Leslie Jones, the co-star of this year’s Ghostbusters movie and cast member of Saturday Night Live who was already hounded off Twitter last month by trolls, has been attacked again.
This time, the trolls defaced her personal website.
The attack was initially spotted by TMZ on Wednesday after images were posted of what appeared to be Jones’s passport, her driver’s license, and explicit photos of the actress.
The content entailed the same type of racist, sexist hate mongering that Jones was besieged with in July through Twitter. This time, the attackers inserted a video of the gorilla Harambe onto her site.
Harambe is the Cincinnati Zoo gorilla who was killed months ago: a reference to the racially charged gorilla remarks and photos directed at Jones in the earlier Twitter trolling.
The attackers also replaced the site’s content – which is usually information about her comedy career and film work – with images of her with stars like Rihanna, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West, according to the New York Times.
The site was taken offline after the attack.
Jones had already thrown in the towel on Twitter last month (though she briefly came back for a high-pitched “SLAY ALL DAY USA!!” campaign when NBC sent her down to Rio for the Olympics.)
The Twitter trolls had sent her a torrent of hate aimed at her race and her appearance.
Twitter responded by taking action against several users, including a rare lifetime ban against the politically conservative blogger Milo Yiannopoulos, who writes for Breitbart News. Yiannopoulos was accused of orchestrating the Twitter harassment.
Jones already has a hashtag in her honor – #StandWithLeslie. It’s been promoted by high-profile defenders, including Katy Perry and comedian Patton Oswalt, among others.
If 101% of pop culture catered to white nerds instead of only 98.1% then the cyber attacks like the one on Leslie Jones wouldn’t happen.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) August 24, 2016
Do not give your eyeballs to this racist, hate-filled, misogynoir crime. I #StandWithLeslie ❤️
— KATY PERRY (@katyperry) August 24, 2016
The fact of the matter is, Jones herself has stood up for targets of cyberbullying, including African American Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas.
Sameer Hinduja, the co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and a professor of Criminology at Florida-Atlantic University, told the NYT that this was a righteous move that could have indirectly led to policy change on Twitter’s part.
But Jones’s decision to come back to Twitter and stay active on social media well might have set her up as a tempting target for the bullies and hackers, he said.
As it is, that lot relish picking at sore spots:
Some of those that cyberbully attempt to identify something that you’re particularly sensitive about, and because they know that it will get under your skin.
Or they’re just biased and intolerant, as perhaps was the case considering the racial hatred in some of the attacks on Leslie Jones.
Image of Leslie Jones courtesy of Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com