"In the 20 minutes the post was live, someone had taken a screenshot of it. She doesn't know how the screenshot got to the right-wing influencer who posted it. Natalie, who owns her own small business, was on a client call as the death threats started to roll in. She told herself to focus on the call, but she was shaking so hard that she was having trouble holding the phone."
"The first day, she got 400 threatening calls, a deluge of emails, and an influx of one-star reviews of her business. She deleted profile pages of the business in response. Someone sent a photo of Natalie herself, altered to make it look like she was burning alive in her car. Another texted her that they were traveling to her neighborhood this week and would "pop by for a meet-and-greet.""
""That was the text the detective was most interested in," Natalie says, after reporting the harassment to the police. It was the most specific, actionable threat. But it was hard to get the police to take what was happening to her seriously - she had to hire an attorney for local law enforcement in her largely conservative area to remember that doxxing is actually illegal in her state."
Natalie posted a crude joke about Charlie Kirk's death on a private Facebook page; the post was live for 20 minutes before being screenshotted and shared. After deleting the comment, she received an email telling her to kill herself the next day and the post went viral within 24 hours. Threats escalated to 400 calls, many emails, and one-star reviews targeting her small business, along with doctored images and texts promising to visit her neighborhood. Local police were slow to act; she had to hire an attorney to ensure enforcement recognized doxxing as illegal. She continues to experience lingering paranoia and trauma.
Read at The Verge
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