Internet opens door to a world of hate
Death threats and crude attacks are a part of the sad, sick side of sports fandom
The hatred that arrives rapid-fire into their social media accounts is so personal and acidic that it could sear through even the thickest skin.
Messages from men who said they wanted them dead. Or raped. Or beaten by their boyfriends.
So Julie DiCaro and Sarah Spain — these two friends and Chicago-based sports journalists who receive these notes on nearly a daily basis — decided to address it publicly. They agreed to be featured in a video highlighting some of the meanest, cruelest messages they’ve received on Twitter.
In the video, produced by Just Not Sports and posted Tuesday, men sat across from DiCaro, a radio host at 670 The Score, and Spain, an ESPN reporter and radio host. They read the notes sent to the women, tweets like “You need to be hit in the head with a hockey puck and killed” or “Hopefully, this skank Julie DiCaro is Bill Cosby’s next victim.”
When I watched the video, I wasn’t shocked, or even surprised. Female sportswriters get these notes, in many forums: Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, email.
Within our small sorority, we female sports journalists don’t talk about these written assaults much. We all know that they exist and that they’ll just keep coming, as if it’s part of the job description.
“Men get mean comments, too, but I think the context of it is quite different for women,” Spain said. “It’s not just, like, ‘You’re an idiot, and I’m mad at you for your opinion.’ It’s: ‘I hate you because you are in a space that I don’t want you in. I come to sports to get away from women. Why don’t you take your top off and just make me lunch?’ ”
It used to take at least a few days for disturbed readers to get their cruel points across — that slap in the face via snail mail.
When I first became a sportswriter, nearly two decades ago, a reader sent me a letter, with no return address on the envelope, week after week. On a single white sheet of paper, the reader pasted a photo of me that ran with my newspaper column. Below that were comments about my face, hairstyle and figure and how, as a woman, I should be cooking and having babies instead of invading men’s territory to write about sports. How I needed to quit my job and get out of town. Or else.
Creepy. But I just filed the letters away, kept my head down and moved on.
I had heard the stories of the women who came before me and what they had to go through to cover sports. Journalists like Lisa Olson, who had been with the Boston Herald. In 1990, she said she had been harassed in the locker room while covering the New England Patriots. What followed her accusations was brutal: Death threats. Slashed tires. Naked blow-up “Lisa” dolls tossed around the stands at games. Her apartment was burglarized. In the end, she had to move to Australia to get away from the abuse.
So the notes I received from creepy readers didn’t seem so bad at all. This, I thought, was the deal for women in sports. I had been an athlete. You had to be tough to make it. I could take it.
Men got mean notes, too, I was told. But as far as I can tell, none of the notes my male colleagues have ever received are laced with sexual connotations.
I’m pretty sure that any man who wrote about the rape accusations against the former Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston didn’t receive reader emails saying he would be raped because of his opinion, as I did. He probably didn’t get an email from a man who said he
“Back in the day, there just wasn’t as much volume of these messages as there is on Twitter.”
JULIE DICARO
RADIO HOST
wanted to line him and other men like him against a wall so he could shoot them all in the head.
Emails like that arrived in my work inbox one morning. It was Christmas.
Can’t I just ignore all of it? That’s not easy to do now that news organizations expect reporters to build a social-media presence and engage with readers. Especially on Twitter. In the sports community, Twitter is the social hub of choice for athletes, fans and journalists — a giant water cooler in the cloud where people share opinions and ideas.
It can be a great place to network. It can also be a hostile place. Harassers can hide in anonymity and strike in a millisecond.
DiCaro, a former family law and criminal lawyer, said a man once sent her avalanches of troublesome messages on social media, for hours a day, as he stalked her.
Another man, after DiCaro began writing about the rape accusations against Chicago Blackhawks forward Patrick Kane, sent DiCaro a series of tweets, talking about her being killed and raped. He said she would be in trouble the next time he was in Chicago.
DiCaro said she never went to the police because she had been told there was nothing that law enforcement could do to stop the messages.
“You just can’t get away from being harassed,” DiCaro said. “Back in the day, there just wasn’t as much volume of these messages as there is on Twitter.”
DiCaro said she recorded the video of the mean tweets with the hope that it would change some people’s minds about harassing others on social media.
She has two teenage sons, and she wants them and the younger generation to know what’s acceptable — and what’s not.
How does this abuse end? DiCaro said there needed to be more diversity in sports media. She lamented that sports was still a man’s world, and would be at least for the near future, leaving the few women in it as targets for some men who don’t want them in their boys’ club.
“It’s sort of like separating a weak antelope from the pack,’’ she said. “I think guys recognize that.”
DiCaro and Spain say 90 per cent of the response on Twitter to their video has been positive. But the remaining 10 per cent, the sad and sorry 10 per cent, didn’t get the point.
One person on Twitter told Spain, “please kill yourself I will provide the bleach.’’
So much hate. And for what?