This ain’t ‘kids joshing around’

A couple of days ago it was Michelle Marie getting a barrage of abuse on Twitter. The next day it was hackers abusing Leslie Jones. Sexism and racism meet to form the fun new game of Attack the Visible Black Woman.

Leslie Jones, a co-star of this year’s “Ghostbusters” movie who has been besieged in the past month by online abusers who have targeted her appearance and her race, was victimized again on Wednesday when her personal website appeared to have been hacked.

The hackers inserted a picture of the gorilla Harambe on the site, and exposed what appeared to be explicit photos of the actress, along with pictures of her driver’s license and a passport, and images of her with stars like Rihanna, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West.

Because she’s in Ghostbusters, because she’s female, because she’s black, because because because because – a bunch of doodz feel entitled to violate her privacy, hack her website, put intrusive racist sexist shit on her website, and just generally do whatever they can to make her life bad, for their own amusement.

Can we have a safe space from this? Can we be allowed to do what we do without being the targets of angry boy-men? No, we cannot.

Ms. Jones, 48, had spent much of the past month battling online trolls who sent her a stream of racist imagery, pornography and abusive language. She briefly left Twitter, but later returned to tweet about the Rio Olympics.

In the hours after Ms. Jones’s site was taken offline, high-profile defenders offered public support.

“These acts against Leslie Jones are sickening,” the musician Questlove wrote in a post on Twitter. “It’s racist & sexist. It’s disgusting. This is hate crimes. This ain’t ‘kids joshing round.’”

Others, including Paul Feig, the director of the “Ghostbusters” film, the comedian Patton Oswalt and the singer Katy Perry defended the actress on Twitter.

Meanwhile the abusers were hard at work planning their next action.

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