Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s lawyers have issued South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas with a concerns notice over comments he made about her removal from the Adelaide Writers’ Week program.
In a post on Instagram on Wednesday, Abdel-Fattah said her lawyers issued a formal concerns notice to Malinauskas under the Defamation Act.
Abdel-Fattah accused Malinauskas of suggesting she was an “extreme terrorist sympathiser” and had linked her to the Bondi Beach terror attack.
“This is a vicious personal assault on me, a private citizen, by the highest official in South Australia,” she wrote in a social media post.
“It was defamatory and it terrified me.”
Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian-Australian author and academic, was removed from the Adelaide Writers Week program by the Adelaide Festival board. She had been scheduled to appear at the literary festival to speak about her 2025 book Discipline.
The Adelaide Festival Board told her she would no longer be included, saying it would not be “culturally sensitive” to proceed with her session in the wake of the deadly Bondi Beach terror attack late last year.
On Tuesday, the Adelaide Writers’ Week was cancelled. It came after 170 authors quit the program following the removal of Abdel-Fattah.
Writers Week director Louise Adler also resigned from her role over the board’s decision.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Peter Malinauskas rejected the claim that he had sought to influence the Adelaide Festival board. Instead, the premier said he had given his opinion that the state government did not support Abdel-Fattah’s inclusion at the event.
On Wednesday, Malinauskas said he was not aware that a concerns notice had been received. Abdel-Fattah said she had never met the South Australian premier and he had never attempted to contact her.