A California woman told the Daily News she is “afraid for my safety” after strangers pulled a revenge prank on her connected to the “Gamergate” harassment campaign.
Grace Lynn, 35, said she is “harassed daily” by Gamergate members and their recent prank left her “feeling suicidal.”
Twenty police officers in Portland, Oregon reported to a home there Friday night, responding to a caller who said he was holding hostages inside, the Oregonian reports. But officers found people safe inside the home, and later determined the call was a prank, known as “swatting,” to try tricking police to send SWAT teams to the house.
The address once belonged to Lynn, a video game artist who moved to California last year.
Lynn, a transgender woman, said the prank is connected to Gamergate, an online movement that began in August 2014 as a call for stronger ethics in video game journalism but quickly descended into attacks against women who speak out against sexism in gaming culture.
Lynn used to be part of Gamergate and described herself as a one-time “misogynist,” but said she changed her mind and started criticizing the movement when it turned against transgender women.
She said her experience was “a wakeup call” that she will “always be a target for future harassment and abuse” from Gamergate members.
Lynn said that shortly before the incident Friday night, she found a discussion thread of people planning the prank on 8chan, a loosely regulated chat website that is home to many Gamergate discussions.
She detailed the incident in a series of tweets early Saturday morning, which have since disappeared from her account.
“Just got confirmation from Portland police someone did indeed try to SWAT my old address,” she wrote in her first tweet about the prank.
She later alluded to moving back to Portland soon and said police told her “they would make sure to have my info on file in case anyone tried again.”
In later tweets from Saturday, which are still on her page, Lynn wrote “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill myself,” followed by, “Because I’m having a hard time justifying living tonight.”
But she wrote hours later that she wants to remain “strong and powerful so I can help others.”
In a Sunday morning tweet Lynn said she is still being harassed through Twitter by Gamergate members.
“A–holes out in full force tonight in my mentions,” she wrote. “Trying to remind myself there are more good people to outweigh the bad.”
Lynn said on Sunday she used to go by the name Devi Ever, and that some Gamergate users created the hashtag #deviwhatever to harass her.
She told the Daily News, “If I can ever afford a lawyer, I plan on filing restraining orders against the Gamergate supporters who harass me.”
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