Taylor Lorenz has become used to being abused. The journalist, who works at The Washington Post and was previously at The New York Times, has been sent death threats, been stalked and faces regular online harassment. Her parents have also been targeted and driven out of their home in the dead of night after fake police calls. Last year, she had to be escorted to safety from a conference panel after a man who had been live-streaming violent threats about her turned up, and recently she found an advert on Craigslist offering a fee to anyone who could take and supply covert images of her. Lorenz does not file from the front line of a war zone or an authoritarian regime but rather her apartment in Los Angeles, where she covers technology and online culture.
“The internet has given me my entire career and I love covering it,” Lorenz says. But since rising to online prominence, with a million followers across her social media accounts, she has erased any trace of personal information about herself on the internet, including her age (she will say only that she is in her late thirties) because “it’s just so vicious; you just can’t believe how cruel people are. I definitely have just lost all faith in humans.” She doesn’t sound upset — she’s become hardened to this world.
