AN AUSTRALIAN MAN is facing criminal charges after making rape threats on a Facebook post.
The 25-year-old made the comments against a woman whose Tinder profile had been shared across social media.
The case began back in August when an Australian man named Chris Hall took a screenshot of Olivia Melville’s Tinder profile and posted it to his Facebook page.
On her profile, Melville had quoted the rapper Drake with a bio that read:
Type of girl that suck you dry and then eat some lunch with you.
Hall, who did not know Melville, posted the picture with a caption that read:
Stay class ladies. I’m surprised she’d still be hungry for lunch.
The post attracted numerous comments before Melville was alerted to them. When she posted some of what had been said to her on her own Facebook page, her friend Paloma Brierly Newton lept to her defence.
This culminated in Newton posting screenshots of encounters she had had on the social network, some of which included rape threats:
Newton told Mashable Australia that she posted the exchanges to help other women.
When men shame you, it feels pretty gross and awful. For me, I felt angry, I can’t speak for Olivia, but when this individual posted things with my photo on the comment thread with things like ‘kill it before it breeds’ I literally saw red.
“Men will shame women to try and shut them up, bring them down and stop them from having a voice.
“I stood up for my friend because I believe when you see an injustice you do something, if you see something horrible happening to someone else and you don’t do anything, you are being compliant in that awful thing.”
Following the reporting of the posts, a 25-year-old man was arrested at his home in Sydney. He has been charged with “using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence”. He will appear in court tomorrow.
Newton says she hopes the case shows people that harassment online is not a victimless crime.
The internet is not an invisibility cloak, behind every computer is a living breathing human being who has feelings and emotions.
Comments on this article are closed as the matter is before the courts.
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