“It was an honour to welcome the best-selling author and professor into our offices last month. She said the team at Mamamia were “huge Roxane Gay fans and supporters”. Mamamia has since removed the story from its website and edited the podcast description to remove details of her publisher’s requests.įreedman responded on Tuesday afternoon, releasing a statement on.
“‘Can she fit into the lift?’ Shame on you Mamamia,” she added. Just hours after the interview and accompanying online story went live on Monday, Gay tweeted to her 211,000 Twitter followers that she found Mamamia’s discussion of these issues to be “cruel and humiliating”. “I estimate that there were a dozen exchanges back and forth between my producer and her people and the details of them both broke my heart and opened my eyes,” Freedman said on the podcast. When Gay’s publishers were arranging her visit to the Mamamia office to conduct an interview with Freedman for the No Filter podcast, Freedman says they had a long list of requirements. At her heaviest, she weighed 261kg and is medically classified as super morbidly obese. Gay was gang raped at age 12 and turned to food for comfort. Gay, a New York Times best-selling author, was in Sydney to promote her new book Hunger, a memoir discussing her lifelong battle with her body. She says she is “deeply apologetic” and that she “missed the mark”.įreedman was slammed by the author herself, Roxane Gay, over how she was portrayed in a podcast interview. MIA Freedman, the founder of women’s news website Mamamia, has responded to criticism that she was “cruel and humiliating” when she described in detail the weight issues of a best-selling author.