A Christian counselor and social media influencer in the UK is seeking legal action after she lost her position at a private Catholic school. Gozen Soydag, 37, had been hired at St Anne’s Catholic High School for Girls in Enfield, north London where she worked as a consultant pastoral manager for year 10 students in 2022. In February 2023, Soydag was summoned by staff administrators who informed her there had been complaints about her social media accounts. Soydag runs several Instagram accounts that deal with traditional views on marriage and Christian living, with an emphasis on submission to husbands. Soydag has over 30,000 followers across her accounts.

According to a statement from Christian Legal Centre (CLC), which is representing her, Soydag was then notified that some of her posts had caused “offence” to an anonymous complainant and was forced to take several posts down. One post in particular that was shown at an employment tribunal earlier this week involved a video Soydag shared of a woman in a headscarf discussing how she submits to her husband. In the video, the woman says, “My husband is my boss. My husband is number one. If my husband tells me ‘Hey sit down’ I will sit down.” She goes on to say, “So I tell women out there, you want a man in your life? You want to be happy? Figure out what you would do when you are happy because I am happy. My husband does so many great things for me. I obey him, I respect him and I let him be the man that he is. I chose a man I wanted to follow. I chose someone to lead me and that’s why I will do anything for him.”

Soydag stated that the school’s assistant head teacher, Jo Sanders, accused the post of being “provocative like Andrew Tate.” Andrew Tate is a controversial social media influence who speaks on masculinity, and has been accused of promoting abusive and dismissive views of women. He is also currently being investigated for accusations of alleged human trafficking. When asked if she agreed with the woman’s outlook on marriage, Soydag responded that there was a misunderstanding of “the beauty of submission.” “It does [align to my beliefs] to the extent where there’s love and a choice to agree to yield to her husband’s choices. However, it’s clear here she’s not Christian- she’s Muslim. So, in its entirety it does not fully line up but some of it does line up,” she said.

When she was confronted about the video in 2023, Soydag agreed to take it down. When asked to set her account to private, she informed the school it would take around two weeks before the algorithms would no longer connect her to the controversial post. However, the next day, her birthday, she was let go by the school. During the first day of the employment tribunal, Soydag stated she had not seen any policies by the school about keeping social media accounts private. “This isn’t a private social media account, it’s a ministry, it’s the way I serve my community, the way I encourage, uplift. Most of it is for encouragement to benefit, help and it is mostly around the word of God,” she said. Soydag has said she had never encouraged any of her students to seek out her accounts. Soydag and her legal representatives are seeking damages for breach of contract and wrongful dismissal according to the Equality Act 2010. Soydag has stated that her beliefs align with the school’s mission statement CLC Chief Executive Andrea Williams said the school’s dismissal of Soydag’s was “another example of schools capitulating to secular orthodoxy under pressure,” and that, “Gozen was doing a fantastic job in a tough area of London, supporting young women in a Catholic school, until someone complained about her beliefs expressed in her own time.” A decision has not yet been released from the tribunal.