Death threats force Sue Perkins to leave Twitter after Top Gear rumour

As we recently reported, Sue Perkins was being lined up as the favourite to replace Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear, and sexist men weren’t very happy about it.

This morning, she posted a series of tweets explaining that she’s still getting abuse, including death threats, and is leaving Twitter for a while:

sue 1 sue2

sue3

Sadly, this kind of abuse is all too common on social media, where it’s easy for little people to hide behind big words. But judging by the amount of support her tweets this morning have received, we’re at least heartened to see that there are as many good folks out there as trolls:

love lucy chimps anonymity

Though we’d like to see Richard Hammond, James May and Jeremy Clarkson add their voices to the condemnation.

Sue hasn’t deleted or disabled her account, so we hope to see her back in the twittersphere soon.

Holly Brockwell