Lindy West seeking FBI help over online extortion

Lindy West’s attempt to get help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation over an online extortion campaign turns a flood of unwanted email into a practical and professional crisis. The demand was that she remove an old tweet; the tweet, she discovered, documented a rape threat sent by a popular troll. The episode shows harassment reaching beyond hostile messages to interfere with her time, income, and work as a journalist, while the institutions she contacts fail to offer an effective response.

The Demand and the Flood

The incident began on a morning when West initially took the arriving subscription emails for ordinary spam. Around ten o’clock, however, the trickle became a flood. Alongside it appeared a message from an anonymous sender, offering to stop the spam if West deleted an unspecified old tweet. The demand made the nuisance legible as coercion: the emails were not simply accumulating by chance but were being used to force her to remove something from her public record.

The immediate work of coping with the attack was itself extensive. While waiting to reach the Federal Bureau of Investigation, West contacted MailChimp customer service and filled out help forms for Twitter, Google, and Yahoo. She repeatedly refreshed her inbox, sorting through hundreds of unwanted subscription messages to find legitimate communications from her agent, editors, and family. The volume made missed messages likely, and she feared that she was losing money. What the attacker could impose, even without gaining access to her accounts, was a costly diversion of attention and time.

The Tweet Behind the Extortion

West was preparing to write about her abortion that day. The extortion interrupted that work, but its target also revealed the campaign’s purpose: the tweet the sender wanted removed was a screenshot of a rape threat she had received from a popular troll. The demand therefore sought to erase evidence of the abuse by using further abuse as leverage. In West’s account, this was not an isolated inconvenience but part of a sustained online harassment campaign that had saturated her life for roughly five years.

That context matters to how she understood the incident. West regarded her social-media presence as part of her work, and the forced deletion of evidence would have interfered with a journalist’s ability to document and report on harassment. She also connected the attack to the wider effect of online abuse on women, who can be driven away from the internet by repeated disruption. Her writing about such treatment did not stand outside the harassment: it was work that the harassment could interrupt, and the evidence she used to describe the problem could itself become a target.

Seeking Institutional Help

West called the Seattle office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and struggled to explain the situation to a receptionist who might not know what Twitter was. She was trying to convey an unfamiliar form of extortion: an anonymous person was using subscription emails to pressure a journalist to delete a past tweet, without identifying it in the initial demand. She also questioned whether the conduct was illegal, but her concern did not receive an investigative response.

The receptionist said the office could not help and directed West to the Washington State Patrol. She called the number she was given, but nobody answered. With no response from that route, she abandoned the effort and tried to return to work. The sequence ended not with the threat resolved or the sender identified, but with West left to manage the flood herself. Her account makes the failed referral part of the incident’s consequence: institutional contact consumed more time without producing a practical remedy.

Privilege, Work, and Recourse

Elsewhere in the book, West reflects on how her middle-class, white upbringing in Seattle, health insurance, and the legality of abortion had made access to care seem routine. She also remembers a clinic administrator who agreed to let her return for care and pay after her next paycheck. Those experiences sharpen the contrast in this episode: receiving help can depend on who is asking and on whether another person is willing to take a chance, while seeking official assistance for digital harassment can lead nowhere. The comparison does not make the situations equivalent; it highlights how unevenly support and recourse are distributed.

West presents the extortion as material harm rather than an abstract quarrel over speech. It occupies working hours, threatens potential income, disrupts contact with editors and family, and pressures her to remove documentation of abuse. She describes the theft of time as part of the work she has come to do: reporting what online harassment does while trying to continue that reporting under its pressure. The episode’s significance lies in that feedback loop. The campaign attacks her ability to work and to preserve evidence; the failed attempt to obtain help leaves her with no recourse beyond returning to the very work the attack was designed to disrupt.