’s a promise.

And:

The defendant has been harassing & posting extremely abusive messages about the applicant online for over 8 years. Some of these messages have been threatening in nature.

I have responded to these separately in the following documents. Part 1 relates to the specific “threat” made on April 29, 2012, and Part 2 deals with the general accusation of a pattern of harassment. Part 2 is an annotated version of Ms Dorey’s statement to the Court.

I would like to make the following points:

1. Ms Dorey waited four months from the incident in April to file the application, so there was apparently no urgency. As she filed three applications on the one day against different people (one of them in Perth) and the other two concerned actions which were quite recent, it is possible to assume that I was added as an afterthought.

2. She did not reveal the context in which my remark was made. This context is that she had publicly and in writing suggested that my family be told that I have mental health issues because I responded to an anonymous troll telling lies about me. The particular lies were that I have criminal convictions, including one for contempt of court, and I felt perfectly entitled to respond to this anonymous slur in a robust fashion. The words quoted by Ms Dorey in her application were taken from a larger message telling her to leave my family out of any dispute she had with me.

3. During those four months she took part in a speaking tour of NSW, announcing her whereabouts every day. This is not the action of someone who thinks they need protection. I asked for an invitation to one of those talks but as I didn't get an invitation I didn't attend.

4. During the four months between my remark and her application for an AVO she published no fewer than five articles on blogs and web sites (links available on request) attacking me for my response to the anonymous troll, so she can have been in no doubt as to the context of my remark. These articles were published in places where I am banned from any right of reply. In one of them she tried to initiate a Twitter campaign designed to influence an online magazine and have them refuse to accept me as a contributor ("If you are on Twitter, please use the hashtag #DumpBowditch on your tweets to encourage Mia Freedman of Mamamia and other venues where this man publishes his hate- speech to no longer allow him an opportunity for abuse"). As I am building a profile as a freelance journalist to supplement my retirement income this could directly impact my ability to find work.

5. It is 746 kilometres by road between my house and Ms Dorey's place of residence and work so I am very unlikely to have any physical contact with her. As far as I know I have been in the same place as her on only five occasions - at a seminar in 2002, in the audience for the recording of a television program in 2009, and three times in the public gallery at the NSW Supreme Court.

6. Given the information in 5 and the wording of the fourth order requested by Ms Dorey ("The defendant must not mention the applicant in any online forum in any derogatory manner") it is obvious to me that this application has nothing to do with any perceived threat of physical violence but is actually an attempt to prevent me speaking about or criticising Ms Dorey's activities.

Response to AVO application by Meryl Dorey Summary

Peter Bowditch 25/10/2012 of 2

7. I do not want Ms Dorey's freedom to express her opinions to be compromised or restricted in any way. For this reason I would oppose any reciprocal order being placed on her just as vigorously as I contest the application of this order to me alone. She has a perfect right to express her opinions, no matter how wrong I think that those opinions are.

8. I have not made any threats against Ms Dorey. Her evidence is simply deliberate misrepresentation of my comments.

Ms Dorey was to submit her material to the Court on October 11 and it was then to be forwarded to Katoomba Court House for me to collect. She actually submitted it on October 15 and I did not have access to it until Friday, October 19. She had provided it to the operator of a US-based anti-medicine web site some time before October 14 and I was able to download it from there before she had lodged it with the Court but I needed to see an official copy before I could prepare a response. Her late submission reduced the time I had available to me if I were to meet the deadline for lodging my response (October 25), and my available time was already reduced by the need to allow for the time for transit through the postal system from where I live to Ballina Court House.

This is a message posted to the Australian Vaccination Network’s blog at 1:39am on October 15. All posts to this blog have to be approved by Ms Dorey, so she was prepared to allow this to be displayed. Mr Bolen had been given Ms Dorey’s three statements at least two days before she had lodged them with the Court, and he had subsequently made them available for download from his web site.

Peter Bowditch 25 Tableland Road Wentworth Falls NSW 2782 Phone: 0419 219 659 Email: [email protected]

Response to AVO application by Meryl Dorey Part 1

Peter Bowditch 24/10/2012 Page 1 of 5

Part 1 – Response to specific claim in AVO application

In her application for the Apprehended Personal Violence Order, Ms Dorey identified this specific threat by me against her person:

On the 29th of April, 2012, the defendant addressed the applicant via his web page:

If you or any of your followers come near my family I will react and it will not go well for you. If you think that’s a threat, think again. It’s a promise.

She then went on to say:

The defendant has been harassing & posting extremely abusive messages about the applicant online for over 8 years. Some of these messages have been threatening in nature.

There are two issues here. I will address the first (the statement made in April) in this part of my submission and the second in Part 2.

In my original email to the Court advising that I would not be attending the first mention hearing and that I would be contesting the AVO application, I included the following:

2. She did not reveal the context of my remark, which is that she had publicly suggested that my family be told that I have mental health issues because I responded to an anonymous troll telling lies about me. The particular lies were that I have criminal convictions for the assault of a police officer and contempt of court, and I felt perfectly entitled to respond to this anonymous slur in a robust fashion. The words quoted by Ms Dorey in her application were taken from a larger message telling her to leave my family out of any dispute she had with me.

In her full submission to the Court Ms Dorey has accused me of lying about this and stated that the entire context was a private message between her and a Liz Hempel. That “private message” was posted to all of Ms Dorey’s Twitter followers (1708 at the time of writing this). Twitter provides the option of having “Protected tweets” which limits the audience to followers. Ms Dorey has not chosen this option so her Twitter messages are visible to anyone with an Internet account.

Here is the full context. I apologise for not having dates for the messages but Twitter is by nature an ephemeral medium and I felt no need to capture what I said for later. Luckily, a friend of mine (who had been attacked by the same troll) did keep records. The conversation took place in April 2012.

A person using the name Liz Hempel (I have no way of knowing whether this is a real name or not) posted the following messages to Twitter. Note – not all Twitter client programs display anything other than Twitter handles. These screen shots were made by a friend who uses the Twitter web site for access. I use a program called “Tweetdeck” which showed the identity of the person I was dealing with as “SAVNGodComplex”, “EauTheHyprocrisy” and others.



She also posted the following message to an anti-vaccination Facebook page (account since closed):



The web site she referred to was created in 2005 by someone who preferred to remain completely anonymous. It consisted of a single page:

Yes, I was sued in 2005 by a multi-level marketing company who were unhappy that I had reported on the fact that they had been found by the Federal Court to be operating an illegal pyramid scheme in breach of the then Trade Practices Act. The matter was settled in 2006. The company engineered three contempt of court charges against me. All of these were heard and dismissed on September 23, 2005, and Justice Madgwick made no secret of his displeasure at being called into court at short notice in order to have his time wasted.

An anonymous claim was posted to the AVN blog saying that I have a criminal conviction for the assault of a police officer. Ms Dorey approved the publication of this lie and asked the poster for more information, but as this doesn’t relate to my interaction with Liz Hempel I will leave discussion of that to Part 2 where Ms Dorey mentions it.

I felt no restriction on replying to someone who was publicly defaming me by repeating spurious claims about what had happened to me in a court case. I responded robustly and I might even have been less than polite. I have no time for people who feel that they can say whatever they like without regard for the truth or without even doing the slightest amount of work to check whether what they are saying is true. I have had policies since I first started using the Internet of always using my own name and never taking any action for defamation except to respond to speech with more speech. If my responses offend anonymous trolls then that is too bad.



Back to Ms Dorey’s request to people to contact my family.

Ms Dorey has a history of contacting families or suggesting that other people should do it. In 2009 she attempted to obtain the medical records of a child who had died of pertussis, and more recently she suggested on the AVN’s Facebook page that her followers should ask the parents of children who had mysteriously died for details about the babies’ vaccination status. As my family and I can be found easily I had real concern that people might attempt to contact my family because “they need to know”.

Here is the complete text of the message I posted on my web site in response to Ms Dorey’s Twitter post. (I can’t respond to her on Twitter because she has blocked me from following her or replying to her messages.)

Do not even suggest that anyone contacts my family. I realise that you have in the past harassed the family of at least one child who died of a vaccine preventable disease. But don’t start on me.

You might think you can get away with continual defamation of Australian Skeptics. You might think you can get away with continual lies about the activities of the members of Stop the AVN. What you will not get away with is involving my family in your insane campaign to harm children. If you don’t like me asking tasteless questions about dead babies then stop spending your days trying to increase the number of dead babies.

If you or any of your followers come near my family I will react and it will not end well for you. Don’t even suggest it in a joke. And if you think that’s a threat, think again. It’s a promise.

I believe this was a perfectly reasonable response to someone with a history of encouraging her followers to harass parents and families and who was defending another person who had been publishing lies about me for several weeks.

People can say whatever they like about me and all I ask for is the right of reply. Ms Dorey has blocked me from following her on Twitter or replying to her Twitter audience when she mentions me, she has banned me from at least two Internet mailing lists so I cannot even read what is posted, I am blocked from commenting on the AVN Facebook page and the AVN blog, both places where attacks on me have been published. Ms Dorey wants the right to say anything about me (and I fully support that right) but seems to think that any response I make is a threat. I have to make any such response publicly because any private channels are closed to me.

There was no threat of violence (I live about 750 kilometres from Ms Dorey’s house), just a warning that I take my family’s safety and privacy very seriously. Ms Dorey even acknowledged this when she included the following screen shot in her submission. (I was responding to yet another anonymous poster.)



If I were to take any action it would be through the courts. I could have immediately applied for an AVO against Ms Dorey but that is not the way I do things, preferring instead to issue a warning request. The warning had to be published on my own sites because there was no way that I could have transmitted it to Ms Dorey privately.

In summary, an anonymous person spread lies about me, I responded, Ms Dorey took offence at my responses and suggested to a large group of people that my family be told I “need help”, I told her to leave my family out of any dispute she had with me. No threat of violence was made and any suggestion of a threat is entirely in Ms Dorey’s misinterpretation of what I wrote.



Part 2 – Response to Ms Dorey’s statement to the Court

This is a detailed response to Ms Dorey’s statement to the Court.

My responses are delineated by horizontal lines and shown in blue text. No changes have been made to Ms Dorey’s statement other than cropping some images in order to fit them within the boundaries of A4 format.

Below is a compilation of just some of the information showing a long history of Peter Bowditch both harassing and threatening me. In 2010, I asked my then legal advisor how we could stop this most unwanted contact and whether or not an AVO could be applied for at that time (more on this later on in the piece) but I was not given any advice and the matter dropped for the time being.

Direct threats from Mr Bowditch towards myself

I have read Mr Bowditch’s submission to the court (dated September 21, 2012) regarding my application for an Apprehended Personal Violence Order (APVO). Some of these statements are incorrect and untruthful and I will explain to you why I say this.

Attached to this statement are two recordings - one an audio tape of an interview with Mr Howard Sattler in Perth WA earlier this year. During this interview, Mr Sattler asked Mr Bowditch if it were true that he regularly asked parents a certain series of questions - questions which Mr Bowditch has also put to me:

Please listen from 5:35 on the recording -

Howard Sattler (HS) Talking about abuse, is your Twitter account RatBagsDotCom?

Peter Bowditch (PB) It certainly is.

HS - You’ve sent tweets off to people saying things like this: “How many dead children in a pile do you need to trigger a spontaneous orgasm?” Is that right?

PB - That’s right. Yeah, yes, I, I, I’m waiting for them to answer that question. For some reason or other, they don’t.

HS - And, “Your loins are where you must get a tingle every time you hear about another death from measles or whooping cough”

PB - Well, what can you say when you’ve come across people who tell people to expose their children to dangerous illnesses?

HS - “If dead children don’t give you a thrill in your loins, then why do you want to see more of them?”

I was invited to appear on the Howard Sattler show on 6PR to discuss an article I had written for the online magazine Mamamia. When Mr Sattler’s producer rang me to start the actual telephone interview I was informed that Ms Dorey would be following me with her response to what I was about to say. I could hardly pull out of the interview at that time so I agreed to going ahead. During the interview I was asked a single question about the article and the rest of the interview was an attack on me about how I had said some things that might have offended some people. As Mr Sattler’s modus operandi is making outrageous statements in order to get a reaction from listeners I found this rather ironic, but I decided not to make this point to him.

Ms Dorey might well have been offended by what I had to say, but there was no threat there. I was offended by some of the things she had to say in her comments that followed but not liking what you hear is not the same as being threatened.



Here is a similar statement that Peter Bowditch posted onto the AVN’s blog some time ago and which was not allowed through moderation but which I saw and, as the mother of a vaccine-injured child, was very distressed about:

I like to put two questions to anti-vaccination liars:

1) How many dead children in a pile does it take for you to have a spontaneous orgasm?

2) When unloading the bodies of children from a truck into a mass grave, do you prefer a pitchfork or do you just use your hands?

Again, there is no threat there. I am highly offended by the actions of people who misrepresent the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. If I offend them then I am simply making the feeling mutual.

As Ms Dorey says, because she doesn’t allow anything I say to appear in any forum over which she has control nobody needed to see what I wrote unless she chose to make it public. She did not choose to do this.

In Mr Bowditch’s submission to the court mentioned above, he made the following statement:

“She did not reveal the context of my remark, which is that she had publicly suggested that my family be told that I have mental health issues because I responded to an anonymous troll telling lies about me. The particular lies were that I have criminal convictions for assault of a police officer and contempt of court, and I felt perfectly entitled to respond to this anonymous slur in a robust fashion.”

Mr Bowditch is either incorrect or is not telling the truth in his statement to the court. As you see below, and this screenshot is taken from Mr Bowditch’s own blog, Memo to Meryl Dorey at the Australian Vaccination Network (http://peterbowditch.com/wp/2012/04/memo-to-meryl-dorey-at-the-australian-vaccination-network/%23comment-157), the statement he is referring to has nothing to do with any past criminal record of his (a record which I have heard about but of which I have no first-hand knowledge) nor did I suggest that anyone contact his family. I was speaking with Liz Hempel - the so-called anonymous troll he was referring to and a person well-known to Mr Bowditch so again, not a true statement on his part.

Ms Dorey is being disingenuous in claiming that the entire context was a single Twitter message by her. I have explained the context more fully in Part 1 of this statement.

Ms Dorey mentions “any past criminal record of [mine] (a record which I have heard about but of which I have no first-hand knowledge)”. Apart from the nonsense written by “Liz Hempel”, this comment on the Australian Vaccination Network’s blog indicates the sort of evidence Ms Dorey is prepared to accept. All posts to the blog have to be approved by Ms Dorey before they are displayed.



Here is my conversation with Liz Hempel who is the mother of a severely vaccine-injured child and a person who had just been put through Mr Bowditch’s questions regarding dead babies and orgasms:

This was a conversation I had with a friend - nobody else - and in no instance did I suggest that anyone contact his family. Mr Bowditch’s immediate response to this conversation was to threaten me online and via email. Here is what he said.

The message was posted to Ms Dorey’s unprotected Twitter account. She currently has 1708 followers, all of whom would have seen the message, and as her account is unprotected anything she posts is visible to anyone with an Internet account. This was hardly “a conversation I had with a friend - nobody else”. I have no record of any email I sent to Ms Dorey about this. As she has stated publicly several times (but has never informed me directly), she doesn’t read emails from me anyway.

If you or any of your followers come near my family I will react and it will not end well for you. Don’t even suggest it in a joke. And if you think that’s a threat, think again. It’s a promise.

And just so you know that Mr Bowditch actually meant this as a threat and not just some random statement, here is how he clarified this on his blog when questioned:

The clarification is that I would use the courts in retaliation, not violence. Please see Part 1 of this statement for a full discussion of this “threat”.

Below is a compilation of just some of the information showing a long history of Peter Bowditch both harassing and threatening me. In 2010, I asked my then legal advisor how we could stop this most unwanted contact and whether or not an AVO could be applied for at that time (more on this later on in the piece) but I was not given any advice and the matter dropped for the time being.



I have asked Mr Bowditch several times if he would stop writing to me since I found any contact with him to be most distressing but he has always ignored my requests and continually emails me as shown below. I block his emails now but he posts his email messages onto his blog and they get forwarded to me by others. Here are a few of the contacts from this man.

I have no record of Ms Dorey ever contacting me to ask me to refrain from emailing her. I have seen her declare on several occasions that she doesn’t read emails that come from me and, as she says, she has the capability to block anything coming from me. If she hasn’t asked me to stop and deletes my emails immediately without reading them I can hardly be said to be threatening her. Most of the things she complains about here required her to go to my web site and actively search for information.

Mr Bowditch discovered that someone had left a negative review of my private business, the Fountain of Beauty. I was completely unaware of this negative review yet he seemed to have found it very quickly indeed. He wrote to me to inform me, most gleefully, about this review. In his email, is a threat regarding an up-coming court date in which I would be appearing against the HCCC in the NSW Supreme Court. Mr Bowditch stated that some of his friends who would be in the audience would like to see “a reminder of Valentine’s Day in Chicago in 1929”. In other words, they would like to see a repeat of the St Valentine’s Day massacre during which many people were killed. Supposedly, the implication was that I would be one of those people.

As Ms Dorey says, she was unaware of the fact that her business was receiving unfavourable publicity. Informing her was a polite thing to do and can hardly be construed as a threat.



It takes a special kind of paranoia to infer from a mention of a date that anyone is likely to attempt an assassination inside the confines of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. It was a joke and this fact would have been obvious to anyone reading it.

According to Wikipedia: “Since 1929, The St Valentine's Day Massacre has taken on a much wider meaning in everyday culture, signifying only a major contest, defeat, or thrill. Examples are the final match between boxers Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta in 1951; a ride at Disney's Hollywood Studio; an annual route-finding contest played out entirely on Rand McNally Road Atlases”.

And here is the comment that Mr Bowditch posted on his website - a site specifically set up to attack and defame anyone in the community who questions the safety or effectiveness of vaccination - regarding that selfsame review of my private business:

My web site was not “specifically set up to attack and defame anyone in the community who questions the safety or effectiveness of vaccination”, and a look at the other people who received awards in the same year shows this. The site is about things I don’t like, and has comments about religious bigotry, medical quackery, sexual bigotry, pseudoscience, pyramid schemes, cults and other matters as well as anti-vaccination campaigners. If Ms Dorey doesn’t like what she sees there she is quite free to stay away, but if she wants to comment on anything there she will find an email link on every page and I publish all correspondence critical of the site and my opinions expressed there.

Again, Ms Dorey seems unable to distinguish satire and sarcasm from threats.



Below are several more emails that I have received from Mr Bowditch. These emails are all of an extremely harassing nature and even though I do not want this contact, there seems to be no way of stopping him from contacting me in this way.

This is not a threat, and can hardly be called harassment. The matter of Ms Dorey’s CV had come up in a public forum and there was disagreement over whether she had ever worked for a stockbroking firm. The best way to solve the dilemma was to contact the only person guaranteed to know the answer.

I am frequently asked (sometimes quite hostilely) for my qualifications to speak out on certain matters and I always respond giving as much detail as I can. I have found the answer I gave on one occasion has been reproduced on several web sites that are quite antagonistic towards me, but I accept the fact that if I am going to express opinions that others might not like I have to also accept people responding in a manner I might not like.



It is a fact that Ms Dorey was asked to remove copyright material from information packs she was selling on the AVN web site. It is a fact that Ms Dorey was asked by the Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing to explain why the AVN’s charity registration should not be revoked by a specified date and she had not complied. It was definitely unwise of her to publicly accuse the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission of corruption when the organisation was taking action against the AVN. It is also a fact that Ms Dorey is free to republish any content from my web site provided she complies with the copyright conditions stated on every page of the site.

This was all advice, not harassment or a threat. If Ms Dorey was really blocking all emails from me she would not have seen the email anyway.



Schadenfreude is not harassment or a threat. Ms Dorey was asked by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission to display a message on the AVN web site. She refused. She was asked by the NSW Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing to explain why the AVN’s charity registration should not be cancelled. She refused. The fact that the AVN operated for two years without a charity registration while still claiming charity status is indisputable, and my reporting of this clear breach of the rules is no more harassment than, for example, reporting someone providing suspect medical advice to the Health Care Complaints Commission. It’s what citizens do.

The question about vaccines in the last paragraph is one I have been asking for some time. I never get an answer.

Again, if Ms Dorey didn’t want to read this she should not have let it past the filter on my email address in her mail client.



Ms Dorey had missed a deadline imposed by a government authority and I was politely reminding her of this fact. Such oversights often have serious consequences.

The question in the second paragraph was related to a topical event. Ms Dorey had advised her followers to avoid making donations to certain charities at the times of previous natural disasters and I was simply asking if she was maintaining that policy for the most recent tragedy. It seems rather strange that Ms Dorey objects to my comments about the charity she runs but she feels free to comment on the actions of other charities, with her comments extending to recommendations that her supporters withhold donations because the charities do things that she doesn’t like.

No threats or harassment, and another email that Ms Dorey would not have seen unless she allowed it past the block in her email program.



Mr Bowditch is not content to just harass me by sending me emails however. He also writes to venues where I will be presenting seminars, asking them to cancel my booking so the talk would not go ahead. Below is just one of the many, many such letters Mr Bowditch has written.



Perhaps Ms Dorey could list the “many, many such letters” that I have written to venues “asking them to cancel [her] booking”. I don’t remember any.

Any citizen has the right to object to public facilities being used for purposes which he thinks are inappropriate, and I happen to think that a public library is not the place to spread misinformation which is directly contrary to government vaccination policy. As can be seen from the last sentence, I am not saying that the AVN should not be allowed to speak as long as the speech isn’t made in a place of learning. I had the same problem when a group of people who deny the reality of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center wanted to rent a room at the Powerhouse Museum. They still spoke, but it was not in that institution.

It should be noted that the library still accommodated the AVN seminar despite objections from several people. They were perfectly entitled to do that even if the objectors were not satisfied with the explanation.

Ms Dorey was copied in on this email as a matter of courtesy. If her email filter was working she would not have seen it.

Mr Bowditch, a pensioner, runs a computer business of some description. He has several times stated that he has hacking tools that he can use against the AVN, the organisation of which I am President. Below is one example.

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Tweet by Peter Bowditch Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:35:56 +1100 From:

Observant people might have noticed me replying to @nocompulsoryvac today (Please note - that is my twitter address). She has me blocked but skeptics haz sharp hacker toolz. #StopAVN

by Peter Bowditch at 19/01/12 3:36 PM

(Source: http://twitter.com/RatbagsDotCom/status/159856784583045120)

I’m not sure how Ms Dorey got an email about this because as far as I know her blocking me from following her on Twitter also prevents her from following me.

As far as I know this is the only time I have joked about “hacker tools”. In this case it is simply logging out of the Twitter web site on my browser program. As Ms Dorey’s Twitter messages are unprotected anyone with Internet access can read all her messages as long as they are not logged in as a blocked user on the Twitter site. This is hardly a secret and if Ms Dorey has a problem with it she should either protect her messages or get Twitter to change their system.



And when I advertised for someone to help me with our website, Mr Bowditch sent the following message to me:

Ms Dorey seems to be confusing politeness and sarcasm with harassment.

As an aside, I have had an astrologer and a spiritualist church as clients and in neither case did I agree with what they did for a living (both knew my opinion) but as legitimate businesses they were entitled to good advice. I didn’t really expect Ms Dorey to accept my offer but I thought it was polite to ask.

It is interesting to note that Ms Dorey sued Bronwyn Hancock in 2004. In his judgment Raphael FM said:

This is a most unfortunate case. It should never have been brought. There has been no loss established. The evidence is that once the entries were discovered to exist in 2003 they were removed for subsequent years. What possible point could there have been in pursuing the declarations sought or the damages based upon the evidence that I have described. When the proceedings came before me for directions I made the unusual step for me of ordering the parties to mediation because I believed that it was not a suitable case for the parties to expend costs upon. Regrettably, the mediation was unsuccessful.



That is difficult to read but the original image in Ms Dorey’s statement was too wide to fit on an A4 page. I can no longer find the message in Facebook’s archives and as I never delete anything from there I am not sure why it is missing. It might have been useful to find it to establish in what context it was posted and what could be viewed by clicking “See More”.

What is obvious from the three images above and what has never been a secret is that I have contempt for people who oppose vaccination on emotional and unscientific grounds. Their beliefs, if followed, would result in the death and disablement of many children. This is my opinion and it does not constitute threats against anyone unless they perceive any form of criticism as threatening and harassment. Ms Dorey has been aware of my opinion since at least March 1999 when she accused me, in a mailing list that I am blocked from participating in, of committing the criminal offence of receiving secret commissions. I have been the target of such abuse for a long time but I accept that it is one of the prices that have to be paid for publicly expressing an opinion that others might not agree with.



This is one of the emails I never received from Mr Bowditch because I had blocked his address, but the screen shot was sent to me by a friend. Please note the last paragraph where he states that he will be sitting in the courtroom (at our hearing before the Supreme Court) with a square of black silk - a reference to an executioner.

Ms Dorey had published a statement saying that vaccination was equivalent to “rape with full penetration”, and had refused to apologise for this disgusting comment. I was not alone in expressing my revulsion at this idiocy. If it had been uttered in a moment of carelessness and then either retracted or apologised for I would have been reasonably satisfied, but instead of apologising Ms Dorey tried to justify it. I do not apologise for reacting strongly, but my reaction is neither a threat nor harassment.

It is not the executioner who wears the black silk, it is the sentencing judge, but in any case I had no intention of doing anything so silly in a real court. Ms Dorey obviously has no ability to detect satire or metaphor.

It is rather ironic that Ms Dorey has filed many copyright violation claims with Facebook over the last year where people have taken screenshots of her messages and reproduced them elsewhere yet she seems comfortable reproducing one of my Facebook messages without asking my permission.

Ms Dorey does not appear to have any comment about this image. Again, I can’t find the message in Facebook’s archives. It might have been a little tasteless but it is certainly true that I am heartily sick of being told that there is no need for a measles vaccine because doctors had found ways to manage viral diseases and reduce the death rate before the vaccine was introduced. Death is not the only result of measles and the vaccine took the incidence to zero, eliminating the side effects of the disease. Ms Dorey has been told this on many occasions but she perpetuates the nonsense.



At our hearing before the Supreme Court, the Court decided to take what I have been told is a rare step - they had 3 security guards there. This was because of threats by people like Peter Bowditch. If the Court is concerned, why shouldn’t I be as well - and I am!

There were two Sherriff’s officers there, not three, and they had no idea why they were wasting their time providing protection in the absence of any apparent threat. The Court wasn’t concerned, Ms Dorey was and the Court responded to her concern. The idea that I or any of my friends would risk a contempt charge by doing anything untoward inside the Supreme Court is ludicrous. In fact, I find it offensive and defamatory but I’m not about to sue anyone over it.

Below are a series of tweets sent by Mr Bowditch after this first hearing. In this tweets, he discusses the fact that there were security guards there, that he was aware they had been called out because of the risk to people attending the court and that he was proud of these threats.

It is difficult to express sarcasm in the 140 text characters of a Twitter message. There was no risk to anyone. I was being sarcastic. And yes, Ms Dorey’s overreaction to will o’ the wisps amused me.

Note 1: By reproducing my messages only without other parts of the conversation, Ms Dorey has not presented a true picture of what happened on Twitter that day.

Note 2. This image was cropped to fit on the page and remove irrelevant material. One of the things removed was Ms Dorey’s statement “Shame that his train wasn’t stopped by snow”. Why she should want me to miss a public court hearing is a mystery.



The last part of my submission is a copy of a video which Peter Bowditch put together and uploaded to You Tube called Leave Meryl Alone (http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=5E0XN1Xmtsk). I’m sure that if you watch this video - either on the DVD which I have included or online at the link noted, you will see that this is not only threatening, but chillingly so.

Ms Dorey is again demonstrating her inability to understand satire. Also, if she found the video to be “not only threatening, but chillingly so” then perhaps she should have complained to YouTube to get it removed. She would appear petty if she were to do that now, however, after she has publicised it.

In today’s world, we are told that cyberbullying, harassment and threats are becoming more common. Just because something is common, however, is no reason to excuse it as being normal - it is not.

Does this mean that Ms Dorey will ask her friends and followers, such as “Liz Hempel”, to refrain from publishing lies about my non-existent criminal record? Does it also mean that Ms Dorey will herself refrain from encouraging raving loons like John Scudamore and Tim Bolen (to whom she provided her court statements before lodging them with the Court) to produce ridiculous web pages about me?

I have been very visible on the Internet for a long time and I learnt very early that anybody with any sort of profile can expect abuse and harsh words. If Ms Dorey wants to adopt a prominent and perhaps controversial position then she can expect incoming flak. I’ve learnt to live with it and so should she.

I have lived for 3 years under constant threat by Mr Bowditch and the other defendants in my AVO applications.

I look to the court system to help protect my family and myself by issuing an APVO against him which will hopefully prevent him from continuing his relentless campaign - at least for the next 12 months.

Ms Dorey has been able to provide only a small number of examples covering many years. Such a low volume of material hardly constitutes a barrage of harassment.

As I live a long way away from Ms Dorey’s residence and place of work, the purpose of this application can only be to limit my ability to comment on Ms Dorey’s activities. I do not want to stop her speaking even though I disagree totally with what she has to say. I simply ask that I have the right of reply. Ms Dorey has total control over some places where I can comment or respond to her, such as on Twitter, in her mailing lists, or on her blogs and Facebook page, so she can already completely shut herself off from anything I say or do. I place no such restrictions on her, but she is in the position that she can only see what I say if she goes looking for it. I can’t harass or threaten her (not that I have ever done so or plan to do in the future) if she doesn’t see what I say and do.

Thank you in advance for your consideration in this matter. Meryl Dorey

statement by peter james bowditch - home of the … to avo application by meryl dorey part 1 peter...

Documents