Video depicts hateful, violent, abusive messages women in sports media face on Twitter

A disturbing video shedding light on the online abuse faced by women in sports media is making the rounds on social media Tuesday.

In the clip, produced by the Just Not Sports podcast, features men reading violent and hateful tweets to ESPN’s Sarah Spain and 670 the Score’s Julie DiCaro. The men seem to go in thinking these will be standard, innocent Kimmel-like mean tweets, and the first few are relatively harmless, but they quickly escalate into some truly brutal messages.

We’ve heard in the past from countless women in sports media, most prominently Michelle Beadle, about the kind of crap women deal with on Twitter, but this video brings that harassment to life by making these guys read the messages out-loud to Spain and DiCaro (who, unbeknownst to the readers, had already seen them). The tough-to-watch clip hammers home the idea that these tweets are #MoreThanMean.

The video ends with the text, “We wouldn’t say it to their faces. So let’s not type it,” because clearly these tweets have no business existing. But we should also remember there are real people sending these messages, presumably because they believe them, and it’s truly scary to imagine how many men — not just on the internet but in the real world — harbor such dangerous hatred of women.