Stress of vile trolls stopped baby kicking
Rachel forced to block abusers
VILE trolls caused so much stress to pregnant Countdown whizz Rachel Riley that her child stopped kicking in her womb for two days. The ex-Strictly star was so worried about the effects on her baby that she blocked those sending the hateful messages rather than engage with them. Rachel, 33 – part of a campaign to end online trolling – said: “I was very stressed and upset for a couple of days, and my baby stopped wriggling for a couple of days. So at that point, it’s like, ‘You know what, nah’. It’s not worth the hormones.” Rachel, expecting her first child with husband Pasha Kovalev, 39, in December, said she got a “professional level of trolling” after talking about anti-Semitism on Krishnan GuruMurthy’s Ways to Change the World podcast in January. She claimed the abuse turned “ugly” after a Panorama documentary aired in July about anti-Semitism in the Labour party.
She said: “I’ve now changed most of my Twitter settings as you don’t need to see them.
“They’re not after proper debate. They’re not after their minds changing. They’re not doing it for virtuous reasons, so I block them.”
She added: “Mentally I am strong. I am up for this fight.
“We have to win – it is imperative. I don’t feel as if I had any choice. I need to do it.
“But when I got pregnant... you have some chocolate, and within minutes the baby is wriggling and kicking. The day I was going for my scan my baby was kicking.”
Rachel, who has teamed up with Gary Lineker on the Don’t Feed the Trolls campaign, added: “Being pregnant has highlighted that for me, I don’t need this.”
Speaking to former EastEnders star Tracy Ann Oberman for her Trolled podcast, she added: “I found out I was pregnant in April and that was around the time of the Boycott Rachel Riley campaign.
“They posted things like: ‘You posted about your pregnancy. You are pretending to be a nice normal human.’ I am human!
“It’s not fun. I get abuse: ‘You are just the woman who puts up the numbers on the telly.’
“Absolutely right. I should not have to be doing this. I should not be one of the largest voices. Where are the grown-ups?”