“These are wild accusations to make without solid proof,” tweets an internet personality who is largely famous for having reasonable and nuanced takes on unreasonable situations. “These are people’s livelihoods at stake. I’m troubled by how eager this community is to delight in the suffering of others. We all need to do better.”
A pop-culture blogger with conservative leanings and seventy thousand followers launches a hate campaign against Adele Sparks-Sato. ASS IS A CRAZY PERSON WITH A VENDETTA AGAINST MORE SUCCESSFUL WRITERS, he rants. NEWS FLASH: JEALOUSY LOOKS UGLY ON YOU, ADELE. (This is entertaining to witness, but to be clear, I do not condone such actions. I guess it’s nice to have someone speak in your defense, but in a perfect world, they wouldn’t be frequent commentators on Fox News.)
Eden’s Angels, bless them, are firmly on my side.
From Jen: So normally I don’t agree with fascists but he’s right about ASS lmao.
Marnie: Well you don’t need to be a fascist to know that!
Jen: You alright, though? Hanging in there?
Marnie: This is horrendous. I am so, so sorry you’re going through this. Let me know if there’s anything we can do. You are so brave.
Jen: It’s tall poppy syndrome. They hate seeing young women succeed. That’s all this is. I get shit like this all the time from male CEOS. They can’t STAND us.
Marnie: They’re dogpiling on you for clout and attention and they know it. It’s not about you, it’s about them.
Jen: Don’t wrestle with pigs, and all that!! Block it out, Junie. Ignore the haters. RISE ABOVE!!
IF ONLY I COULD. I CANNOT UNGLUE MYSELF FROM MY DEVICES. WHENEVER I close my eyes, I still see that azure-blue screen. I still imagine the likes racking up on yet another takedown thread about me.
I do try a digital purge. Everyone keeps urging that I do this, as if pretending Twitter doesn’t exist will solve all my problems. Trolls feed on your attention! Jen keeps reminding me. What’s on the internet can’t hurt you if you don’t look at it. But it doesn’t feel like a cleanse; it feels like sticking my head in the sand while everything is falling down around me. I can’t ignore the damage. I have to track the exact trajectory of the hurricane, because knowing the precise moment it’ll hit and where will make things hurt less. At least, my brain is convinced this is so.
I try taking a walk, to lose myself in details like birdsong and splattered sunlight and the wet patches left by the rain on the cement, but the world outside feels so insubstantial, irrelevant, like a video game environment that’s still buffering. Sometimes I do manage to forget it all for a moment, but then my focus slips and I think back to my phone lying on my bed, buzzing with more and more notifications. And then my breathing quickens, and my head swims, and I know I’m on the verge of an anxiety attack, so I double back to my apartment and curl up on my bed and whip out my phone for another hour of doom-scrolling, because that is paradoxically the only thing that calms things down.
I can’t eat. I want to eat—I’m starving all the time, and I keep ordering huge, hot, greasy delivery meals of pizza or pasta bowls, but the moment I start to chew, my thoughts begin to spiral again about my impending professional implosion and then I can’t take another bite without gagging.
I can’t sleep. I lie awake every night until the sun comes up, feverishly refreshing various threads and accounts to see who’s retweeted or responded to what, composing imaginary responses in my head, then composing imaginary rebuttals to the backlash to those responses.
I wish I had an exit strategy. I wish there were some magical apology I could make, or defense I could offer, that would make everything stop. But there is no point, I know, in getting embroiled in the mess. Anything I post will become further evidence that people can use against me. And what would an online victory even look like? There’s no way to reverse the exposure, to make the internet forget about me. I’m marked forever. Every time someone Googles my name, or brings me up at a literary conference, the association with this plagiarism scandal will foul the air like a persistent fart.
I know some authors who have been able to jump from scandal to scandal with their reputations perfectly intact. Mostly white. Mostly male. Isaac Asimov was a serial sexual harasser; so was Harlan Ellison. David Foster Wallace abused, harassed, and stalked Mary Karr. They are still hailed as geniuses.
Sometimes, I think ruefully to myself that maybe this is just something I have to get through. An online raking over the coals feels like a rite of passage every notable author must now undergo. Last year, a YA writer was driven off social media for encouraging her fans to leave one-star reviews on another writer’s debut (afterward, it transpired the debut writer had stolen her fiancé). In any case, both writers involved just signed new, six-figure deals for their follow-up trilogies. And Marnie Kimball, Daniella’s favorite author, has gotten in hot water at least a dozen times, always for tweeting something edgy and indefensible, like The classics are just better and if you don’t get them, you don’t know how to read. Sorry. Her sales are doing fine. Maybe Daniella’s right. Maybe silence is the best response.
Even Athena suffered her own period of online vitriol, though in her case she really had done nothing wrong. Two years ago, she’d tweeted some uncontroversial, bleeding-heart thread about the recent rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans. I’ve never been so nervous to be in my own skin, she’d said. Until now, I never felt so much like this country was not my own. It read as a little cheesy and narcissistic, but whatever; it was a cause close to her heart, and you couldn’t exactly hate on someone who was afraid of being attacked on the street.
But then some anonymous account with an emoji of the Chinese flag in the bio asked her, If you care about Asians so much, why are you dating white?
I don’t know why Athena responded. One never argues a racist troll into submission. But she must have been feeling defensive, or raring for a fight, because she quote tweeted the reply and said: Who I date has nothing to do with my politics. Hating on interracial couples? Is this 2018?
Then the floodgates opened. Hateful messages inundated her replies and DMs. She showed some of them to me when we met up for coffee later that week, and they were utterly vile:
Shut up and go suck white cock
WAMF couples are unnatural. WAMF is how you get Eliot Rodger. You want me to come shoot you up like Eliot Rodger?
The whites will never love you LOL stop trying honey
Don’t you dare speak for Asians. You lost that right when you let a white man colonize your cunt.
By the time she took her account private, the AMRAs (the Asian Men’s Rights Activists, she called them) had already found her author account and email address. She started getting death threats. Screenshots of the initial Twitter encounter started circulating on Reddit, on which the main thread eventually acquired over a thousand posts, many of them screenshotted photos of Athena and her then-boyfriend, Geoff, pulled from their respective Instagram accounts, with captions like RACE TRAITOR and Some Asians have no loyalty for their race. They only want white cock, white money, white baby. But some day they will wake up and learn that white supremacy will not save them. Pray that this girl learns before it is too late.
Someone hacked her author website so that when you clicked on the home page, all you found was a cartoon of an Asian woman with slants for eyes prostrating herself to a crowd of slobbering white johns.
Here for you, I’d texted her, because it seemed like the appropriate thing to say. People are such assholes.