A journalist for the Washington Post broke down in tears on camera when talking about the online bullying and harassment she’s faced.
Taylor Lorenz, a technology reporter, said during an interview that aired on MSNBC’s Meet the Press Daily on Friday that the harassment has given her severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
“They’ll threaten children — they’ll threaten my parents. I’ve had to remove every single social tie. I have severe PTSD from this,” Lorenz said in the segment. “I contemplated suicide, and it got really bad. You feel like any little piece of information that gets out on you will be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life, and it’s so isolating.”
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Lorenz apologized as she began to cry and told two other journalists who had also received hateful messages that the experience has been “horrifying.”
“It’s overwhelming,” Lorenz added through tears. “It’s really hard.”
Lorenz came on the show during a segment covering a study conducted by New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics that found that one-third of women under 35 are victims of online harassment. The study also determined that online hate against Lorenz increased by as much as 144% after journalist Glenn Greenwald chastised her for claiming he was not a “real journalist” last August, even attacking Lorenz’s mental health.
Lorenz announced last June that she had dermatillomania and trichotillomania. Dermatillomania is a disorder that causes a person to pick at their skin, while trichotillomania causes people to pull out their own hair.
I’m not a “legitimate journalist,” says the deeply unwell Swiss-boarding-school-educated neurotic who is paid by the New York Times to lurk outside teenagers’ TikTok houses and exposes their past transgressions. pic.twitter.com/AZsxo8xnTk
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 12, 2021
Fox News host Tucker Carlson also attacked Lorenz during a segment of his show Tucker Carlson Tonight in March 2021, when Lorenz worked for the New York Times. Lorenz had tweeted that she wanted support for the women who have to endure online harassment. Lorenz also said the harassment has “destroyed her life.”
“Destroyed her life, really? By most people’s standards, Taylor Lorenz would seem to have a pretty good life, one of the best lives in the country, in fact,” Carlson said. “Lots of people are suffering right now, but no one is suffering quite as much as Taylor Lorenz is suffering.”
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Lorenz made Fortune’s 40 under 40 list in 2020 during her stint at the New York Times. She has also previously worked at the Atlantic and the Daily Beast.
In a Twitter thread that followed the airing of the interview, Lorenz said, “I call out right wing smear campaigns because the *media* constantly fails both the public and their staff when covering and reacting these things. I don’t think it’s accurate to even call it online harassment b/c it’s far more insidious than that. I want the media to do better.”
