Her allegations brought down megachurch pastor Bruxy Cavey. Then the anonymous trolls came for her.
“I will never forget the pain,” she said. “I will never forget the fear.”
She had tried to block her tweets from the public eye for years by deleting them, but Facebook had other ideas.
The internet can feel a lot like the real world. For people in power, it can feel like an impenetrable prison.
But for a 13-year-old girl, trapped in her own Twitter world, it felt like her only hope.
A week after her tweets, after the public learned what Cavey was accused of doing, he was fired from his $1.5 million megachurch and was charged in court with molesting a 13-year-old girl.
He was also sued by the teenage girl and her family, claiming that he had raped her, tried to molest her and made obscene phone calls to her. They said the abuse happened for about 20 years, beginning at 5 or 6 years old.
The day after the charges were filed, a woman told the Washington Post that the 13-year-old girl was one of her friends, and a former foster child who had been at the center of a “dark, dark secret,” and who was now being subjected to cyberbullying by anonymous trolls. She said she’d had friends in the past who had been raped by the same pastor.
“You know, to me, it almost felt like a different country,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Mary Lou. “Like when you’re out in the real world, you’re anonymous. With Twitter, you’re not.”
The Washington Post
“I was terrified, you know,” she said. “It gave me this sense of not being able to control what was going on.”
The allegations against Cavey come in the wake of a scandal within the church, which brought down his megachurch, the House of Truth International Church, and led to a national conversation about the role technology plays in relationships and the culture of our digital world. It also raised a question about Twitter’
