Spare us, Grace Tame. Your six-months-late, non-apology ‘apology’ video is insulting tripe. I’ve got the proof that you know it, too: PETER VAN ONSELEN

Six months after dismissing the October 7 rapes as ‘propaganda’ that had been ‘debunked’, Grace Tame has finally issued what she’d like us to mistake for an apology.

The timing is suspiciously convenient. With her speaking engagements drying up and Australia consumed by fresh sexual violence allegations involving the Sydney Swans and students from Scots College and St Gregory’s, the nation’s once ubiquitous survivor-advocate finds herself locked out of the conversation.

Yet even now, Tame can’t eke out the only three words that matter: I was wrong. Instead, she now claims her comments were ‘misinterpreted’ and the subject of a ‘mischaracterisation’. Give me a break.

When asked on ABC Radio in March why she hadn’t spoken up for Israeli women, Tame didn’t bat an eyelid in response: ‘I’m not going to sink to the level of entertaining any kind of propaganda’, she said. 

When the host Hamish Macdonald confronted her with the United Nations finding that there were reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape had occurred, she doubled down, insisting the claims had been ‘debunked’ and cast the questioning as a tactic employed by bad faith actors.

It wasn’t an ambiguous exchange. It doesn’t require translation, let alone ‘misinterpretation’.

Now, her new statement quietly shifts the goalposts. Tame hides behind Human Rights Watch, presenting its inability to verify rapes through its own interviews as though it disproved the allegations. It did no such thing. 

Its same report cited the UN finding that there were reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred at several locations.

Tame then retreats to the narrower claim that Human Rights Watch couldn’t substantiate rapes ‘en masse’, before tossing in a meagre concession that she accepts individual accounts. 

But Macdonald didn’t ask her about ‘en masse’ semantics back in March. He asked about rape and gang rape. She called it propaganda.

The most disgraceful part is her non-apology itself: ‘I acknowledge and sincerely apologise for any harm their mischaracterisation has caused’.

Whose mischaracterisation?

Not one word apologises for calling the allegations ‘propaganda’. The passive voice does all the work, allowing Tame to pose as the victim of everyone else’s misconduct. 

The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Earlier this year, Anthony Albanese apologised after calling Tame ‘difficult’. He later hid behind the claim that he meant she’d endured a difficult life and regretted any ‘misinterpretation’.

Tame publicly gutted him for the weasel words: ‘We all know what you meant. Spare me the condescension, old man’.

Albo’s excuse was tripe, but so is her non-apology now, laced with caveats and deflections such as it is.

If ‘misinterpretation’ was cowardly when Albo used it, which it was, it’s cowardly when Tame uses it now, which it absolutely is.

The decision to make this a solemn video only amplifies the phoniness. It looked like a self-convened press conference answering a question nobody had asked in many months. No interviewer, no follow-up. 

And it took her six months to even summon the courage or decency to deliver the non-apology. Even then it likely only happened to address lost speaking gigs and lost relevance.  

The recent allegations involving the Swans and students from Scots and St Gregory’s must be handled carefully while legal processes play out. But they have reignited a national debate about sexual violence, male behaviour, and institutional accountability.

Tame would ordinarily have expected to be at the centre of that debate. But she can’t be, not without every contribution inviting the obvious question: Which victims count and which don’t?

She revealed that her solidarity with Israeli victims was conditional on whether their suffering fitted her politics. Her new video looks less like contrition than a desperate application to rejoin the conversation.

Frankly, it reeks of relevance deprivation syndrome: a public figure who built an identity around survivor advocacy suddenly discovering the moral microphone has been switched off.

None of this requires defending Benjamin Netanyahu or Israeli policy in Gaza. Tame can condemn the State of Israel all that she likes.

But you don’t get to preach universal solidarity, then selectively disbelieve victims from a country you despise. That’s the test of principle: whether it survives contact with people you don’t like. 

Tame has failed that test before. I know that only too well.

Tame’s courage in telling her story and campaigning for legal reforms remains real. It always will. But past courage doesn’t provide a lifetime hall pass for disgraceful behaviour. Being a survivor doesn’t place you beyond scrutiny when you dismiss other survivors.

In fact, her history makes this worse. Her words carried the authority of someone who had taught Australians that survivors must be believed. 

But the higher the pulpit, the harder the fall.

A real apology required one sentence: ‘I was wrong to dismiss credible rape allegations as propaganda, and I am sorry’. And it shouldn’t have taken this long.

No semantic retreat to ‘en masse’. No selective citation. No passive voice blame-shifting. No theatrical video.

Until she honestly owns what she did, she has no business lecturing anyone else about anything.