Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Federal Bureau of Investigation enters Lindy West’s account as an institution she turns to for help when an online extortion campaign disrupts her work. West describes calling its Seattle office after a flood of unwanted emails was tied to a demand that she delete a tweet. The receptionist tells her the agency cannot help and directs her to the Washington State Patrol; nobody answers when West calls that number. In this episode, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is defined less by an investigation than by the limit West encounters when she asks for one.

Role in the Account

The Federal Bureau of Investigation appears within a scene organized around the practical consequences of online harassment. West is on hold while contacting MailChimp and submitting help requests to Twitter, Google, and Yahoo. At the same time, she sorts hundreds of spam messages from legitimate email from her agent, editors, and family. She fears that she is missing important messages and losing income. The call to the agency is therefore one part of an urgent attempt to restore access to the communication systems her work depends on, not an abstract inquiry into internet policy.

The immediate demand is that West delete an unspecified old tweet. The message linking the demand to the flood of emails gives her reason to treat the disruption as extortion rather than ordinary spam. She later identifies the targeted tweet as a screenshot of a rape threat she had received from a popular troll. The demand thus sought to remove public evidence of the harassment by making the evidence itself the condition for stopping the disruption. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is contacted in response to that coercive pressure on a working journalist.

The Call and Its Outcome

West describes struggling to explain the problem to someone who might not know what Twitter is: an anonymous person is using email newsletters to pressure her into deleting a tweet whose identity the message does not specify. She also worries about whether the matter will be understood as serious. Her uncertainty is sharpened by her own pop-cultural impression of the agency, which she associates largely with the television series The X-Files and imagined cases involving Sasquatch. The disparity between that distant image and her ordinary request for help lends the call its uneasy, almost absurd scale: she is trying to translate a new form of online coercion into language an official listener might recognize.

The receptionist at the Seattle office tells West that the Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot assist and supplies the number for the Washington State Patrol. West experiences this response as a brush-off. She calls the number, but nobody picks up; she abandons the attempt and tries to return to work. The sequence ends without an investigation, a resolution to the email flood, or another route to recourse being identified. The agency’s action in the account is specific and limited: it redirects West, and that referral does not connect her to someone who answers.

Institutional Limits and Narrative Significance

West frames the harassment as more than an inconvenience. It consumes time, threatens potential income, and affects her mental health; because she considers Twitter part of her work, the attempt to force her to remove a tweet also interferes with her journalism. She places the incident within a much longer campaign of online abuse and connects that pattern to the broader exclusion of women from the internet. The Federal Bureau of Investigation scene makes the gap between those material consequences and the available response visible through a short chain of ordinary actions: a call, a referral, an unanswered number, and a return to work without recourse.

The episode does not establish that the agency never handles online harassment, nor does it describe what an investigation might have involved. Its evidence is West’s encounter with one receptionist and the outcome of the referral she receives. That narrowness matters: the account records the point at which she sought official help, not a general assessment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s capabilities or policies. In the memoir’s treatment of online abuse, however, the failed contact contributes to a recurring pattern in which documenting harassment becomes part of West’s work while the disruption itself remains hers to manage. The agency’s brief appearance gives that pattern an institutional setting without resolving it.