Content warning: This article mentions paedophilia, child sexual abuse and rape.

Grace Tame has called out Peter van Onselen, after the pair engaged in a heated conversation on Twitter that saw him disclose that he was also a victim of child sexual abuse.

Van Onselen previously wrote in The Australian that he was “lucky” to not be abused by a notorious paedophile he had gained the attention of, and has now said that wasn’t the case.

The conversation was sparked by van Onselen commenting on a separate tweet by Dr Gemma Carey, suggesting that her family being banned from the GP clinic they had been seeing for a long time was “a sign that you’re a complete pain in the arse”.

Grace Tame retweeted a screenshot of his comment with the caption, “When you victimise a vulnerable person, that’s a pretty good sign too.”

This prompted van Onselen to say he was a victim of child sexual abuse from a person who was convicted at the time that he shared his story to police.

Tame replied noting that the person who he said abused him hadn’t been convicted of crimes against him, writing that “co-opting other survivors’ experiences is a whole new low, mate”.

Van Onselen also said Tame forced him to make the disclosure after she accused him of co-opting the stories of other victims of the same person.

“You have made me say this which is incredibly distressing but there you go,” he wrote. “The police knew of three other boys he raped who didn’t want to testify. I was one of them.”

“I was going off your own words, Peter. You are responsible for when and what you publicly disclose, not me. I ask again that you leave me alone now,” Tame replied, attaching a screenshot from his article in The Australian.

“Like lots of survivors I have sought to not go public about what happened to me. I spoke to the police about exactly that as my abuser was being sentenced. Please stop shaming me for not having your courage to choose to go public.”

“I have not shamed you, not once,” Tame replied. “You’re manipulating this entire situation. I have pointed out exactly what I have known to be true.”

Tame returned to Twitter on Friday morning to explain the situation.

“I stood up for a friend whom Peter demeaned unsolicitedly,” she wrote.

“He then used ‘convicted’ paedophilia survivorship as a defence, in a tweet he copied and pasted several times – to me a paedophilia survivor.  

“Prior, he publicly aserted me he was “not sexually abused”, so I called him out.”

Earlier the same day, she asserted that every survivor “deserves to be heard and respected”, but that trauma shouldn’t “excuse bad behaviour”.

“It is not a weapon of provocation or one-up-manship to deploy in the face of others at your convenience, especially not fellow survivors.”

Van Onselen originally wrote that he had been groomed by a paedophile but had not been abused in his The Australian piece.

“To be very clear from the outset, I was not sexually abused, I am one of the lucky ones” he wrote at the time.  

“But only just. A teacher … tried to sexually assault me on a school trip. He was convicted for doing so to three other boys on that same trip.”

But, he also wrote that he may have “dissociated” during the abuse and may “have blocked more that happened”.

In his latest online spat, the Project co-host also referred to a previous altercation with Dr Carey, when he had threatened to sue her over a tweet suggesting he was a danger to his wife in an old photo with Christian Porter.

Image: Roy Vandervegt (Adelaide Festival) / Getty Images