Erin Molan reveals online troll threatened to rape her daughter

Television personality Erin Molan has revealed an example of a vile threat made against her daughter on social media. WARNING: Graphic

WARNING: Graphic Content

Television personality Erin Molan has revealed that she feared going outside due to vicious online trolling – but when she reported a threat to kill her unborn baby to Facebook it told her it didn’t meet the threshold for “inappropriate” content.

The 39-year-old Sky News contributor relayed countless examples of sickening abuse – including someone writing they would rape her two-year-old – while giving evidence to a powerful parliamentary inquiry into social media and online safety on Tuesday.

Molan said that she was inundated with terrifying messages after she began hosting The Footy Show and she soon became nervous to leave her home.

“Not things like we don’t like watching you, but things like we want to ensure you die, I’ll hit you with a bus,” she said.

“It made me fear for my safety, it made me nervous about going outside.”

Erin Molan was subjected to horrifying abuse.

The single mother started to cry when speaking about how she’d gone through a lot in her private life and despite her resilience and support from her family the trolling became too much.

“When you’re subjected to something so often and for so long and it is so repetitive and so awful, even the strongest people in the world can start to maybe believe that maybe a bit of it is true,” she said.

“But once I realised that Mother Teresa could build an orphanage in Botswana, and they would still go online and absolutely annihilate her, once I realised that it happens to tens of thousands of other people, it’s awful, but I felt a little bit comforted by the fact I wasn’t actually all the things they’re saying I am.”

She said world-first draft legislation that would compel social media companies to hand over the identities of trolls in defamation cases was important in taking away their power.

Erin Molan used an example of someone threatening to rape her two-year-old daughter.

She also said new powers given to the eSafety Commissioner in the Online Safety Act – which will take effect from Sunday – that could lead to someone being fined for cyber abuse would be effective.

She said it would set a bare minimum standard of behaviour and hopefully it would filter down to improve things from a societal perspective, by setting an example.

“The personal impact of this on people, we’ve seen people take their lives, we’ve seen kids try to take their lives, we’ve seen many lives ruined by this kind of behaviour,” she said.

“It’s not weak, it’s not for the vulnerable its not for people who aren’t resilient, strong people get absolutely annihilated and torn to shreds by this kind of behaviour by anonymous trolls.

“If you take away their anonymity and you take away their power and all of a sudden it's a level playing field again and that’s what it needs to be.”

Erin Molan said she has support systems in place but the online abuse badly affected her.

Erin Molan is speaking at the social media inquiry. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Molan said that she had in the past she felt essentially powerless to do anything about the horrific abuse and like she was banging her head against a brick wall when dealing with the social media giants.

“Facebook I reported some horrific messages from an account, it kept being recreated, I would block it and it would be recreated,” she said.

“I remember Facebook sending me a reply to one of the report mechanisms I had used on a message, it was about trying to kill my child within in my stomach (when I was pregnant).

“They came back to me and said it didn’t meet the threshold for inappropriate behaviour.”

She said the person being abused online shouldn’t have to get off social media - the perpertrators should.

“That’s never been good enough for me, being on social media is such a big part of what we do, being online is such a huge part of how we live our lives now,” she said.

“So much of what we do is online, why should I get off becasue someone is telling me they’re going to rape my two-year-old child?

“Why do I have to get off a platform I use professionally because someone’s threatening to rape my child?

“Get them off the platform.”