Twitter has taken action against rapper Nicki Minaj after she doxxed a Trinidadian reporter named Sharlene Rampersad.
The “Barbie Tingz” rapper posted the journalist’s phone number on her Instagram story earlier this week and threatened that “her days are (expletive deleted) numbered.”
Minaj stated that her cousin in Trinidad & Tobago didn’t take the vaccine because one of his friends’ testicles swelled up after being injected. This caused the man’s fiancé to postpone or cancel the wedding.
There is no evidence that enlarged testicles are a side effect of the vaccine. Thus, Rampersad a reporter for the Guardian Media outlet tried to interview her cousin and his friend about the claim.
This was when the chart-topping artist took note and tried to shut everything down.
Rampersad shared, “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.”
The rapper also posted Rampersad’s phone number in her Instagram stories, saying, “Threatening my family in Trinidad won’t bode well for you.” The Barbz took commands from their leader and started to attack the woman via text messages, calls and etc.
According to the journalist, “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.”
“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 shared.
“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.”
According to Lexology, “Doxing, or doxxing, is the act of publishing personal information of a person or someone related to that person to harass, threaten or incite violence against them. The information could be their name, date of birth, residential address, email address, phone number, national registration identity card number, family background, place of employment or education, passport number, signature, password, photos or videos of the person, anything else that may be used to identify the person or someone related to them.”
“The term doxing comes from dox, which is short for documents,” the site further states. “The act is usually carried out online through social media and public forums, however, it can also be perpetrated in other ways such as with graffiti, letterbox drops, and public demonstrations.”
Minaj, whose real name is Onika Maraj-Petty, indeed doxxed the reporter by putting her info out into the interwebs. Both Instagram and Twitter removed her posts for going against their community guidelines.