Death threats. Racist taunts. Vows of violence. Inside the increasingly personal attacks targeting Canadian female journalists in Canada is the fear that a woman’s voice will be silenced.
Journalist Anne Dachel, who writes under the name Anne of Green Gables, began to receive death threats in recent months on Facebook. On Jan. 30, she wrote in a Facebook post that she was subjected to death threats following a news story about a Canadian military sexual assault trial involving members of a Somali community.
On March 4, Dachel posted more threats along the lines of “I’m going to kill you. I’m going to take your life. I’m going to destroy your life.” She also wrote that she’d had to ask police officers to intervene in a family dispute, then that they had asked her “to take down her website.”
Dachel is on the board of directors for Women Deliver, a women’s rights group based in Toronto that Dachel co-founded in 2013.
Dachel does have the support of her family and friends, according to her Facebook page, as well as the backing of Canadian journalists.
The attacks were in part fuelled by what she believed to be a homophobic attack on her Facebook page. Dachel, who is gay, also received a couple of death threats against the family of her partner.
The Toronto Star has also heard threats against Dachel.
In an affidavit obtained through a freedom of information request by the Star, a former female editor at the Star said she was told by a former staffer in an email “to be careful with this one, she’s going to get killed.”
The former Toronto Star employee also told the Star she had received threats against her life, but “not nearly what Dachel received.”
The email that prompted the former editor to warn
