Ashley Judd to Press Harassment Charges Against Twitter Trolls
Ashley Judd, 46, on Monday told MSNBC's Thomas Roberts that she is pressing charges against those who sent her tweets calling her a whore, a bitch, a cxxxt, and threatened her with sexually violent acts like sodomy, during Sunday's Southeastern Conference basketball championship match between the University of Arkansas and her alma mater, the University of Kentucky (UK).
That Sunday, Judd, known to regularly attend UK games since her student days, and in fact still continues to take her seat at the student section, tweeted that the opposing team was "playing dirty." Following that, she received a steady barrage of counter-tweets, some of which used vulgar and threatening language on her.
In her MSNBC interview, Judd said that had she been in a more calm state of mind, she would have phrased her tweet differently: "I might have said, 'I feel really disappointed with what seems [like] ultra-aggressive play.' Instead, I wrote, 'I think Arkansas is playing dirty.'"
Judd continues: "The way things happen on social media is so abusive, and everyone needs to take personal responsibility for what they write and not allowing this misinterpretation and shaming culture on social media to persist."
Still on the subject of the Sunday incident, the actress in another interview with Craig Melvin of Today noted: "The amount of gender violence that I experience is absolutely extraordinary. And a significant part of my day today will be spent filing police reports at home about gender violence that's directed at me on social media." Judd re-tweeted what she calls a typical example of the verbal abuse she got that day, and it reads: ""@Leeroy_MAX: .@AshleyJudd Go suck on Cal's two inch dick ye Bitch whore. "She tells Melvin that although she doesn't expect anything to come of the police reports, she still wants to do them anyway to send a message that its "not okay" to harass and threaten just about anyone on the social media with sexual violence.
Of course, the matter of Judd's run-in with the social media trolls was just incidentally brought up during the course of the MSNBC and Today interviews, which were more about the actress' recent work, which include her documentary on sex slavery, A Path Appears, and her now-showing movie Divergent Series: Insurgent where she reprises her Natalie Prior role. Also, her alma mater's team won 78-63 over Arkansas University.