Ashley Judd Pressing Charges After Twitter Harassment
By Rebecca Macatee ••
Ashley Judd will not tolerate digital abuse.
The "Insurgent" star fell victim to extreme social media bullying and threats recently when a spirited tweet she posted during a University of Kentucky basketball game incensed fans of the rival team. Judd responded by retweeting vulgar messages and threats directed at her, and she plans on pressing charges, she said on Today.
Judd has deleted the initial mid-game tweet she posted Sunday that sparked such vitriolic responses. "If I were in a more calm state of mind, I might have phrased [it] differently," she said of her initial post. "I might have said, 'I feel really disappointed with what seems [like] ultra-aggressive play.' Instead, what I wrote [was], 'I think Arkansas is playing dirty.'"
This prompted a slew of disproproportiantely hateful responses, something Judd immediately took a stand against."When when I express a stout opinion during #MarchMadness I am ... threatened with sexual violence," she tweeted. "Not okay."
Judd told NBC News the "amount of gender violence that I experienced is absolutely extraordinary," noting the online abuse was "that explicit, that overt" and came from so many people that she had to take a stand against it.
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"Everyone needs to take personal responsibility for what they write and not allowing this misinterpretation and shaming culture on social media to persist," she said. "And by the way, I'm pressing charges."
NBC News' Craig Melvin said Judd told him she "does not anticipate these cases are going to be prosecuted vigorously, but she does want to send a message."
Twitter also released the following statement: "We now review five times as many user reports as we did previously and we have tripled the size of the support team focused on handling abuse reports."
(E! and NBC are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)
