Ashley Judd, who plays Shailene Woodley‘s mother in the “Divergent” franchise, is using her celebrity to call attention to the “extraordinary” amount of gender-based abuse that women are subjected to on social media.
In an interview that aired on “The Today Show” on Tuesday morning, Judd expanded on her mission that she talked about with MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts on Monday, when she announced “I’m pressing charges.”
“The amount of gender violence that I experienced is absolutely extraordinary,” Judd told ‘Today’ correspondent Craig Melvin. “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, a Kentucky Wildcats fan, began speaking out against the online bullying on Sunday after some Twitter users responded to a slam she tweeted against her alma mater’s SEC Championship opponent.
“I think Arkansas is playing dirty,” she wrote.
When when I express a stout opinion during #MarchMadness I am called a whore, c—, threatened with sexual violence. Not okay.
— ashley judd (@AshleyJudd) March 15, 2015
I am sorry to retweet but this is a typical example. “@Leeroy_MAX: .@AshleyJudd Go suck on Cal’s two inch dick ye Bitch whore.”
— ashley judd (@AshleyJudd) March 15, 2015
Example: I am mentally weak for not tolerating sodomy threats. “@AshleyJudd oversensitive liberals like are you that mentally weak?”
— ashley judd (@AshleyJudd) March 17, 2015
“That many people, that explicit, that overt,” Judd emphasized to Melvin when speaking about the volume of online harassment she has received.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said last month that he was “ashamed” of his company’s failure to deal with online bullying.
“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” he said in in a memo to staff. “It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.”
In a new statement, the company said, “We now review five times as many user reports as we did previously, and we have tripled the size of the support team focused on handling abuse reports.”
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