Alicia Ann Lynch, a 22-year-old from Michigan, tweeted and Instagrammed a photo of herself tastelessly dressed as a Boston Marathon victim for Halloween.
The backlash was incredibly swift – the young woman received countless attacking tweets right away. Some claimed they were disgusted and disappointed, and others went as far as to threaten Lynch.
Sydney Corcocan, who was injured in the marathon, replied on Twitter, “You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died in the marathon. You need a filter.”
Hundreds of threatening replies continued, and even grew more brutal when users discovered Lynch had once posted a picture of her driver’s license with her personal information. Twitter users began to take out their anger at Lynch by contacting her family. They also began to circulate nude pictures and videos of her found on Tumblr. The threats of murder, rape and arson (among others) continued.
Lynch deleted her social media accounts and later seemingly reopened her Twitter account to attempt to settle the situation. She tweeted from her handle, @thatSKANKfromMI, on November 1st, pleading with users to stop with the death threats toward her parents and apologized for being insensitive. She also claimed that she lost her job over the costume and said that she is “paying for what [she] thought was a simple joke.”
Though most users did not find this information comforting and continued with the anger and threats, others did let up and forgive her. Many agreed that the situation shouldn’t be fought with threats and cyber bullying.
On November 3rd, Lynch emailed Buzzfeed (who had been covering the story) to express her regret at the costume choice and her shock from being attacked by Web users.
“It seems as though my outfit was too soon, and will always be that way, it was wrong of me and very distasteful. My costume was not meant to disrespect anyone, ever. I am truly sorry to anyone that I may have offended or hurt with this,” Lynch said in her email.
“What I did may have been wrong, but is it truly right to wish harm upon someone and say that you’re doing it for the victims?” She asked of the Web users that attacked her. “As being a part of a tragic event I never would ever wish what had happened to me upon someone else, as I can say most people wouldn’t wish death upon someone to ‘make it right’.”
In her email to Buzzfeed, Lynch also claimed that she didn’t post the apology tweets from her handle on Twitter. “I had apologized a few hours after posting and the apology went to deaf ears and blind eyes, so I had deleted all my social accounts. It seems someone is trying to look out for me and help me make things better, which I also greatly appreciate,” she said.
On the evening of November 3rd, Buzzfeed spoke to Lynch by phone from her home in Michigan. “I’ve had voicemails where they want to slit my throat and they want to hang me and tear off my face,” she said over the phone. “I’m just like, I don’t even know how to respond to this right now.”
Lynch added that strangers also reached out to her parents and told her best friend “they’re going to blow up her house and hang her child.”
Despite the uproar it caused, Lynch said she never second-guessed her costume and said that multiple people to whom she proposed the idea to found it funny. She even claimed that she had seen other people on Twitter dressed as Boston Marathon victims.
“It happened, I made a mistake,” Lynch says. “I just have to learn from it.”