The topic of the reboot of Ghostbusters has been a controversial one since its inception. However, what actress Leslie Jones has had to deal with goes far beyond the bounds of artistic differences. Yesterday, the Ghostbusters actress was inundated by tweets from people spouting unapologetic racism, and when she tried to shine a light on the situation she then had to deal with a fake account tweeting in her name. The entire internet is not terrible, however, as Ghostbusters director Paul Feig came to Jones defense and rallied support around her.
The whole mess began yesterday when Leslie Jones began tweeting images of some of the overtly racist material she was being sent in order to show people what was going on. Stuff like this...
Some of the other Tweets are even worse. Eventually, however, it just became too much for her to handle as the hate and vitriol seemed to be never ending. Somebody even went so far as to create a fake account under her name in order to tweet the same sort of hate at other people. Eventually, she was forced to step away from social media.
Luckily, there also nice people on the internet who aren't terrible racists. Ghostbusters director Paul Feig publicly came out in support of Leslie Jones and did what he could to rally support for the actress using the hashtag #LoveForLeslieJ as a way for people to oppose the hate.
Overnight the #LoveFor LeslieJ hashtag was trending, and was also picked up by a number of high-profile names including comedian Margaret Cho, Josh Gad and Anna Kendrick among many others.
So the good news is that there are still good people in the world who will try to drown out the hate. We're all welcome to dislike a movie. That's fine, nobody gets hurt over a movie. But nobody deserves this.
