Gorman, the middle of three girls, also lived in England, Thailand, Ireland, Germany, and The Netherlands as a child of a diplomat; however, she regards Canberra as her home.
[3] Some of Gorman's best-known stories include the live recording of plastic surgery,[4] letting listeners hear her be set upon by a police dog,[5] an award-winning series on death that included seeing a body being prepared in a morgue and another being burnt in a crematorium,[6] as well as speaking to an inmate prior to his release from the Alexander Maconochie Centre in Canberra after serving a 12-year sentence for his part in another man's death.
In 2010, while presenting RN Drive for ABC Far North in Cairns, Gorman interviewed a gay couple with an adopted Russian-born son, with the story afterwards published online.
[10] Gorman stood her ground against the attacks, admitted her mistakes, and spoke on the topic of internet trolling in a TEDxCanberra presentation.
[16] Gorman had worked for months researching and writing an article for news.com.au called "Unspoken abuse: mothers who rape their sons".
Newscorp (owner of news.com.au) took the Daily Mail to court over the matter, but it was settled (reportedly without money changing hands) in a confidential settlement three months later.
[23] From this experience, Gorman wrote a series of articles in 2017 on cyberhate for Fairfax Media[12] and, later, her first book, Troll Hunting (published by Hardie Grant in February 2019).
[13] During her five-year research project into online trolling, Gorman adopted an approach she later identified as the "radical empathy", described in Cheryl Strayed's book, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar.
Gorman contacted the internet trolls who had targeted her, earned their trust, and, ultimately formed complex and long-standing relationships with them.
Her research shows that predator trolls often hold down good jobs, lead normal lives, and work in international, online syndicates.
She found that, in common with terrorist organisations, these syndicates use the internet to recruit and radicalise young people (mostly boys) aged 10–16.
She warns that predator trolls do not confine their activities to the Internet; that attacks often spill over into the real world as stalking, physical abuse, murder, or even terrorism.
My research links predator trolling to all kinds of real-life horrors: shootings, suicide and suicide attempts, a woman killed and many others injured at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, indecent communication with a child, stalking, domestic violence, PTSD, mental illness and more.”Soon after the publication of Gorman's book, 51 people were killed in the Christchurch mosque shootings; consecutive attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The accused, a 28-year-old Australian man, was revealed as a member of an online trolling syndicate similar to those Gorman discusses in her book.
[36] In November 2019, Gorman, together with photographers Hillary Wardhaugh and Martin Ollman, sculptor Tom Buckland, and printmaker Jess Higgens, was one of the organisers of "On Thin Ice", an arts-documentary collaboration which allowed young people recovering from addiction to crystal methamphetamine to tell their stories.