A University of Arizona student saw the worst aspects of internet infamy after a sports column trash-talking Washington State University in anticipation of an upcoming football game rubbed many WSU fans the wrong way.
In her post for Yahoo sports blog The Post Game, UA senior Megan Coghlan calls out WSU for a whole host of things, local station KVOA reports. This line from her column pretty much sums it up: “Butch T. Cougar, you’ve got your work cut out for you. WSU has no real traditions, nothing to define itself, no rich football history and a sad lack of identity.”
After the column went up last Friday, Coghlan started to recieve explicit attacks from across the web, including many offensive tweets tagged #MeganCoghlanSucks. Coghlan told KVOA that she received physical threats, sexist attacks, and messages from people telling her to kill herself.
In response to the onslaught from WSU fans, on Monday Coghlan took to the pages of UA student newspaper The Daily Wildcat to respond to her cyberbullies. She writes,
I expected negative responses, sure. When you talk trash, you expect to get trash back. But the overflow of sexism and cruelty that flooded my inbox and social media accounts was far out of proportion for a trash-talk column before a football game.
As if they’d never heard their sports team take a hit before, people were getting worked up enough to track me down all over the Internet or find my phone number just to call me a c—. Because they didn’t like a thing I wrote.
In the column, Coghlan states that the issue of cyberbullying is a “much bigger problem” than her experience. “I am not ashamed of what I wrote. I am ashamed of the reaction,” she writes.