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The Project's Waleed Aly issues warning live on air: 'Be careful'
"This is the lesson we refuse to learn."
The Project's Waleed Aly appeared to use the experience of his former co-host Lisa Wilkinson as an example while discussing recent allegations against singer Lizzo.
Waleed, Sarah Harris, Steve Price and Sam Taunton were discussing the singer after three dancers came forward with allegations of sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment.
Lizzo has since denied the allegations, with the hosts questioning whether the singer's career could survive the claims.
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"Well, I don't think a white male performer would survive that, they'd be out of a job already," Steve said. "Who knows whether these allegations are correct or not, but why else would those women make those allegations."
"You've got to be careful, right. This is the lesson we refuse to learn," Waleed said, jumping in. "There's allegations made and we jump in and start doing commentary and then later a court reaches a decision and we go, 'Oh, what do we do now?' Maybe we'd be better off if we didn't end up making that mistake."
He continued, "I think what is clear, is where you become an icon of a certain virtue – irrespective of these allegations or what becomes of them – there just always seems to be a moment where that comes, right?"
Sarah compared it to the toxic workplace allegations against Ellen DeGeneres, "She was the Queen of Nice! And then when rumours and allegations or her being a nightmare behind the scenes started surfacing, people were really affronted by that. When you kind of build your brand on that authenticity and then something comes up to kind of, perhaps, question that?"
Steve added that people will usually come to the defence of the victims in these cases, with Waleed arguing that whether people default to believing the accusers or not will "depend on their pre-existing politics".
"They go, 'Is this a person I want to defend? Do they fit in the boxes that I want to defend or not?' And then we jump in, and that's just backwards, it's just the wrong way to approach these things," Waleed added. "So, it'll be fascinating to see how it all plays out."
"Put it in the vault, we'll have a look when the result comes out," Steve said.
Waleed's comments about being 'careful' appear to potentially be in relation to Lisa Wilkinson, who created controversy at the Logies last year when she spoke about Brittany Higgins' rape case, despite the fact the trial was only days away.
Lisa was accepting a silver Logie for her interview with Ms Higgins, who accused former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann of rape, however, her comments resulted in the trial being delayed and the trial was moved to October 2022.
Mr Lehrmann pleaded not guilty to sexually assaulting Ms Higgins, however, the trial was later cut short after 12 days of evidence and submissions and five days of deliberations due to juror misconduct.
The trial was discontinued, and charges were dropped after a retrial was deemed to be a risk to Ms Higgins' health.
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