DUBAI: Northern Irish actor Gerard McCarthy has denied bullying British actress Maureen Lipman, in a statement posted on Instagram after she wrote about him in The Telegraph.
“For the avoidance of doubt: I have never met Maureen Lipman. I have never spoken to her. I have never contacted her,” McCarthy wrote, adding that he had never asked for her to be removed from a production and had never refused to work with her. “So if I have managed to bully her, I have done so with remarkably little effort.”
McCarthy withdrew last month from “Right Before I Go,” a suicide-awareness play at London’s Soho Theatre, after Lipman joined its revolving cast. He said he had privately told producers he was not prepared to publicize her involvement because of views she has expressed publicly about Israel and Gaza, but had not asked for her casting to be reconsidered.
Both actors have since left the production.
“Antisemitism is abhorrent, and I condemn it without qualification,” he wrote. “My disagreement is with views Maureen herself has chosen to express publicly.”
Lipman, a longstanding public supporter of Israel who has criticized pro-Palestinian protests, wrote on Wednesday that McCarthy’s decision was “cowardly, stupid and ignorant,” and told him to “grow up.”
“I sincerely hope I continue to have that opportunity,” McCarthy wrote. “Tens of thousands of children in Gaza never will.”
