Stan Grant kicks out Q+A audience member
ABC host Stan Grant has taken extraordinary measures to eject an audience member in the latest episode of Q+A.
The moment was triggered when the audience member, known as Sasha Gillies-Leakakis, shared widely discredited pro-Russian claims about killings in Ukraine.
The inflammatory question from Sasha was promptly and uncomfortably deflected, but the show's host was unable to move on from the controversial statements.
Mr Gillies-Leakakis asked the panel hosts, “As someone who comes from the Russian community here in Australia, I’ve been pretty outraged by the narrative depicted by our media, with Ukraine as the good guy and Russia as the bad guy."
“Believe it or not, there are a lot of Russians here and around the world that support what Putin’s doing in Ukraine, myself included.”
The University of Melbourne student went on to claim that Ukraine had “besieged” the Russian populations in Donetsk and Luhansk and killed about 13,000 people, before audience members began to heckle him, with calls of “that’s a lie”, “don’t do this” and “propaganda”.
The question was ignored by the panel, but after 20 minutes, Stan Grant felt he had to do something.
“Something has been bothering me … people here have been talking about family who are suffering and people who are dying. Can I just say – I’m just not comfortable with you being here. Could you please leave?,” Grant said.
Stan Grant kicks an Australian-Russian man out of #QandA for questioning the media's pro-Ukraine/anti-Russia coverage. pic.twitter.com/tKylsWVeCK
— Caldron Pool (@CaldronPool) March 3, 2022
The audience applauded Grant's request, as the audience member tried to fire back.
“You can ask a question, but we cannot advocate violence. I should have asked you to leave then. It‘s been playing on my mind and, I’m sorry, but I have to ask you to leave.”
Once the questioner had left, Stan apologised to the audience for the disruption and explained his motivations.
“We come here in good faith to have open conversation, rigorous conversation. We’ve heard different points of view, and we encourage different points of view here,” he said.
“But we can’t have anyone who is sanctioning, supporting, violence and killing of people. So I‘m sorry for the disruption. It was not a vetted question. It was a rogue question. It’s not good.”
Following his eviction from the ABC studios, Sasha shared a lengthy post regarding his controversial views, while also saying, “I would like to say that I had no intention whatsoever of offending anyone, and so would like to sincerely apologise for any distress my comments may have caused.”
Image credits: ABC