Last night, Leslie Jones appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers to discuss her unfortunate week — where she should have been celebrating the release of Ghostbusters, but instead had to deal with incessant racist insults virtually aimed her way by some of Twitter’s worst, led by frightening alt-right Ken doll Milo Yiannopoulos.
Earlier this week, the Brietbart tech editor/Trumpist troll got himself permanently banned from Twitter for having instigated the racist harassment of the Ghostbusters star. Jones had fought back vocally on Twitter, and had publicized some of the nauseating messages that’d been sent her way in an attempt to show the overwhelming nature of the virtual attacks. Despite this having gotten the media’s attention and — barring the likes of Breitbart, support — the persistence of the harassment had ultimately led her to write:
This had been interpreted, to the dismay of many, as Jones’ claim that she was leaving Twitter for good. The next day, however, she tweeted:
Speaking with Seth Meyers, she clarified once again for people who’d missed that last Tweet:
First of all, let me let everybody know that I did not leave Twitter. I didn’t leave — I just signed out, cause I wanted to deal with what was going on. And then I went to bed and woke up the next morning and I was like, ‘They said I left Twitter. Wait! I didn’t leave!
She also spoke about how it was the attack-en-mass rather than the insults themselves that frightened her, saying that “unfortunately [she’s] used to the insults”:
What scared me was the injustice of a gang of people jumping against you for such a sick cause. Everybody has an opinion and it all comes at you at one time, and they really believe in what they believe in, and it’s so mean, it’s so gross and mean and unnecessary.
She emphasized the importance of her having said something, and that she really had to push Twitter to get certain people’s accounts deactivated.
Watch: