Michael Krawitz, a Republican candidate for a minor office in Gloucester County, New Jersey, has suspended his candidacy, according to ABC 6 News. The reason? A tweet posted to his Twitter account reading: “I. Hope. Somebody. Rapes. You. Today. :)” The threatening tweet was directed toward Daily Beast reporter Olivia Nuzzi, after she shared a controversial article about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Krawitz is a huge Trump supporter.
A later tweet from his account read, “Hope. You. Get. Raped. By. A. Syrian. Refugee. :)”
Krawitz, who was running for township committee, has not publicly admitted to the offense. Instead, he suggested that he was hacked by his political opponents.
“Could be anybody in this township or the Democratic party,” he said, according to Philly.com. “When you're running for township committee in Jersey, these people do anything to try to smear you.”
The local GOP Facebook page also insisted that the tweet has the work of a hacker, but after Nuzzi shot that claim down, the Facebook page was erased.
“I don’t buy the idea that someone hacked a low-level local political candidate a year ago and spent all that time harassing a journalist on there for sport,” Nuzzi argued. “[Krawitz] is someone who’s not Internet-savvy enough to know that people can see what he says – or he doesn’t care.”
According to Cosmopolitan, Krawitz has been harassing Nuzzi online since 2014, and Nuzzi says it isn’t that uncommon.
“Reporters, particularly female reporters, are frequently subject to harassment from internet trolls,” she told ABC 6. “As a reporter, bullying of this kind from would-be politicians makes you fear for your First Amendment rights. As an American and a woman, it makes you fear for the state of our country and the safety of half the population that inhabits it.”
