It looks like 2013 has been kind of the year for painfully ill-advised Halloween costumes. You had Julianne Hough in blackface, a couple of Florida morons as George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, and most recently, a Michigan woman’s bloodied Boston Marathon survivor.
On Halloween, Alicia Ann Lynch, 22, posted a photo of herself wearing a marathon runner’s outfit complete with fake splattered blood to her Twitter and Instagram accounts. The costume was meant without any ambiguity to represent a victim of April’s Boston Marathon bombing.
I’m sure you know the rest, but here’s a summary. The Internet doxxed her, threatened her life, and she was fired.
The basic Twitter backlash was as follows:
@SomeSKANKinMI People at the Boston Marathon died in terror and agony… and you looked at the images and thought “lol funny costume idea”?
— Rebecca Brown (@Chinchillazllla) November 2, 2013
@mzbilly @mmurphycit @SomeSKANKinMI Wow. If she has kids, would she put them in bloodied Sandy Hook shirts? — LisainDallas (@LisainDallas) October 31, 2013
someone dressed up as a boston marathon bombing victim for halloween I’m done with this world — Life of a Blonde (@lifeofablondee) November 5, 2013
Oh, and my favorite:
@SomeSKANKinMI You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died in the marathon. You need a filter.
— Sydney Corcoran (@Sydney23Lynne) November 2, 2013
There’s just no coming back from that.
But the party didn’t stop there. Someone found Lynch’s driver’s license and was able to get a bunch of personal information on her and her parents which they used to shuttle off death threats of varying intensity. One user found NSFW photos of her online and started passing them around as well.
Before she shut down her Twitter feed, some users did reach out to her in forgiveness:
@SomeSKANKinMI You guys, stop. Cyber bullying another human being is not going to undo her actions. She has apologized.
— Hannah (@HanzBuhnanz) November 2, 2013
@SomeSKANKinMI As a Bostonian, I forgive you. I am glad that you have not killed yourself, and I seriously hope you learned your lesson.
— Twid Blight (@TheTwidster) November 2, 2013
Lynch has since shut down all of her social media accounts, and was indeed fired for the costume. She told Buzzfeed Sunday that the threats are still coming.
“I’ve had voicemails where they want to slit my throat and they want to hang me and tear off my face. I’m just like, I don’t even know how to respond to this right now.”
She added, “it’s the Day of the Dead. I wasn’t a dead person, I wasn’t being disrespectful. I was a survivor of a marathon. And it’s not like I was walking around with a fake leg or my arm torn off or something like that.”
She also seemed to accept that she had farked up bad.
“I have nothing to hide. It happened, I made a mistake. I just have to learn from it. I’m not a terrible person,” she insisted.
Check out Alicia Ann Lynch’s Boston Marathon bombing costume below, and tell us what you think in the comments.
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