The historian and broadcaster Lucy Worsley has spoken frankly about her “upsetting, disturbing and hurtful” experience of being abused by online trolls.
She says she has to be careful of everything she says and does on TV for fear that her critics will seize upon itbut she says she now confronts them. “I ask them: ‘Would you say that to my face?’ That’s how you call them out,” she said.
“‘One thing I know, and any female presenters will know this, is don’t reveal any body part or bend over because freaks will freeze-frame it and put it on their nasty messageboards,” she said in an interview with the Mail on Sunday.
“I visited [the trolls’ messageboards] once in my life. Never again,” she said. “It was upsetting, disturbing and hurtful.”
Worsley, the chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, has been abused about her appearance, her intelligence and her posh accent, “which surprises me because I don’t think of myself as a posh person,” she said. “One thing that does seem to particularly annoy people is my voice and my very slight, to me unnoticeable, speech impediment.”
She said she was not as feisty as the Cambridge professor Mary Beard, who “makes toast of trolls”.
Worsley said: “If I’m having a good day I’ll think I want to take this on and hit back at the trolls. Half the time they just back down. But if I’m busy or haven’t got time for it, I just delete the message.”
Beard revealed in 2014 that she had met and written a reference for one student whom she had named and shamed after he tweeted “You filthy old slut” following an interview she had given – part of regular torrents of abuse she has suffered from trolls.
She retweeted the abuse to her 47,000 followers, and subsequently wrote the reference because, she said, she worried that the student would find it hard to find a job as the tweets would come up in any internet search.
