Comic speaks out about vile trolls

Rosie Jones has spoken out about the staggering levels of vile abuse she receives when she appears on TV, describing it as ‘exhausting’.

The comic says she attracted the worst vitriol after her two appearance on BBC One’s Question Time, with hateful trolls targeting her over her cerebral palsy.

‘I’ve done it twice now, and both times I started trending on Twitter from all the abuse I was getting,’ she told the BBC’s Access All podcast.

When hosts Nikki Fox and Emma Tracey asked her what sort of comments she received, she said: ‘Literally every ableist abuse under the sun. They told me that I should be in a cage. I shouldn’t be on TV. I should die. And it was because I was exposing myself to a different kind of audience. I think Question Time is brilliant but it attracts a lot of angry people.’

And she said those viewers tend to get furious with her for being ‘female, disabled and gay’, which they vent online.

‘Would I do it again?,’ she added. ‘Yes. But I would go in there more prepared and I'd probably shut my Twitter down for a few weeks.’

‘It’s hard because I’ll always be political, I’ll always speak for what I believe. I will always champion diversity, but it's hard and it's exhausting’.

She also said that it was hard to be her ‘normal positive self’ among such comments.

‘Being a woman and being gay means that every time I’m on TV I’ll get a comment about what I sound like, my disability, my weight, and then what I look like, my teeth, my hair, and then the gay stuff.

‘And what is awful, is every single one of those negative thoughts, I can go on social media right now and a stranger will be saying them back to me. It’s so hard.’

Jones is also currently making Channel 4 documentary about online abuse and society's attitudes towards disabled people, which is due to air in May.

She said: ‘That has been quite hard for me because a lot of the things that I’ve shut away, masked over, I’ve had to confront. And because of that, I’m in therapy.

‘I would recommend therapy for literally everyone out there, because I’m really dealing with a lot of internalised ableism and things that I probably painted over with a joke.

‘But what I will say is by talking about this I feel a lot of release, and it’s actually going, "I am not Tigger, I am not this over-optimistic, eternally happy human being who goes, ‘I love being disabled every day’", because I don’t. Because society wears me down.

‘I now think in order to eradicate that, in order to face the abusers, I’ve got to come here and go, "You know what, it’s not OK".’

But Jones said she would not be deterred by the abuse she gets as  she hopes that by being one of the very few visibly disabled comedians  she can help change he TV and comedy business.

‘By me going on those shows and using my platform, it’s my hope and my dream that I can encourage more disabled people to come into the industry,’ she said.

‘I don’t think I’m taking jobs from other disabled people. We’re still unfortunately at a stage where they’re getting either me or another white, straight, non-disabled person.

‘So it is my ultimate dream that I can go on a panel show and be among two, three, four other disabled people. But right now we need more people to join comedy.’

Listen to the full podcast on BBC Sounds.

Published: 1 Mar 2023