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[/audioplayer]On Saturday morning, when the body of the beautiful Antipodean model and television personality Charlotte Dawson was being taken from her home in Sydney, I was back in Blighty rolling up my sleeves and getting stuck in for yet another happy hour in the gladiatorial arena that is the Spectator online comments section. Wherein, amongst other things, an angry trans-person had threatened me with the Police, for committing Hate Crimes (note the use of Krazy Kapitals) and a Beating from her Hells Angel Husband.
These two things might seem completely random were it not for the fact that in 2012 Charlotte Dawson was admitted to hospital after a massive twit-off in which she was targeted by an organised online campaign of harassment at least in part due to her involvement with an anti-cyber-bullying crusade. ‘It kept going and going and going and going and going,’ she said of the anonymous hordes who told her to kill herself.
Some people saw a Hint of Hypocrisy (smells like an interesting fabric conditioner) in this, Dawson being notorious down under for her rather catty attitude as an Australia’s Next Top Model judge. She had also been bitchy about the Oz equivalent of Wags as part of her job as a TV fashion reporter and last month encouraged the singer Lorde to leave her native New Zealand: ‘Unless you’re very mediocre you need to get out of there … you just have to if you want to keep succeeding, otherwise it’ll just crush your spirit.’
But it was Dawson herself whose spirit ended up being crushed, and her friends and colleagues maintain that online trolling played some part in this. Sad though her death was, one would have to have a heart of stone not to raise a smile at the sight of Russell Crowe breaking down in tears at the news, before tweeting ‘Charley … just don’t understand.
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