Twitter Hate Over Ghostbusters Brings One Star To Tears, Forces Director To Action

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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Dirk Libbey
Content Producer/Theme Park Beat

CinemaBlend’s resident theme park junkie and amateur Disney historian, Dirk began writing for CinemaBlend as a freelancer in 2015 before joining the site full-time in 2018. He has previously held positions as a Staff Writer and Games Editor, but has more recently transformed his true passion into his job as the head of the site's Theme Park section. He has previously done freelance work for various gaming and technology sites. Prior to starting his second career as a writer he worked for 12 years in sales for various companies within the consumer electronics industry. He has a degree in political science from the University of California, Davis.  Is an armchair Imagineer, Epcot Stan, Future Club 33 Member.