Women journalists – worldwide and here at home – face outsized online attacks
July 15, 2026
This column is part of the Indianapolis Public Editor project, a pilot program designed to test whether the presence of a public editor who analyzes local coverage can elevate audience trust in journalism and promote media literacy.
Mirror Indy reporter Mary Claire Molloy’s June 17 story about Indy’s public hospital-to-jail pipeline got 63 comments on Facebook. Although most offered praise for her investigation of questionable police arrests made by Eskenazi Health, some veered into personal attacks and criticism.
Online comments questioned her motivations and whether the story was actually true. One commenter even criticized her speaking voice in the Facebook video highlighting the investigation.
This example of a woman journalist being harassed online in Indianapolis is representative of a disproportionate burden for women journalists as a group. Women journalists face online attacks at a higher rate compared to their male counterparts. In 2020, almost three quarters (73%) of 901 women journalists, surveyed globally for UNESCO, had experienced online violence, characterized as threats, harassment and abuse. These attacks include racism, religious bigotry, sectarianism, ableism, homophobism and transphobism, where they intersect with misogyny and sexism.
So many women in member states detailed experiences of online attacks that it was deemed an epidemic, prompting UNESCO and UN Women to commission global studies in 2020 and 2025. In the 2025 study for UN Women, researchers concluded that online harassment of women journalists has increased with the aid of artificial intelligence technology.
Journalists of all kinds face trolling online. But the way women reporters are harassed often seeks to silence and discredit them, and to cast doubt on the facts and information they report. This problem also disproportionately affects women journalists of color and journalists who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community.
I asked local print and broadcast journalists about their experiences with online abuse. Some women, including Mirror Indy’s Molloy, acknowledged the occurrence, but declined to comment for this story. I found former and current IndyStar reporters as well as a former WISH-TV anchor who described what it’s like when the public turns on you.
One thing they told me: News consumers have an important role to play in how public discourse can support — or perpetuate harm — toward women and minority journalists.
Coverage of certain issues triggers online abuse
A reporter for more than two decades, Shari Rudavsky has spent the majority of her career at the IndyStar, and told me she experienced intense online abuse while reporting on abortion services and the COVID pandemic. She’s currently the IndyStar’s local news and entertainment editor.
Her July 2022 story in The Star about a local doctor providing abortion services to a 10-year-old Ohio girl generated hundreds of emails and Twitter messages questioning her honesty, education, and journalistic expertise, as well as the veracity of both her source and the story, she said.
“People called for me to be fired, mocked me, cursed at me and threatened me physically,” Rudavsky said. “One woman even wrote that my children should be removed from my care. That one hit hard personally.”
The trolling went on for weeks and was comparable to the same vitriol she faced when she reported on COVID, for which she received months of harsh online criticism. “It made me sad that discourse about topics such as abortion had reached the level where people felt justified responding that way to the story,” she said.
“In the context of reporting on politics, we see coverage of gender issues being a trigger for these kinds of attacks and also coverage of disinformation itself,” said Dr. Julie Posetti. She is a journalism professor at City St George’s, University of London and director of the Information Integrity Initiative. She was commissioned by UNESCO and UN Women in 2020 and 2025 to study online violence against women journalists and other women in public life. “There are a range of issues, including reporting on climate change and medical science, which trigger these sorts of attacks.”
For news consumers who see the online attacks, especially in conservative communities where the vitriol is believed and redistributed, she said, it corrodes the audience’s trust in the media. Online hate, including misogynistic or racist attacks, is designed to undercut trust in credible public interest journalism, Posetti noted.
Women of color and other minority groups have it worse
Former IndyStar public safety reporter Jade Jackson, who is Black, has experienced public comments on social media going too far, as a reporter for both TV news outlets and a newspaper.
Being called racial slurs online is typical, she said, and some commenters fixate on her personal appearance, body-shaming her. She’s let those comments stay on her social media pages, not wanting to censor people’s freedom of speech. Jackson said many commenters make assumptions about her, including casting her as a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, or asserting that she is very liberal or leftist because of her race.
But it’s when trolls malign her journalism that bothers her the most.
“If they say I’m bad at my job, stuff like that, it does kind of get to me,” Jackson said.
She keeps those comments posted on her content, believing in freedom of speech. But, if comments show blatant disrespect, meaning they’re racist, sexist or cruel, she usually deletes or hides them. Jackson also considers the feelings of families, loved ones or people involved in stories. She will engage and keep the responses of people who comment on her stories, but her rule of thumb on respect along with the nuance of a story’s topic, determines whether she will allow commentary to stay posted.
The 2021 UNESCO report, “The Chilling,” lead-authored by Posetti, found that 81% of Black women journalists surveyed experienced online harassment compared to 64% of white women journalists. That percentage climbs to 88% of Jewish women journalists surveyed, 88% and 85% of lesbian and bisexual women journalists respectively, compared to 72% of heterosexual women reporters and 86% of indigenous women journalists surveyed.
Jackson said she has had more conversations with female coworkers about online abuse than she has had with her male contemporaries. If the men were criticized, she said, the most they would get, in her experience, was “just, oh, you suck” as a reporter. She, like others I interviewed, was told by superiors that online hate comes with the territory and instructed to develop thick skin.
Jeremy Jenkins, former WISH-TV news anchor, was told to hide any behaviors that signaled he was a gay man. He was advised to blend in as much as possible. He recalls hearing from mentors and news managers earlier in his career: “Women should want to date you, and the men should want to be you.” He still didn’t escape online harassment.
Over the course of his 10-year career, he’s received comments from viewers who were uncomfortable with his sexual orientation. He cites examples of a person writing to him that they “can’t wait until (his) kind along with the fake news are long gone off the airwaves.”
Online abuse is common and increasing
The researchers, who lead the studies for UNESCO and UN Women, define online violence as misogynistic harassment, abuse and threats, and digital privacy and security attacks, that increase physical risks associated with online violence. Some of the online harassment manifests as coordinated attempts at disinformation campaigns that use misogyny and other forms of hate speech.
Posetti told me these sort of attacks against women journalists have become more common since the pandemic. In 2025, 75% of the women journalists surveyed for the UN Women study reported experiencing online violence, a slight increase when compared with the 2020 survey she led for UNESCO, which included an overlapping group of journalists respondents.
She laughs at the idea that social media companies have done anything to support or prevent harm to women journalists.
“From the end of 2022, when we see Elon Musk take over Twitter and effectively provide cover for the other companies to do less and less, what we’ve experienced is an actual rollback of efforts to increase and improve protections for women journalists, for women human rights defenders, and others online,” Posetti said.
The current political atmosphere has also amplified the issue, she said.
“When political actors, when presidents and prime ministers and other political leaders directly attack women journalists – when they call them ‘piggy,’ or tell them to shut up – this is in effect licensing the kind of sexist and misogynist aggression that goes viral online,” she said.
Posetti’s team found that, in the five years between surveys, attacks, abuse and harassment offline that were triggered by online comments had more than doubled: 20% reported experiencing offline incidents in 2020, compared to 42% in 2025.
Not only that, but the researchers found that in 2025 50% more women journalists reported self-censoring to avoid harassment and a quarter surveyed said they had been diagnosed with depression or anxiety directly related to their exposure.
Generative AI going mainstream in 2022 only made the problem worse, Posetti said. Women in public life, including journalists, are now subjected to “nudification” apps that can instantaneously strip them of their clothes and pose them as porn stars. A quarter of the women respondents to the 2025 survey had experienced AI-assisted online violence.
News consumers actions can make all the difference to online hate
News consumers have more influence over this dynamic than they might think when it comes to how a reporter’s story is perceived by the public. Posetti doesn’t recommend getting into a fight with a perpetrator of online violence. Instead, she said, news consumers can signal to others that they appreciate the journalist’s work and that the journalist shouldn’t be harassed, abused or vilified for doing their job.
“This comes with a degree of risk, but so does standing up for what we believe in a world where authoritarianism continues to thrive, and where we risk losing the battle for fairness, for decency and for democracy,” Posetti said. “So I think we all have a part to play.”
Unlike many of the survey participants, Jackson, Rudavsky and Jenkins say trolling has not changed the way they report on a story. They did not choose to remove themselves from the public eye on their social channels nor step back from reporting as others have to avoid harassment.
“Trolling has not changed what I report or how I report it,” said Rudavsky. “Now as an editor, I am aware how painful trolling and harassment can be, and I know how to support reporters when they experience it.”
The fact that some journalists do choose to self-censor because of harassment should be alarming to the public, let alone what they’ve had to endure that brings them to that decision. Online hate and abuse – against journalists in this community, and disproportionately against women and minorities – undermines democracy because it attacks the very people tasked with investigating its legitimacy. Trust in local news is eroded when journalists are attacked for presenting facts and information the public needs. It’s up to all of us to help maintain dignity and safety for journalists to share our communities’ stories.
You can join me at my next “News & Nibbles: Let’s Talk Media” event at the Glendale branch of the Indianapolis Public Library, from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., Thursday, July 23. (3660 East 62nd Street, Indianapolis, IN 46220)
I’d love to hear from you. Please send your questions about Indy’s media ecosystem to indypubliceditor@poynter.org, or reach out to let me know if you’d like me to come speak to your community group. Your input helps strengthen Indianapolis’ local journalism.
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The Indy Public Editor is a grant-funded pilot project run by the Poynter Institute. This column is edited by Kelly McBride and copy edited by Lauren Klinger. The project is managed by Nicole Slaughter Graham with support from Amaris Castillo.