Comedian is forced to wear headphones to drown out abuse she gets in street
Dealing with abuse has become part of comedian Rosie Jones’s day-to-day life.
Jones’s cerebral palsy sadly makes her a target for hate.
While the abuse predates her fame, her appearances on the likes of 8 Out of 10 Cats, The Last Leg and Question Time brought her and her disability into people’s homes.
And that has made the insults, taunts and slurs much worse, in real life and on social media.
The 33-year-old comic and writer says: “I always use headphones when I’m out and about on my own because every single day of my life I will get people laughing at me and shouting abuse.
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“I choose to drown it out. I read people saying that I deserve to be in a cage, I deserve to die.
Rosie suffers abuse whenever she is out and about“I love my job, I love my career, I love my life, but of course, running alongside that, I am a woman with cerebral palsy.
“I come across difficulties, whether that is physically or socially.
“The bigger I’ve become in terms of my career, unfortunately the more abuse I have received online. And some of that is because I’m a woman, and of course women aren’t funny!
“But a lot of that abuse has definitely come from my disability.”
At one point, things got so bad that she considered giving up her comedy career. She now pays for AI software that filters her tweets so she can engage with fans online.
After dealing with ableism for years, Rosie is fed up, angry and upset at how abuse directed towards disabled people doesn’t seem to be taken as seriously as racism, homophobia or other forms of hate speech.
She wants to understand why people think it’s okay to troll online.
So in a Channel 4 documentary she dives into the issue, exploring why social media platforms allow hate speech and speaking to families impacted by abuse.
She even meets a troll who has sent abusive messages online, to find out why they did it.
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The one-off documentary, Rosie Jones: Am I A R*tard?, has already caused friction due to the title’s ableist slur.
Rosie says of the word: “I really wanted to take control of it and say ‘this is not OK’.
“People don’t take ableist slurs as seriously as other slurs, so I decided to put it in the title so that people will still realise how offensive it is.
“This documentary is not for disabled people. This is a film for non-disabled people who think it’s okay to sling that term willy-nilly.”
* Rosie Jones: Am I A R*tard?, Channel 4, 10pm, tonight.
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