Weeks after online trolls sent police to her door on false pretenses, popular transgender Twitch streamer and activist Clara Sorrenti was once again doxed.
Earlier this month, Sorrenti, who goes by the name Keffals on social media, was the victim of a tactic known as “swatting.” Police raided her London, Ontario home and arrested her after someone using her deadname reportedly sent violent threats to local city hall officials. She was released without charges and later cleared of all wrongdoing. London police chief Steve Williams said that he will review how officers treated Sorrenti, who says she was consistently addressed with her deadname, which is not her legal name.
After going public with the story, Sorrenti moved out of her apartment and into a hotel. But that location has also been compromised.
“The hotel I was staying at got doxed so I had to move hotels,” Sorrenti told Canada’s Global News. “Five different pizza companies sent pizzas to my hotel room in my (birth) name. Obviously, the pizza itself isn’t the problem. It’s the threat they send by telling me they know where I live and are willing to act on it in the real world.”
Sorrenti, who was a Communist Party candidate in Canada’s 2019 federal election and frequently posts about trans issues on her Twitch channel, has been the target of relentless anti-transgender harassment. In July, Twitch banned Sorrenti from the platform after a stream she was doing highlighting examples of the hateful abuse she receives was mass reported by trolls.
Sorrenti speculates that online trolls may have managed to find her using a photo she posted of her fiancée’s cat on their hotel bed following the swatting ordeal.
“The people who have been harassing me [must have] spent hours looking at the bedsheets, cross-referencing them with every hotel in my city until they found a match,” she said.
London Police Service is investigating both the swatting and doxing.
“We’re concerned,” deputy police chief Trish McIntyre said. “It’s harassment. Is it police’s responsibility to investigate those occurrences? One hundred percent. We’re aware of them, they’re under investigation.”
