an open letter to Amy Schumer

Dear Amy Schumer,

First off, I want to say how EFFING hilarious you are.

I think that it’s pretty rad that you stand up for women the way you do, and let me tell you, Trainwreck had me laughing throughout the whole movie so, nice job.

I recently came across your show Inside Amy Schumer and while that was hilarious too, I think you may have taken the twitter death threat emoji skit a bit too surface level. Like yea it was funny, and yea it brought a little light to the reality that death threats on Twitter is a real fucking thing, but, as someone who recently dealt with death threats, I want to say that it’s really not a comical situation.

Let me explain and maybe you can relate or understand where I’m coming from.

I’m Annah Rose, I guess I fall under the category of “feminist bloggers” but I like to see myself as just me, a 28 yr old LA transplant from Long Island who writes about real things that have happened to me in order to help other women with their self love and confidence so that they can create healthy relationships.

I am in no way an expert, or a therapist, I just write about my life and what I learn.

See, back in April, I was targeted by a man in Rhode Island impersonating a women who reached out to me through mutual friends on my personal Facebook page. They sent me a creepy letter thanking me for my writing and being a positive influence and then proceeded to write 12 pages about seducing men with feet, so obviously I blocked them.

The thing is that this man got pretty upset, he went on to move over to my fan page, impersonate another 4 women saying they were sisters of the first fake profile and that I was just another LA bitch on the beach with a laptop. When I finally responded asking him to stop, acknowledging that they were all the same person( which I knew because the show Catfish is a thing, reverse image search amiright?!) he got really angry.

He got so angry Amy, that he moved over to Twitter threatening my life in so much detail which I’ll spare you with since young people may be reading this but, I’ll tell you this, the words that were tweeted completely kept me up at night, I no longer knew what sleep was. He even told me that he would “show me what a mass shooting was”. I called the police, my eyes so swollen from crying, my body so tense from all the shaking.

The police arrive 30 minutes later, and the officer allergic to dogs, walked into to my apartment that housed two dogs. Why am I telling you that? Well, he was having an allergic reaction and barely followed my words. I showed him a file I compiled with all the tweets messages and reverse image searches but he basically shrugged it off, telling me I had to wait 5 days for my case to get assigned, The guy threatened a mass shooting and nothing was done, the police didn’t take it seriously at all.

So what did I do, I had to deal with it, and not only that, the man proceeded to create 4 more Twitter accounts a total of about 20 different threats, that included threatening my mom’s life, and more gruesome tweets threatening my life.

 When my case was assigned, I handed the police a now 41 page file that I compiled of all the threats, all the accounts, all the research I found after many sleepless nights.  The man had two open internet fraud cases, and the shitty part is, they still did NOTHING. They didn’t even open the file I gave them.

Not only did they do nothing but, when I went to the station the first time in person, they told me that this was because I was a public woman, looked nice and made the decision to be a feminist writer. They told me to delete my social media and not put out content for awhile. Essentially their route was to silence me. They weren’t going to help me it was pretty clear. All because I look 18, I write for women and I have an inviting smile. How messed up is that?

Now Amy, I know you’ve dealt with death threats, and as a first timer, it was the scariest thing I ever dealt with. Yes, maybe “first world problems” but here’s the thing, there’s a hole in our legislation.

There are no real consequences for social media crimes, internet crimes against women, or cyber bullying.

Twitter doesn’t even have flagged words, the threats weren’t taken down on until a few days or so after I reported them.

That meant, if you searched my Twitter handle you would have been able to see the threats publicly. Which felt like defamation of my character to me.

Not only that, since nothing was done, the man was able to comment on my page a few weeks ago as himself. He joked about my snap video telling me I was awesome, but I knew what he did and I immediately started shaking. I knew he couldn’t harm me, but words hurt, and words last.

Basically the point of this is to bring awareness that not only do these things happen to celebrities, but it happens to women like me as well.

There has to be something that we can do.

All of us women, we need to stand together to make a change.

Don’t you think?

Sincerely,

Annah Rose

P.S I am super aware by hitting publish on this article I am going to potentially receive more threats, but the thing is, I would sacrifice my own @Tweets for the other women out there in the same position.

And, for other women reading, don’t allow yourself to be silenced because someone on the other side of a computer is sending you cyber threats. You are worthy, and whatever you are writing about is worthy.