I saw this posted on the SWAN Facebook page. Pardon me for copying and pasting my comments from there, but here are my thoughts on this "controversy":
When I bought the 6" Slave Leia figure at Target for myself LAST YEAR, I had my daughter with me. Mind you, she's a toddler. But I felt kind of self concious. And the cashier (female, btw) actually said something to me about the figure like "Ooooh, Leia's looking pretty powerful". I didn't quite know how to take that, personally. And frankly, I was a little surprised that Hasbro went with Slave Leia as their first 6" figure depiction of the character, but it's a look that is very much an accepted part of pop culture. I mean, the costume was the basis for a subplot point on the sitcom Friends after all! And there have been Slave Leia costume contests going on at conventions for years.
As for this article? It came out yesterday on the heels of SDCC. Star Wars was a VERY BIG story coming out of Comic Con, with lots of positive articles running about the panel which featured guess who: Carrie Fisher. If you pay attention to the news, you'll generally find a trend where there are usually some negative articles about some tangential aspect of a given big news story. The negative pieces generally aren't breaking any sort of hard-hitting news, but they do generate website hits and it might fill 2 minutes in a local newscast, like for this Fox 29 station in Philly. And if Fox 29 in Philadelphia is fishing for a story like this, it's probably an effort on the part of that station's News Director to pump up their ratings and social media profile.
The fact that this figure has been out for well over a year, or that the likeness of Leia is something that's been in pop culture for well over 30 years, very likely does not mean a thing to the News Director of Fox 29 in Philly or the reporter who put this piece together. Have they run pieces about the Funko action figures that depict Danaerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, who is featured in even more brutal scenes than Leia in the slave outfit? Not likely, since Fox 29's reporting is pretty superficial. And they almost certainly wouldn't get a comment from Hasbro because when they ran this piece since all of Hasbro's people were probably travelling back from SDCC. But if they can run a negative piece about a hot topic like Star Wars that leads to a ratings bump? Then they're probably all for it. The journalism and related facts don't matter to the people at Fox 29. And this is the kind of crap that I've come to expect from local news...even if Philly is among the top 10 TV markets in the country.