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Friday, May 9, 2025

Twitter deletes Nicki’s posts attacking Guardian Media journalist

by

Soyini Grey
1329 days ago
20210917

Trinidad-born US-based rap­per Nic­ki Mi­naj has doxxed lo­cal re­porter Shar­lene Ram­per­sad for try­ing to lo­cate and in­ter­view her cousin and his friend, who were ref­er­enced in a vi­ral tweet ear­ly this week. Yes­ter­day, the rap­per shared Ram­per­sad’s phone num­ber on her In­sta­gram sto­ries, while threat­en­ing the jour­nal­ist, say­ing “her days are (ex­ple­tive delet­ed) num­bered.”

On Mon­day the rap­per, whose re­al name is Oni­ka Maraj-Pet­ty, tweet­ed that her cousin didn’t want to take the COVID-19 vac­cine be­cause his friend’s tes­ti­cles be­came swollen af­ter he re­ceived the vac­cine here in T&T. She al­so claimed this man’s fi­ancée called off their im­pend­ing wed­ding as a re­sult of this.

The tweet went vi­ral, gen­er­at­ing a lot of in­ter­est on­line and mak­ing its way through in­ter­na­tion­al me­dia chan­nels. The sto­ry has been cov­ered by CNN, Fox News and the BBC and both en­ter­tain­ment and news pro­grammes have cov­ered the evolv­ing sto­ry in one form or the oth­er for the past week.

Guardian Me­dia re­porter Ram­per­sad was tasked with try­ing to lo­cate Mi­naj’s cousin, his friend or even the fi­ancée.

On Thurs­day, Ram­per­sad went to Pe­nal to try and track the men down, a search that con­tin­ued yes­ter­day. Ram­per­sad said she got in con­tact with some­one re­lat­ed to the rap­per’s friend and wrapped up the search by mid­day and re­turned to Guardian Me­dia’s Of­fices in Port-of-Spain. It was there she first no­ticed that some­thing was up.

“I start­ed to get a lot of no­ti­fi­ca­tions on Twit­ter. When I even­tu­al­ly checked it, be­cause I was do­ing oth­er sto­ries as well, I re­alised that Nic­ki Mi­naj is re­spond­ing to me on Twit­ter,” Ram­per­sad said.

What Mi­naj did was share Ram­per­sad’s ac­tu­al phone num­ber in her In­sta­gram sto­ries, say­ing, “Threat­en­ing my fam­i­ly in Trinidad won’t bode well for you.”

Mi­naj al­so used sex­u­al­ly ex­plic­it slurs to ad­dress the jour­nal­ist.

That was enough to em­pow­er Mi­naj’s fans to call Ram­per­sad’s phone hun­dreds of times, many with threat­en­ing calls.

“They’ve told me to kill my­self. I’ve got­ten What­sapp mes­sages, text mes­sages and mes­sages on tele­graph. I de­ac­ti­vat­ed all of my so­cial me­dia ex­cept my Twit­ter,” she said.

While the mes­sages de­tailed the harm the sender ei­ther hoped or in­tend­ed to en­act on Ram­per­sad, what re­al­ly sur­prised her was that some of the mes­sages were from rel­a­tive­ly close to home.

“To be hon­est with you, I can take, I guess I can take the threats from the in­ter­na­tion­al num­bers be­cause they are far away...and when they get over the heat of the mo­ment, they would un­der­stand, maybe, that I meant no harm to her rel­a­tives,” she said.

“The lo­cals who have chimed in to threat­en, to call me, to ha­rass me, I don’t ap­pre­ci­ate that. It makes me fear for my safe­ty here, which I should not have to do.”

Pub­li­cist Te­nille Clarke says this is not the first time Mi­naj has spread mis­in­for­ma­tion about Trinidad and To­ba­go.

“In 2012, Mrs Pet­ty would have in­cor­rect­ly stat­ed that 250,000 peo­ple here were liv­ing with AIDS, which our Min­is­ter of Tourism at the time, Stephen Cadiz, would have had to ve­he­ment­ly re­fute.”

Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Vis­i­bil­i­ty Ad­vi­sor Teoc­ah Dove, agreed, “For years now, Nic­ki Mi­naj has mis­rep­re­sent­ed the Trinida­di­an re­al­i­ty to sell a nar­ra­tive that she came from rags to rich­es and was ‘for­tu­nate to get out’.”

But Clarke al­so ad­dressed Mi­naj’s doxxing of Ram­per­sad.

She said, “Doxxing is the an­tithe­sis to what jour­nal­ism rep­re­sents; it is a ne­far­i­ous act that can change your life. Not on­ly does it threat­en the safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty of the vic­tim - in this case Ms Ram­per­sad - but wield­ing that im­mense pow­er of celebri­ty to mo­bilise one’s fan base that cu­mu­la­tive­ly con­sists of 220 mil­lion peo­ple across mul­ti­ple so­cial me­dia plat­forms can es­sen­tial­ly crip­ple every as­pect of some­one’s life.”

Doxxing is the shar­ing of per­son­al in­for­ma­tion on­line with the view to ex­pose and/or threat­en the vic­tim. In the Unit­ed States there are no fed­er­al laws that re­late to doxxing specif­i­cal­ly. How­ev­er, fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors in the US can use two fed­er­al statutes to sanc­tion doxxers. One for­bids mak­ing pub­lic the pri­vate in­for­ma­tion of “cov­ered” per­sons, which in­cludes wit­ness­es, ju­rors and state em­ploy­ees. They can al­so ac­cess laws that for­bid the use of elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion to ha­rass a per­son, caus­ing that per­son emo­tion­al dis­tress or to fear for their safe­ty. A fed­er­al charge can re­sult in jail time.

Af­ter mul­ti­ple re­ports both In­sta­gram and Twit­ter re­moved Mi­naj’s posts for go­ing against their com­mu­ni­ty guide­lines. In­ter­na­tion­al jour­nal­ism agen­cies have al­so been en­gaged and are mon­i­tor­ing the in­ci­dent.

Guardian Me­dia Lim­it­ed has al­so is­sued a state­ment against the rap­per’s ac­tions in sup­port of Ram­per­sad.

 

Fol­low­ing is the state­ment:

“To­day, in the le­git­i­mate pur­suit of a sto­ry that has both lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al in­ter­est, one of our jour­nal­ists was sub­ject­ed to a range of at­tacks via so­cial me­dia in­clud­ing death threats. This is un­ac­cept­able and we have tak­en all mea­sures with­in our con­trol to en­sure her safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty.

At Guardian Me­dia Ltd. we de­nounce in­tim­i­da­tion of jour­nal­ists in any form. Bal­anced re­port­ing which presents all per­spec­tives is fun­da­men­tal to the de­mo­c­ra­t­ic process and we will con­tin­ue to cham­pi­on vig­or­ous­ly the free­dom of the press.

The use of ag­gres­sion on so­cial me­dia to in­tim­i­date can have ad­verse phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal ef­fects on peo­ple. As a re­spon­si­ble me­dia house, we en­cour­age oth­ers to stand up against this type of be­hav­iour as we can all make a dif­fer­ence in ad­dress­ing this glob­al chal­lenge posed by the per­va­sive na­ture of so­cial me­dia.”

 


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