After voting against the construction of a new NBA arena in Seattle on May 2, the five women who are a part of the Seattle City Council got more than just an earful from angry sports fans. According to the women, they were also threatened with violence and even told to "end" themselves.
The decision not to proceed with a proposed arena for a revived Seattle SuperSonics team was decided by a 5-4 vote. The five Seattle City Council members who opposed the plan for the arena were women, while the four members who voted in favor of it were men, and following the vote, City Council members Lisa Herbold, Kshama Sawant, Debora Juarez, Sally Bagshaw, and Lorena González were all been harassed online by disappointed Seattle residents.
One Twitter user tweeted at all of the women on the Seattle City Council and called them "trailer trash":
Another referred to Suarez as "too dumb to live":
As women, I understand that you spend a lot of your time trying to please others (mostly on your knees) but I can only hope that you each find ways to quickly and painfully end yourselves. Each of you should rot in hell for what you took from me yesterday. I hope you enjoy your thirty pieces of silver and know that I will be make donations to your competitors next election cycle. Please don’t misunderstand me. I TRULY pray for nothing but horrible things for each of you moving forward. You have made this world a worse place by whoring yourselves out to the highest bidder. Please please please do the honorable thing and end yourselves. Each of you are disgraceful pieces of trash that deserve nothing but horrible outcomes.
Kiro 7 News in Seattle also published a portion of an email that was sent to the Seattle City Council's five female members by an attorney, Jason M. Feldman, who told the women to "end" themselves:
To belittle our votes and policy considerations as “emotional and naive” is not only an insult to women, it impacts our community. The misogynistic backlash to our vote is an attempt to communicate a dangerous message: Elected women in Seattle do not deserve the respect necessary to make tough decisions without the fear of violence and racially and sexually charged retaliation.
Feldman later apologized, but González, who cast the deciding vote against the arena, spoke to the Washington Post about how the letter made her and her colleagues feel. "Slight or overt sexism is certainly not something new to me," she said, "but I would say this [letter] is the first time that I have felt that myself and my female colleagues on the council have been clearly subjected to threats of violence and other sorts of hateful rhetoric based on our gender."
On Wednesday, the Seattle City Council's five women teamed up to write an op-ed piece for the Seattle Times. They responded directly to the "misogynistic backlash" they have received:
Men on the Seattle City Council were also upset about the criticism and, in particular, the letter sent by Feldman. "What’s unfortunate about this is that I was not surprised,” Councilman Rob Johnson told the Washington Post. “What it has done here in Seattle is elevate the discourse about the kind of emails directed at my female colleagues on a very regular basis."
But in a statement obtained by Complex, Herbold explained that some good has come out of everything that has transpired.
"The support we got in the week after the vote has far outweighed the insults," she said. "But women, more often than not, don’t get that kind of support. Whether suffering sexism or abuse in the workplace, at school, or in the home, because when they speak up too often no one comes to their defense."
Seattle's Mayor, Ed Murray, condemned the responses he saw to the vote in early May:
Seattle City Council members Sawant, Juarez, Bagshaw, and González did not immediately respond to Complex's requests for comment.
