Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff (born 1971) is an Austrian counter-jihad activist, and human rights and free speech advocate. Her family thereafter returned to Austria, before moving to Chicago, where she completed most of her schooling. She worked for the Austrian embassy in Kuwait at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. She was approached by the Freedom Party of Austria in 2007 to develop a seminar on Islam, which she taught for two years. The verdict was seconded by the Supreme Court of Austria in 2014. She appealed the conviction to the European Court of Human Rights, which in 2018 ruled her speech to not be covered by freedom of speech, although she had made the assertion based on the Islamic texts describing Muhammad's consummation of his marriage with his 9-year-old wife Aisha when he was 54 years old. According to Bruce Bawer, a search for mentions about the case on the internet, described by William Kilpatrick as a "pivotal event in modern European jurisprudence" that "placed the principles of sharia above the right to freedom of expression", failed to find a single mention of the original appeals verdict in any newspaper in the Western world. The case was covered by US-based online outlets such as FrontPage Magazine, Jihad Watch, the Center for Security Policy and Gatestone Institute, the Viennese Association of Academics and ACT for America. and has been featured extensively on the counter-jihad blog Gates of Vienna under the section "Elisabeth's Voice". She was also part of a Freedom Party of Austria delegation led by Heinz-Christian Strache that visited Israel the same year, and she spoke in Israel alongside Geert Wilders at the invitation of former MK Eliezer Cohen. In 2011, she posed for photographs together with Donald Trump and Frank Gaffney at the launch of the United West in Florida. In 2013, Republican Representatives Louie Gohmert, Michele Bachmann, Robert Pittenger and Steve King travelled to Austria to give their support to Sabaditsch-Wolff. She was herself invited to meet with Kansas Secretary of State and Trump advisor Kris Kobach in 2017, and spoke at a pro-Trump rally in Denver, Colorado the same year. The book included "expert analyses" by Robert Spencer, Clare M. Lopez, Stephen Coughlin, Christian Zeitz, Henrik R. Clausen and Christine Brim. An updated and revised version of the book, titled Truth Was My Crime: A Life Fighting for Freedom was published in 2023.