Journalist who profiled Melania Trump hit with barrage of antisemitic abuse

[HonestJohn]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/28/julia-ioffe-journalist-melania-trump-antisemitic-abuse

Lauren Gambino in New York
Thursday 28 April 2016 21.57 EDT

Journalist Julia Ioffe has experienced this kind of harassment before: in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

In the 24 hours since her profile of Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, appeared in GQ magazine", the Russian-American journalist has received a torrent of antisemitic, vitriolic and threatening messages from supporters of the Republican frontrunner.

In the deeply disturbing response to her piece, Ioffe said she sees a frightening future of what freedom of the press – and the country – might look like under President Trump.

“What happens if Donald Trump is elected?” Ioffe said. “We’ve seen the way he bids his supporters to attack the media, his proposal to change libel laws to make it easier to sue journalists.”

The harassment from Trump supporters is not directly linked to the candidate. Yet he has fomented a culture of violence at his rallies, encouraging supporters to retaliate against protesters. He once offered to pay the legal fees for a man who sucker punched a protester at his rally. He also failed to immediately disavow former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who said he supports Trump’s candidacy. His campaign has been contacted for comment.

On Thursday, Ioffe answered a phone call from an anonymous caller who played a Hitler speech. She received another call from “Overnight Caskets”. On Twitter, users posted photos of her face superimposed on a mug shot from Auschwitz. The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist site, attacked Ioffe in a blogpost titled: “Empress Melania Attacked by Filthy Russian Kike Julia Ioffe in GQ!”

“It’s unsettling,” she said on Thursday night. “I started the day off having a sense of humor about it but by the end of the day, after a few phone calls like this, with people playing Hitler speeches, and the imagery, and people telling me my face would look good on a lampshade, it’s hard to laugh.”

Ioffe is one of America’s top feature writers. A former staff member at the liberal New Republic magazine, she freelances for publications such as the New Yorker and New York Times.

Her GQ profile of Melania Trump revealed that the the Slovenian model – and the billionaire’s third wife – has a half-brother who the family was not in contact with.

The profile included an interview with Melania Trump, who has since expressed her disappointment with the piece in a statement online.

Like her husband, who often blames the media for covering him unfairly, she called the article “yet another example of the dishonest media and their disingenuous reporting” in a Facebook post. She accused Ioffe of having an agenda, and said that her parents were private citizens who “should not be subject to Ms Ioffe’s unfair scrutiny”.

“This is not a heavily critical article. There is nothing in it that is untrue,” Ioffe said. “If this is how Trump supporters swing into action what happens when the press looks into corrupt dealings, for example, or is critical of his policies?”

Ioffe worked as a reporter in Moscow for three years. During this period, she experienced antisemitism and witnessed colleagues receive bouquets of funeral flowers at work. But never as a journalist working in the US.

“The irony of this is that today, when I was getting all of this horrible antisemitic shit that I’ve only ever seen in Russia, I was reminded that 26 years ago today my family came to the US from Russia. We left Russia because we were fleeing antisemitism,” Ioffe said. “It’s been a rude shock for everyone.”

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Pictures from her feed, posted by Trump supporters.  What makes this unlike other nuts is that Trump encourages his nuts, going so far as to retweet neo-Nazis, suggest riots and violence against those that oppose him, and then promise to pay for the legal fees of those that run into legal trouble when they are stopped.

See below:


(link to Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/725718952798613505/photo/1)




(Link to Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/725637201372020736/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

[mlizzy]

Thank you for posting this. I read the entire interview [it's lengthy but very well written and interesting] of Melania Trump by Julia Ioffe.

Here's a clip:

Like Donald Trump, Viktor Knavs is not just a hard-charging businessman with a penchant for real estate; he is also viciously litigious when it comes to the women in his life. Back when Viktor was a driver, before he married Melania’s mother, he met a young woman in town named Marija Cigelnjak. They dated for a while, and in September 1964, she told Viktor she was pregnant. According to Cigelnjak’s testimony in a lengthy court record, Viktor offered to marry her, but quickly changed his mind, demanding that she have an abortion. This, Viktor said, was because the child was not his. A son was born in May 1965, and three months later, Marija sued Viktor for child support. Viktor continued to deny paternity—going into detail for the court about when he had sex with Marija and the rhythms of her menstrual cycle—prompting the court to order a blood test. Based on its results, the court determined that Viktor was, in fact, the boy’s biological father. Viktor fought the order to pay child support all the way to Slovenia’s highest appellate court. The courts always ruled in Cigelnjak’s favor. (The court record indicates that Viktor filed his appeal late—and lied brazenly and unconvincingly about the nature of the delay.)

Viktor has never acknowledged his son, Denis Cigelnjak, who is now 50. The existence of Melania’s half brother has never been reported, and although he had never spoken to the media, he told me his story and then gave me permission to retrieve the relevant court documents from the Slovenian archives.

He lives in a tiny apartment in Hrastnik, the town where his mother, who passed away several years ago, once worked at the glass factory. She never married or had more children, and Denis says he has no memory of ever meeting his father. Viktor paid child support until the boy was 18 but never reached out. “I missed being able to say, ‘Hey, Dad, let’s go for a coffee,’ ” Denis told me as we sat in his living room this spring. Periodically, Denis would hear stories about his father, but he said he was afraid to initiate contact and disturb the Knavs family. Now he feels it’s too late. He didn’t seek attention and says he wants nothing from his father or the Trumps. He wouldn’t mind meeting his half sisters, Ines and Melania, who, he’s fairly certain, don’t even know he exists. (When I asked Melania about this over the phone, she denied that it was true. Later, after I’d sent her documents from the Slovenian court, she wrote to me claiming she hadn’t understood what I’d asked, explaining, “I’ve known about this for years.” She added: “My father is a private individual. Please respect his privacy.”)

http://www.gq.com/story/melania-trump-gq-interview