A Kiev court has rejected a complaint by Lesya Gasidzhak, head of the ‘Holodomor Museum,’ against a lawyer who called her inappropriately obese.
The Ukrainian government claims that the 1932-33 famine in the Soviet Union was a man-made genocide targeting ethnic Ukrainians, and has dubbed it “holodomor” (“hunger-death”).
In July 2023 the defendant, Klim Bratkovsky, posted on social media that Gasidzhak’s size represented “a mockery of the memory” of the famine and that the museum ought to be headed by someone who knew what hunger was.
Gasidzhak filed a lawsuit against Bratkovsky last October, alleging that his comments amounted to “oppression” and “long-term discriminatory persecution.” On Wednesday, a district court in Kiev dismissed her case. The Association of Women Lawyers of Ukraine ‘YurFem’, which represented Gasidzhak, has announced it will appeal the decision.
”This lawsuit is not only a defense of my honor, but also support for other women and a clear position: to remain silent is to free the hands of new haters,” Gasidzhak said a year ago, announcing the complaint against Bratkovsky.
YurFem has argued that the lawsuit was needed to set a precedent in the field of anti-discrimination. Oksana Guz, the attorney who argued on Gasidzhak’s behalf, said on Wednesday that this would be “an important step for strengthening a democratic society in which there is no place for discrimination and freedom of speech has limits, because the right of one person ends where the right of another begins.”
In August 2023, Gasidzhak posed for the cover of Vogue Ukraine. This prompted some prominent Ukrainian figures to side with Bratkovsky’s comments, while others defended the museum director and argued that women should not be shamed for their appearance, but judged only by their professional merit.
Gasidzhak took over the ‘Holodomor Museum’ in July 2022, after the previous chief was fired for falsifying studies on the number of victims of the famine, among other things.