Liberal Forum

Journalist who profiled Melania Trump hit with barrage of antisemitic abuse.

Julia Ioffe has received disturbing calls and online abuse since profiling Donald Trump’s wife for GQ, and likens antisemitism to ‘**** I’ve only seen in Russia.’
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.”
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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 ****** Julia Ioffe in GQ!”

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”.