Every celebrity has various trolls who say mean things about them online, a fact of life for most famous people in the modern era. But Tiffany Haddish isn’t just a passive observer when people insult her on social media networks. Haddish says she’s tracked down people trolling her and has even given them a call, according to a new interview with the L.A. Times Thursday.
“I’ve learned how to find people’s information—like I pull up the credit report, police records. You can do that for $1.99,” Haddish told the L.A. Times. “Sometimes, I get so mad that I’ll get they phone number and I’ll just call them.”
The Girls Trip star told the newspaper that trolling got really bad in late 2022 after an anonymous lawsuit claimed she had “groomed” a young woman to appear in sexually suggestive comedy sketches. The lawsuit was dropped and the anonymous woman recanted her story, but it caused a flurry of activity online, with trolls calling her a “pedo.”
Haddish told the L.A. Times that she started an Instagram account to reply to the trolls anonymously, but that wasn’t enough. When she took the next step and contacted them directly over the phone, those people were astonished that the movie star had actually called them. And it’s easy to understand their confusion.
“They be shocked that I called. They’ll be like, ‘I can’t believe you even saw that.’ You did a whole video, [bitch]! You made a full, five-minute video! On the internet, people think they can just say whatever and you not gonna say anything. I try my best not to, but I’m a human being,” she told the L.A. Times.
Social media has obviously radically changed the way that average people can interact with celebrities, even though people have been exploiting new technologies since the early 20th century to harass famous people.
But there are so many people in the world hiding behind their keyboards that it seems unwise for a celebrity to engage in any meaningful way. Trolls often feed on the attention, and when word gets out that celebrities are just calling up random strangers on the internet, that’s surely going to incentivize more rude behavior.
Don’t feed the trolls, Tiffany. If you try to call every mean person on the internet, those $2 charges are going to run up a tab that even a millionaire actress can’t pay.