Ohio University LGBTQ student and former student government member Anna Ayers said she received a hateful anonymous note, followed up by a death threat citing her membership in the LGBTQ community, according to Campus Reform. Less than a week later, she was arrested and charged with three misdemeanors for making “false alarms.”
The police statement says “Ayers previously reported receiving a series of threatening messages, two of them in the Student Senate office, and one of them at her residence…subsequent investigation by OUPD found that Ayers had placed the messages herself, prior to reporting them.”
She’s plead not guilty, but if convicted, each misdemeanor count carries a sanction of a $1,000 fine and up to six months in jail. A day after getting arrested, Anna resigned her appropriations commissioner position on the student senate and her position on the publishing board of a local newspaper. OK, two things here. First of all: this girl, who apparently harassed and threatened herself out of desperation to appear a victim, was also apparently in charge of which student groups got funding on campus. That’s pretty scary. Second of all, resigning isn’t exactly the best thing to do when you want to look innocent.
But allegedly falsifying victimhood isn’t my only concern here. We’ve all heard stories about racist messages, swastikas, and the like found on campus. We’ve covered some of this stuff here at Campus Unmasked because it’s important to reveal actual hatred. But you’ve got to wonder: how many of these incidents are just stunts pulled by attention-seekers like it looks like Anna’s was? And, if that’s the case, media outlets are kind of just feeding the troll by embarking on an outrage circus.
